One of the initial draws behind The Expendables was seeing Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger popping caps together, but while the first film only gave us a brief cameo scene the second upped it slightly with a single shared action scene. The two aging icons went on to make their own individual action films, but fans were still apparently clamoring for the two to work together on something with a bit more substance.
Well that’s never going to happen, but in the meantime we are getting a movie featuring the two in more than a single scene. Escape Plan, formerly known as The Tomb, is focused on Ray Breslin (Stallone), the world’s top authority on prison security. He basically makes his living escaping from jail, but his latest gig sees him locked up in a high-tech super prison with, unsurprisingly, a sadistic warden at the helm. You think he’d use his one phone call to get a hold of Lt. Gabriel Cash for help, but instead he turns to fellow inmate Swan Rottmayer (Schwarzenegger).
This looks like a lost action classic from the ’90s doesn’t it? And that’s not a bad thing. There’s a low-key simplicity to it all, something we’ve come to count on with Stallone and Schwarzenegger, that acts almost as a comfort food for fans of decades past. Sure it’s doomed to be forgotten fairly quickly, but like The Last Stand and Bullet to the Head we’re almost guaranteed ninety minutes of casual, flashback fun.
And not even the presence of Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson can change that.
Escape Plan opens October 18, 2013
Related Topics: Arnold Schwarzenegger
