Escape Plan

                                                                       

              I sometimes sit with my friends and we talk about the worst job to have.  Fast food worker, test subject, maybe that guy who cleans the monkey cages at the zoo. What if your job though was to go to prison? You would have to serve just like every other inmate, but you also have to find a way to break out of the prison you are in. So basically your job is to break out of prisons. It all sounds fun until that day you can’t break out, what happens then?

       “Escape Plan” is a movie about guy who makes a living out of breaking out of prisons, just in case the title didn’t give that away already. That guy’s name is Ray Breslin (Sylvester Stallone) and there is not a prison that can hold him. Ray works for the federal prison system to test their maximum control prisons on how escapable they are. Well apparently Ray always gets out, so I would say those prisons are pretty easy to escape from. Well when you are this good, someone is bound to offer you a shot at a prison that someone believes you can’t get out of. Ray takes that job, and it sent to a prison unlike any he has seen before. The place is designed by someone who read the book on ways to make your prison escape proof, a book which Breslin wrote. It doesn’t take Breslin long to realize that someone wants him to disappear forever, and that this job may be a little harder than planned.  Breslin though meets “the man who can get things” in Rottermayer (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who wants to know who this new prisoner is. Breslin soon lets Rottermayer in on the truth and together they come up with the perfect escape plan.

          Now I will hand it to them, the escape plan they come up with is pretty good, now if only the movie was that good.  Twenty five years ago this would have been the biggest movie in the world. Stallone and Schwarzenegger would be in big bold letters and every red blooded male would be in line waiting. The problem is this is 2013 and not 1991, but just like this movies formula, the story is behind the times. Watching Arnold and Sly in their primes was fun; I mean you really believed that they could both single handily taken out an army.  Now when I see Arnold pick up a M60 and start firing it, I am more worried he might pull something in their prime, Arnold and Sly would pull down twenty million per film, now like all the other aging action stars of the eighties and nineties the only reason they have jobs is because of each other. “Escape Plan” just came out in the wrong decade, written by Miles Chapman and Jason Keller, you get the feeling they watched way to much eighties action movies. Which could have its place in the current state of film, but not here.  When I was younger I used to dream about Arnold and Sly teaming up for a movie, well after watching this movie the only escape I was looking for, was the fire exit.

  Brian Taylor