By Preston Wilder
“You hit like a vegetarian!” sneers Arnold Schwarzenegger in what’s rapidly becoming the most-quoted line in Escape Plan. Wait, what – a vegetarian? You mean there are people so poncey and effeminate that they don’t eat meat, and only eat vegetables? What are they, Communists? That line belongs in the 1980s – long before your teenage kids and all their friends became vegetarians – like much of the rest of Escape Plan, a gloriously unlikely action thriller pairing Arnie with Sly Stallone, to whom the vegetarian insult is addressed.
It’s not true, of course. Sly doesn’t hit like a vegetarian: we’ve already seen him in the opening scene, brawling in the prison yard and laying out a hefty Big Daddy type with a couple of punches. He’s subsequently placed in isolation – but that’s okay, in fact that was part of the plan. Sly is Ray Breslin, an ex-con whose job is to break out of prisons (he’s even written a book about it, ‘Compromising Correctional Institution Security’!) – and he soon breaks out of this one, using the isolation cell’s proximity to an unguarded fire station, as well as a carton of chocolate milk. Quite simple, really: he tears a thin, transparent magnetic strip off the carton and sticks it on the keyboard where the guard punches in the four-figure code to open his cell – then checks the imprints on the strip, after which it’s just “a numbers game” to find the right code when the time comes to make his escape.
Well, yes and no. It is indeed “a numbers game” – but a four-figure code gives you 24 permutations, which is a lot of trial and error when you only have seconds to spare. Plausibility doesn’t always survive in Escape Plan – but the fact that it’s even an issue is cause for celebration. Brawny heroes who don’t have a plan have become the bane of Hollywood action flicks (think of Avatar, where the plan was just to charge in against tanks with bows and arrows), but this one has ‘Plan’ right there in the title. Maybe it’s a function of being older and wilier: a plan comes in handy when you’re a man in his late 60s (Arnie’s 66, Sly 67), stranded in a prison called ‘The Tomb’ that’s designed to be escape-proof.
The cells are made of glass in The Tomb; the guards wear masks, making it impossible to tell when their shifts start and finish. Lording it over everyone and everything is Warden Hobbes (Jim Caviezel), a tyrant to rival Kurtwood Smith in Fortress (the early-90s Christopher Lambert vehicle that exemplifies where Escape Plan is coming from). Caviezel is trim, soft-spoken and hilarious, and would steal the movie if Sly and Arnie weren’t so vigilant. Maybe you’d like to be “free as a bird,” he says mockingly, and flutters his hand like a little bird flying away (he even makes a tweeting sound). “No mess, no rec time … and no showers!” he threatens later, giving it an extra sadistic pause before ‘showers’. When not torturing prisoners – he doesn’t just waterboard, but sticks an actual hose in their mouths – he may be found pinning butterflies and listening to classical music. The script likes these little details: Sly’s traitorous friend (Vincent D’Onofrio) gets a little tic where he cleans his hands obsessively, making something memorable of a stock villain.
But of course the ageing stars are the main event – and this isn’t a semi-parody like The Expendables, it’s a straight action flick that might’ve been played by much younger actors. Schwarzenegger, nattily bearded for the occasion, seems much happier than he did in The Last Stand, which recycled his robotic I-am-ze-sheriff persona; in this one he gets to be vulnerable, and even recites the Lord’s Prayer in German – not to mention his banter with Stallone, grounded in mutual appreciation. “Don’t get killed,” advises Arnie. “If you say so,” grunts our hero. “Last time they killed someone here, they let the body rot for three days,” notes the big Teuton. Sardonic pause: “And they cancelled the prison dance.”
The film is sometimes stupid, but never lazy. Having discovered the truth about The Tomb – it’s deep in the bowels of a giant tanker, somewhere in the middle of the ocean – our heroes refuse to quit, and just keep coming up with ideas. Sly uses heat to loosen the steel rivets in the isolation cell, then builds a sextant (!) out of bits of string and a fellow inmate’s glasses. And we haven’t even mentioned the political layer, with most of the prisoners being Arabs (implicitly al-Qaeda) who’ve been made to “disappear” without trial; it’s mildly brave of the film to make one of them a sympathetic sidekick – and he even test-drives the sextant, having asked to go up on deck for his midnight prayers. Like I said, plausibility doesn’t always survive here.
We mustn’t oversell this silly B-movie; yet it’s genuinely lively, and the final shot left me with a big smile on my face. “You don’t look that smart,” Arnie tells Sly at one point. “You don’t either,” comes the reply. True enough: but one of them was Governor of California, while the other’s carved out a convincing comeback for himself in late middle age. Don’t judge a film by its brawny appearance; Escape Plan is smarter than it looks.
DIRECTED BY Mikael Hafstrom
STARRING Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Caviezel
US 2013 115 mins.
