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escape plan

Escape Plan is a movie I heard about back in 2013, and was intrigued by the premise. The trailer didn’t really sell me on it, so I sort of forgot about it until recently. The director is the established Mikael Hafstrom, this is his latest movie, and with huge headliners like Stalone and Schwarzenegger, I’m excited to see how he handles this project. Swedish director Hafstrom is somewhat of a mixed quality, having directed numerous feature films such as The Rite (2011), Shanghai (2010), 1408 (2007), Derailed (2005), Drowning Ghost (2004), a mix of provocative historical drama, horror and thriller. This movie is actually rated R, and just under 2 hours long.

The movie was written by Miles Chapman, and Jason Keller, based on Chapman’s story. Chapman is a writer who worked on the Cybergeddon TV series in 2012, and wrote two of the stories. Jesse Keller is a veteran who wrote the Gerard Butler vehicle Machine Gun Preacher and the Julia Roberts, Lily Collins as Snow White, feature, Mirror Mirror. I’m hoping there is enough characterization and plotting to this movie to be of interest anyway. Sly Stalone and Arnie Schwarzenegger, last of whom you may have recently seen campaigning for a climate change deal in Paris, teams up with 50 Cent for what promises to be an epic thriller.

Stalone plays Ray Breslin, a man who works for an insurance company that “tests the integrity of prisons” and they’re just finishing up their tour of the US maximum security prison system. The aged yet dapper Stalone plays an ex-prosecutor, a kind of a cross between Houdini and Thomas Crowne. His book, Compromising Correctional Institution Security is considered the gold standard in the field. Breslin effortlessly escapes from a state of the art, $40 million dollar federal penitentiary, and Hafstrom likes to spell out the improbable escape plans with some nice macgyver like sequences and 3D animations, and this gets the action going.

Anyway, Hafstrom has an annoying tendency to over-direct, because he’s really trying to drive the plot and so Breslin meets with his team back at their HQ, which had some nice set design by Sarah Contant, and the costumes by Lizz Wolf are great. and then a lawyer from the CIA tells Breslin that the Feds, her “clients”, are preparing to build something like The Cube and want to know if their current model, the International Detaining Unit, is secure, so they’ve gone to Breslin to test if the facility is indeed “escape proof”. Breslin agrees instantly even though no one on his team will know his location from then on! They incarcerate Breslin inside the highly classified facility which is a pretty cool kind of panopticon design to terrify Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning, guarded by these guys who resemble the robotic Zone Guards from Half Life. Within minutes of entering the facility, some guy gets beaten to death by the Zone Guards while he’s trying to pull a cool hand luke.

Jim Caviezel plays the totally insane Warden Hobbes, who collects butterflies like Domitian Caesar, and who thinks Breslin is a notorious terrorist named Portos and pretends to have absolutely no knowledge of his real identity. The good warden Hobbes is assisted by Vinnie Jones, once the great Bullet Tooth Tony, who plays the murderous chief of security, Drake. With all the convicts confined to their transparent titanium cell blocks, they spend all of their time, when allowed to congregate, trying to devise a way to escape.

This gets us introduced to Arnie who plays “Rottmayer” another security expert or notorious hacker, who alludes to once having been some kind of vigilante like Robin Hood known as or working for another man named Victor Mannheim. Of course Sly and Arnie throw some punches at each other as they test the confines of the prison and try to Harold and Kumar their way out of hyper-Guantanamo and enhanced interrogations, although there is also lots of Shawshank Redemption.

Arnie and Stalone have some good scenes together trying to macgyver their way out, and Caviezel, doing his best Bob Gunton, is of course superb. Breslin proposes the theory that they’re trapped underground like in THX 1138 or Logan’s Run, but it turns out that the prototype has been built on a supertanker or tanker freighter, and Hobbes, who was so attentive to neurotic detail, failed to get the memo about Breslin’s identity because he was out to sea.

Victor Mannhiem is revealed to now somehow be trying to take over the international banking system with his blackhat hacks and the Feds really want to know who the fuck is Victor Mannheim so they’re asking the prisoners but it’s probably too late because Victor Mannheim has to be Bane or Kane or Raoul Silva, or guess what, Jim Caviezel. There’s a subplot with 50 cent and Breslin’s partner, Abigail, played by Amy Ryan, who are rushing meanwhile to discover what happened to Breslin but it’s a subplot. They eventually discover that the panopticon prototype was called The Tomb and was an experiment in private prison contracting, and 50 Cent tells us that it’s probably associated with Blackwater or the company known as Z.

The always disturbing Sam Neill plays the facility’s surgeon, Dr. Kyrie, but most of his scenes got cut? He plays a man torn by his ethics, a counterpart to Hobbes. The commanding Farah Tahir plays Javed, who eventually wields a sextant constructed out of a pen and glasses components and is able to get the supertanker’s location which leads the whole show to the ridiculously violent action-packed climax. So Javed and Breslin and Rottmayer start a riot and escape but Javed gets capped then actually executed by the nihilistic (supervillian?) Hobbes, and Vinnie Jones is gunning for Stalone. Of course they fight and Breslin stabs Drake to death after they struggle like titans in hand to hand combat. Breslin opens all the magnetic cell locks and the prisoners escape! Hobbes taunts Breslin, but Breslin somehow escapes through a fuel concentration pump. Victor Mannheim sends his black helicopter to come to the rescue and they try to collect Rottmayer and Breslin who have to get to the choppa!

Hobbes gets incinerated, “Boom!”, and the heroes rush back to base for cocktails- with one or two final twists. This film cost $50 million dollars to make, and only grossed back half of that. Old hand Alex Heffes wrote the music, which is what it needs to be.