Let’s be honest with ourselves: did anyone think that Escape Plan was going to anything more or less than a big dumb action movie? I mean, it has the names Stallone and Schwartzenegger right at the top.
If the new trailer is any indication – and what else are trailers for? – then Escape Plan’s pleasure is going lie solely in the act of watching two major action stars trying to recapture the glory of their early years.
Both have been successful at this in the past little while: Stallone’s Expendables franchise has reinvigorated the old testosterone, and Schwartzenegger’s return to the big screen in both The Expendables and The Last Stand was actually a pleasant surprise. Maybe Escape Plan won’t be so dire after all.
Escape Plan has all the plot we might expect. Stallone is Ray Breslin, a man who escapes from prisons for a living. In the film, he finds himself locked up in a brand-new high-security prison that NO ONE CAN EVER ESCAPE FROM, with Arnie’s badass inmate as his only ally. I wonder what will happen next.
Based on this new trailer, the one problem I can see with Escape Plan is that it’s taking itself really really seriously. Really. Rather than giving us a compendium of ludicrous one-liners, clunking punches and big explosions, we get a rather portentous voice-over from Stallone, waxing rhapsodic about escaping and imprisonment. There are a few flashes of hope, with the burly boys duking it out on the prison floor, and the beginnings of an escape plan that will involve Arnold Schwartzenegger with a machine gun. But then we see the faces of Jim Caviezel and 50 Cent and my interest wanes.
Escape Plan was directed by Mikael Hafstrom, the man responsible for The Rite and 1408, which isn’t … all … bad. It could still be OK. Couldn’t it?
Escape Plan comes to theatres October 18. Check out the trailer below.
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