The Crossover Too Many Decades in the Making

Having tracked through some of the big (and little) roles for two of the biggest action stars of the 1980s and 1990s, it seems only fitting to go and look at the movies where they starred opposite each other. And, when we look at the filmographies of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, we see that they starred in… actually, very few movies together. They didn’t appear in each other’s films in major roles, usually only providing amusing, winking nods and cameos (such as a cardboard cutout of Stallone in an alternate version of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which appeared in Last Action Hero).

The two didn’t officially appear in a film together until 2010’s The Expendables, an action vehicle for Stallone and a bunch of his buddies, but while Schwarzenegger appeared, his role was only a cameo. Schwarzenegger had a larger role in Expendables 2 in 2012, and both films played up the fact that these were the first time the stars appeared with each other. It wasn’t until Escape Plan in 2013, though, that they actually officially starred opposite each other in major roles. This was the film that everyone said finally put the two stars together, for real, and the advertising hype for this aspect was huge.

You just have to wish it had been expended on a better movie. Escape Plan is a film absolutely overstuffed with solid actors, not just Schwarzenegger and Stallone but also Jim Caviezel, Sam Neil, Vinnie Jones, Faran Tahir, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Amy Ryan, and yet it’s also just not that great. It’s engaging, interesting, and sometimes fun, but it has so many flaws that drag it down that what could have been a solid action film is dragged down into the B-movie dregs. It’s a film that you wish was better because it almost was there but its creative team failed to deliver.

Stallone stars as Ray Breslin, a security contractor whose job involves breaking out a prison. He’ll get placed into a prison and then he’ll search for weaknesses, exploiting them so he can escape. Then he and his partner, Lester Clark (D’Onofrio), will report in to the warden of the prison to give their full report. It’s a lucrative business, paying upwards of millions per escape, all to help ensure people that are sent to prison stay in prison. Breslin even wrote the book (literally) on the subject of making prisons more secure to help prevent escapes.

Considering his set of skills, it was only a matter of time before the government tapped him to try and escape from a true high security, black site location. CIA Agent Jessica Miller (Caitriona Balfe) meets Breslin and his team to discuss a contract to escape a true top-tier black site, and Breslin quickly agrees, signing on despite the requirements violating many of the rules that guide his company’s charter. He’s to be given a new identity, will get picked up and renditioned from New Orleans, and will effectively disappear until he escapes and shows up again somewhere in the world. Except the rendition is actually a setup and Breslin, for some reason, is never meant to escape. He’s in the world’s most secure prison and, just maybe, will remain there for the rest of his life if he doesn’t find someone to help him… such as Schwarzenegger’s inmate, Emil Rottmayer.

The big issue with Escape Plan is that it thinks it’s a very clever film that is, in fact, exceedingly dumb. The film sets itself up to craft a very elaborate, very detailed escape scenario, one of those great prison escapes that becomes the stuff of legend. Except, at every step of the way, the film then undercuts its own daring escape by making everyone around Breslin act incredibly stupid. Basic mistakes are made, leaps of logic are used to cover for flaws in the writing, and what should be a master plan ends up feeling like it just randomly falls together out of pure luck, not skill.

Take, for example, a sequence halfway into the film, where Breslin manages to evade notice as he busts out of a secure holding area and sneaks around the underside of the max-sec prison to figure out where he is. To do this he has to have a distraction, which is provided by Rottmayer. Arnold’s character fakes a panic attack in another cell, everyone on the security team watching the monitors, looks at Arnold’s character, and Stallone’s Breslin then covers the camera in his own cell, pops a hatch out, and explores. In the process he breaks a water main, spraying water everywhere and flooding the basement level. After this, he climbs back while alarms are blaring, uncovers his camera, and no one is the wiser about what he did. There are suspicions but no proof. Which… what?

