Escape Plan - Noodles Review

6 out of 10 Noodles

    Rambo & The Terminator together in one movie! How could this go wrong? Well.... in a couple places. Sylvestor Stallone & Arnold Schwarzenneggar (no, I did not have to look his name up to spell it correctly) were THE two biggest action stars in Hollywood, and everyone wanted them to be in a movie together. It would be so awesome and badass! But, that was 20 years ago. However, we get that movie now, when they're both oldies (Expendables doesn't count because that's an ensemble action star movie). In Escape Plan, we have the both of them as the stars of this movie. I've always loved both of these actors (I might be more of an Arnie fan just for his one-liners); they brought us classics like Rocky, Rambo, Predator, Terminator, and many more. However, they've both had their fair share of misfires; and while this isn't exactly one of those, it's also not a modern classic, much less a generic action movie. The story goes that Stallon plays a guy who breaks out of prisons for a living. He literally gets paid to go to prison, then figure out how to break out, so that they can better secure the prisons. However, he gets sent to a really special prison this time, and there's definitely something wrong here... Additionally, I have to talk about this prison a little bit. It's really cartoony and unrealistic. Each prisoner has their own little glass case and the guards all have these black jabbawockeez masks; it's all really unbelievable. It really remind me of the movie Face/Off, which to me is an action classic. But one segment in that movie really threw me off when they were in the top secret, unrealistically secure & high-tech prison. This was like that, except for the whole movie... In this prison, Stallone meets Arnie and they team up to make... an ESCAPE PLAN! 

     I'm not gonna say this movie is bad, because it's definitely not. The acting was fine. You could tell Stallone is getting a bit rusty but he's still a believable actor (still like him better in The Expendables though). Schwarzenneggar, though, was probably the best part of this movie. He had those cheesy one-liners that we've come to expect from him (and I'm almost certain they did that on purpose as an inside joke to Arnie fans & '80s fans). They weren't memorable and they were pretty stupid, but his screen presence was actually gratifying. Also, Jim Caviezel's in this movie as the warden of this intense prison. Jim Caviezel will always be known as the actor who portrayed Jesus, but he's still pretty good in this movie as the asshole warden. He's sort of a comic booky character in that he's a villain who has somewhat weird maneurisms, but that fits, I guess, with this cartoony prison. He may have not died for our sins in this movie, but I still give him credit for standing out as an acceptable bad guy. 

    There's nothing wrong with the directing or technical aspects of the movie. It's all quite mediocre though. The writing could've been better in that the dialogue was rather generic. However, I was fine with all that. The one thing that mainly threw me off, though, was the concept of this super prison that the movie takes place in. It sort of took me out of the movie. In the beginning, the film shows Stallone breaking out of a regular high security prison and that was actually very cool. I was hoping to see more of that, but what can I say? I guess I was disappointed a bit. Nonetheless, Escape Plan is still an entertaining action movie, with its main redeeming quality being the fact that Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenneggar are actually starring in the moviee together. You don't have to rush to the theatre to watch it, but if it ever comes on on TV, it's worth a watch, because Escape Plan is still fresh at 6 out of 10 Noodles.