Susan Granger’s review of “Escape Plan” (Lionsgate/Summit Entertainment)
Having spent much of their careers as box-office rivals, the muscle-bound, Austrian-born former Governor of California and the Italian Stallion team up once again, following “The Expendables.”
Structural engineer/former lawyer Ray Breslin (Sylvester Stallone) is the author of the definitive, non-fiction tome, “Compromising Correctional Institutional Security,” which finds the glitches in prisons around the country. Usually, he’s an undercover consultant, incarcerated as a phony criminal, who then breaks free to illustrate the particular penitentiary’s potential flaws and serve as an advisor in correcting them. After escaping from a Colorado Federal Prison, Breslin is ostensibly hired for five million dollars by a CIA operative to infiltrate a new, ultra-secret, privately funded, high-tech, heavily-fortified, off-the-grid facility, known as “The Tomb,” filled with underground glass cells housing “the worst of the worst” with masked, jackbooted guards patrolling on catwalks above them. Problem is: his evacuation code doesn’t work and the warden who knows his real identity has gone missing. Breslin and his co-workers (Vincent D’Onofrio, Amy Ryan, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson) have been deceived and double-crossed. Joined by gregarious, goateed, German-speaking fellow inmate Emil Rottmeyer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and an Islamic terrorist (Faran Tahir), barrel-chested Breslin is determined to outwit and outsmart soft-spoken, sadistic warden Hobbes (Jim Caviezel), an amateur lepidopterist – a.k.a. collector of insects like butterflies/moths – and his heinous henchman, Drake (Vinnie Jones).
Generically written for these hulking, monosyllabic, sexagenarian relics by Miles Chapman and Arnell Jesko, it’s burdened with, slow-paced, banal, often unintelligible dialogue, except for Schwarzenegger’s amusing one-liner: “You hit like a vegetarian!”
Swedish director Mikael Hafstrom (“1408”) places heavy-handed, pedestrian emphasis on extreme close-ups and swaggering, yet sloppy, testosterone-laden, tough-guy violence, except when Sam Neill appears briefly as the kindly, none-too-bright prison doctor, experiencing a crisis-of-conscience which forces him to look up the Hippocratic Oath.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Escape Plan” is creaky, chugging 5. Lumbering lunkheads!
