Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
“Escape Plan” keeps the audience invested by placing the hero in an impossible-to-escape scenario.
Ray Breslin (Sylvester Stallone) works for the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) as a professional break-out artist. He is hired to go to high security prisons, look for weak spots, and expose them to break out. In theory, this is supposed to help prisons know where they need to improve.
A lawyer for the CIA approaches the BOP and funds Breslin to go to a different kind of prison. It is off the radar and would give the CIA power to incarcerate people who it deems too dangerous without giving them a fair trial. It is able to do this because the prison is not a government facility. It is funded by a company looking for profit.
Breslin’s coworkers put a tracking device in him, and he walks to the place he is instructed to go. Instead of some cops coming to arrest him, a black van comes, and some people pull him in. They put him to sleep and destroy the tracking device. It looks more like a kidnapping than an arrest.
When he wakes up, he is in a different kind of prison. The cells are small, clear boxes surrounded by video cameras. The guards wear black clothes and masks that cover their faces so the prisoners have no idea who they are while being beaten. Breslin finds out that the reason he is there is different from what he had originally thought.
This movie does a good job at establishing Breslin as a brilliant escape artist. At the beginning of the movie it shows him escaping a prison in Colorado, and he explains how he did it.
When he arrives at the for-profit prison, the film keeps the audience interested by raising questions about his situation. The prison is well established as very secure and highly unbreakable. Because of this, we have a good idea that the protagonist will win in the end, but we still want to know how.
The acting is decent. Sylvester Stallone does a good job at playing the main character. There is one emotional moment in particular that I felt was well done on his part. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the same as he usually is: calm and cool for the most part without displaying too much emotion. He also gives several cheesy Schwarzenegger lines, and there is one part where he speaks German.
Jim Caviezel gives the best performance in this movie as Hobbes, the warden. He does a good job at playing a threatening villain who the prisoners would not want to mess with. By the end of this movie, it is easy to hate him.
What “Escape Plan” does not get right is that it attempts to be more complicated than it should be. This is especially true in how it deals with the character Manheim. When Breslin gets to the prison he befriends Emil Rottmayer (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who had previously worked for Manheim. A big part of the plot becomes centered around how the warden becomes obsessed with looking for Manheim. However, it is not very well explained who this person is. All I came out knowing is that he has something to do with security. If the writers were going to make this person so central to everything, he should have been explained better.
With the exception of Breslin, some of the characters are not developed enough to where I care about them. This is especially true of Javed (Faran Tahir), an Islamic inmate who joins Breslin and Rottmayer in breaking out of prison. This character seems to pop out of nowhere in the middle, and he does some important things. Later on, something happens to him, but while it is going on, I do not care because his character was never well established.
This is an interesting movie that I would recommend people see if they want to watch an interesting jailbreak film. However, I would not recommend seeing it in theatres at full price. Either wait for it to come out at Redbox or see it at matinee price. There are better movies out right now including “Captain Phillips.”
Content: Rated R. There are f-words said throughout. Other than that, there is not a ton of language. There is some mild gore including one disturbing scene of a doctor doing stitches.
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