Escape Plan: A Review

 I’ve had several readers of my blog say they like my movie reviews so I’m printing them as I see them if I think they would like them since we go often. This last week I saw “Escape  Plan” with two of my favorite conservative actors (and some of the few in Hollywood these days) Arnold Schwartzenegger  and Sylvestor Stallone.

This is the first time they have appeared in leading roles together. Arnold appeared with Stallone in the last “Expendables” movie, but as a co-star and will appear with him in the next one scheduled for next year.

I found this film a good action fun film with a plot for a change. Stallone plays Ray Breslin the head of a security company on prisons whose job it is to get into a prison and try to escape to test if it is escape proof or not.  Needless to say once he’s in he’s like any other prisoner and has to fight his way through his share of brutal prison guards and other roughneck, surly, prisoners. The role was originally set for Bruce Willis, but Stallone got it and this works perfect with him and Arnold. He is assigned to a prison that is a ship in the middle of the ocean unbeknownst to him where he meets Arnold who is a master criminal named Emil Rottmayer and they plan to escape together. Jim Caviezel known for his role as Jesus in Mel Gibson’s outstanding movie “ The Passion of the Christ” and now on the dark crime fighting TV series “Person of Interest” plays the cold hearted  warden Willard Hobbs.

The plot got a little confusing for me to explain here so I’m borrowing it from Wikepedia that explains it better here and I’m including a trailer below:

Ray Breslin 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. He claims his goal is to ensure that criminals sent to prison stay there due to an unexplained event related to his seemingly dead wife and child. One day, he and his business partner Lester Clark are offered a multimillion dollar deal by CIA agent Jessica Miller to test a top-secret prison and see if it is escape-proof. Breslin agrees to the deal and gets himself captured in New Orleans, Louisiana, under the guise of a Spanish terrorist named “Portos”, but the plan goes awry when his captors remove the tracking microchip from his shoulder and drug him on the way to the prison.

Breslin wakes up in a complex of glass cells with no outside windows to indicate the prison’s location. He meets inmate Emil Rottmayer, and they both stage a fight for Breslin to study the solitary confinement cell, which uses high-powered halogen lights to disorient and dehydrate prisoners. Seeing that the cell floors are made of aluminum, but the rivets are steel, Breslin has Rottmayer procure a metal plate from Warden Willard Hobbs’s office floor before the both of them and Muslim inmate Javed are once again thrown into solitary. Using the metal plate, Breslin focuses the reflection from the lights to heat the rivets and pop open the floor panel to reveal a passageway below. He goes through the passageway and discovers that the prison is inside a cargo ship in the middle of the ocean, making a simple escape impossible. Breslin and Rottmayer continue to work on studying the complex by learning the guards’ daily routines, and Breslin gives Hobbs  false information about Rottmayer’s boss, Victor Mannheim. Meanwhile, Breslin’s colleagues Abigail Ross and Hush grow suspicious of Clark when Breslin’s paycheck for the job is frozen. They discover from hacked documents that the prison, codenamed “The Tomb”, is owned by a for-profit organization linked to Blackwater, and Clark was offered a US$5 million annual salary from them in exchange for keeping Breslin behind bars.

What follows  is a suspenseful, bait and switch situations and death defying feats for Stallone and Arnold along with their typical tough guy sense of humor. It’s a must see with a surprising ending that is laughable and satisfying for all. If these two guys and action films with a plot are your thing then go see Escape Plan.

Get all the latest trailers and clips for Escape Plan (2013) on Moviefone