Escape plan: Sly & Arnie have a ball

Escape plan
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jim Caviezel
Rated: 6/10

Jailbreaks have been staple for dream merchants but this one comes riding piggyback on two hulks of, well, can we say, the bygone era? So, when Sly meets Arnie behind bars, there can’t be any hope of saving a jailbreak even though the director tries his best to make the jailor look deadly with his freezing-and-mounting butterflies penchant.

But wait, there’s a twist here, and I am not talking just about showing the good side of a jihadi! For starters, Stallone is no offender but a security expert whose sole job is to get into prisons and break out of them merely to test their safety quotients! Untill, he is sent in on the sly by his business partner for some humongous amount of money. The deal is to never let him come out!

A middle-of-nowhere, floating, illegal prison with no record of existing is the last thing Stallone would have wanted to go into but he does and that’s that! A bit of mombo-jumbo around CIA, China and other such unmentionables and then the film gets going. Arnie, well, he is somewhat subdued but therein lies his meat in this one.

While Stallone manages his overwhelming wrinkles the same way as he has managed his speech problems on the screen for most of his career (it was difficult to fathom much of his dialogues here too), Arnie is delectably quirky, underplayed and quite in control of an altogether different ballgame he plays in this film.


Together, the two create a riot and all will enjoy the goings-on which can be termed a laconic thriller with slick editing and techno-savvy prison surroundings. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 20 October, 2013



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