Review of Escape Plan (2013) by Ola G — 21 Jul 2015

Ray Breslin (Sylvester Stallone) is a former prosecutor who co-owns Breslin-Clark, a Los Angeles-based security firm specializing in testing the reliability of maximum security prisons. He spends his life getting into prisons to study their designs and the guards' habits to find and exploit their weaknesses, thus enabling him to escape without a hitch or a victim. His goal is to ensure that criminals sent to prison stay inside by eliminating the weakness of every prison; Breslin's wife and child were murdered by an escaped convict he had successfully prosecuted. Breslin and his business partner Lester Clark (Vincent D'Onofrio) are offered a multimillion-dollar deal by CIA agent Jessica Mayer (Caitriona Balfe) to test a top-secret prison and see if it is escape-proof. However, this time around, he and his work colleagues are not allowed to know where the prison is, as this helps minimize the risk of outside help when escaping. Breslin goes against all his own rules and agrees to the deal, allowing himself to be captured in New Orleans, Louisiana, under the guise of a Spanish terrorist named "Anthony Portos." However, the plan goes awry when his captors remove a tracking microchip from his arm and drug him on the way to the prison, which stops his colleagues from knowing where he's been taken. Breslin wakes up in a complex of glass cells with no outside windows to indicate the prison's location. When Breslin realized the warden was not the one he was supposed to meet and tried to give the evacuation code, he realised he had been played. He meets fellow inmate Emil Rottmayer (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who works for a man named Victor Mannheim who is portrayed as a modern-day Robin Hood. Breslin and Rottmayer starts to work on a plan to escape and Breslin´s wish to find the person who put him behind bars...

Tom Huddleston of Time Out London gave the film two out of five stars, commenting that the film "would have made a perfect vehicle for, say, a Chuck Norris or even a Jean-Claude Van Damme. But these two redoubtable, enormously watchable old-school heroes deserve better." It´s kind of weird that this is the actual first movie teaming up Stallone and Schwarzenegger as headliners in a film, it´s has only been cameos before, but in my book it´s 25 years too late. "Escape Plan" is truly nothing special. It starts as a sort of thinking mans action movie and ends up as a non thinking mans action movie, trying to revive the action feeling of the Stallone/Schwarzenegger past. And it doesn´t succeed as the plot is too wishy washy, Stallone/Schwarzenegger over the hill and the action is so stereotypical it hurts. Pass this one if you ask me.