Think this through for a second. First, everyone on the security team watching the monitors decides to look at one specific dude and ignores everything else. There’s five dudes in this room, and they all get distracted without anyone saying, “back to your stations.” Breslin also covers his camera, which no one seems to notice or care about. And after he gets back, after flooding the basement level, no one thinks to go back over the footage from before to see what he, a known escape artist, was up to. Either that implies they don’t have the footage at all and there’s no recording of the camera, which is a major flaw in the system, or everyone was too stupid to think to go back and look it over, which is somehow even worse.

This is just one example of the stupidity on display, but it speaks to the whole setup for the film. The movie presents to us what it considers the most escape-proof prison in existence – clear plastic cells for each prisoner, security scans at every level, motion tracking and cameras everywhere. There’s no chance for the prisoners to get any alone time, any chance they can plot or scheme… and then the people in charge of the prison act like complete idiots, over and over again.

This is a real problem the film struggles to overcome. In fact, the film doesn’t even recognize it’s a problem. It thinks it’s being smart, setting up this elaborate mouse trap for its heroes to slide through, except when you use your brain, oftentimes it’s obvious just how dumb the film actually is, and realizing that when the film can’t actively detracts from the watching experience. It would frankly be better if the film were actively, knowingly dumb (a la a film like Speed Racer) so that, at the very least, viewers didn’t have to try and point out all the stupid things the film gets wrong.

Of course, the film compounds this by having a central character that is presented as a massive genius even when he, like everyone else, acts incredibly stupid. Oh yes, sign yourself up to be renditioned under a false name to a CIA blacksite where no one will be able to track you or even know if you exist. There’s absolutely no way this could possibly be a setup or go south quickly. This while, at the same time, the film tells us over and over he’s a genius. It even tries to make him look like a genius early on, having him solve a meaningless puzzle as if it were child’s play, except we’re never told what the puzzle is or what it’s proving, so his solving it doesn’t actually matter. Time and again the film falls over itself to craft this perfect genius for Stallone to play, and then fails to make it stick.

At the same time, though, the film doesn’t really understand character development at all. It wants us to trust that Stallone goes to prisons to keep the bad people in. This is his mission statement, which he tells us part way into the movie. If that’s the case, most of the people at the blacksite prison he goes to would be bad guys, ones that shouldn’t escape. Say, like Tahir’s Javed Afridi who we have to assume is a terrorist since he’s at the blacksite, and yet our “heroes” team up with him to try and escape. Hell, we don’t even truly know how bad of a guy Arnold’s Rottmayer might be, so him teaming up with Breslin makes Breslin look like either an idiot or a bad guy himself.

The only reason we cheer for Stallone and Schwarzenegger’s characters is because the people in charge of the prison, Jim Caviezel's Warden Willard Hobbes and Vinnie Jones's Drake, are so cartoonishly over the top that we have to consider them worse guys by comparison. Caviezel’s performance is so bad, so mustache twirling evil that I’m actually surprised he doesn’t literally have a long, curly mustache in the film. He stands over prisoners and revels in their torture so much that he really needs those waves, curly ends to run his fingers through and sell the bit. But again, the film is too dumb to recognize his playing the character poorly, but not dumb enough to just commit to the bit.

With all that being said, the fact is the film sort of skates by just enough to be watchable. It’s not good, but it does have two very solid lead actors trying their best to sell bad material. The script by Miles Chapman and Arnell Jesko is bad, and the direction from Mikael Håfström is, at times, pretty choppy. Arnold and Sly, though, are old hats at taking bad action scripts and making them watchable, and Escape Plan is no exception. When these two are on screen, working on their plan and being affable together, the film works. It shouldn’t, but it does. It is great seeing these two titans of action cinema in the same film, and they clearly have fun working together. That helps to sell the film a fair bit.

Still, this is B-movie pulp material that thinks it’s something better. It’s not, and if the film could have just embraced that we might have had something truly fun. Instead this is passable entertainment that you’ll likely forget the second you’re done watching. That’s not the worst thing ever, but it hardly makes it good. And, sadly, there are two more of these films, both lacking the one thing that made this film watchable: Arnold and Stallone starring together. Won’t that just be a treat.