Blu-ray Review – Escape Plan (2013)
Ray Breslin (Sylvester Stallone) is a professional escape artist who has spent most of his days in prison. Not for committing serious crimes, he’s in there to exploit their flaws and escape! Breslin is the key part of a crack team that are hired out by private security firms to test the security of their prisons.
When en route to his next assignment, Breslin is abducted and transported to a private ultra-high security prison, known as “The Tomb”. What’s different about this prison compared Breslins normal bread and butter? This prison has been designed as “escape proof” thanks to all of Breslin’s research. With nowhere to run, he now finds himself at the mercy of the highly dangerous inmates. Amongst the inmates is Gil Rottmayer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) a political detainee who harbours the only known whereabouts of a highly sought after criminal. Together they forge an alliance and work on hatching the ultimate escape plan!
Stallone and Schwarzenegger team together in the ultimate prison break out movie, which wants you think it’s a really, really smart movie – but in actuality, it’s a pretty decent prison movie. Ok, that sounds negative, but it’s not; Escape Plan is a good film starring two of Hollywood’s biggest action stars; yes they’re getting pretty old now, but with a good story they can pull off a fun, fanciful story.
But, the Special Features on the Blu-ray claim that this is the movie to end all movies! A story a pure as the driven snow, a film where you won’t know what’s coming next! Although you’ll figure out one of the main plot twists just under a hour into the film, it’s obvious Sly, stop telling us it isn’t. I understand that they’re promoting the film, but it seems as if they were shooting for the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay – it’s a near-futuristic prison movie! This isn’t a three hour French film about lesbians!
For this film not being as action packed as Stallone’s prior films it was still fun seeing Vinnie Jones pop up as the head of security figure for the faceless security guards, and you know that Stallone is going to have fisticuffs with ole’ Vinnie at some point! Other notable cast members include Jim Caviezal as the head honcho of the state of the art high-risk prison and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson as the tech support for Stallone’s A-Team, along with Amy Ryan aka Holly from ‘The Office‘ (US).
The film runs just under two hours, which is a tad long, but the banter between Stallone and Scharzenegger keeps it light and when Stallone brings the science to life it is quite entertaining.
Special Features include three featurettes; one focusing on the making of the movie (AKA the best story since sliced bread!), “Clash of the Titans” with cast and crew commenting on the collaboration between Stallone/Scharzenegger and one last feature focusing on the history of high security prisons. Other than that we’re given an audio commentary from the director Mikael Håfström and writer Miles Chapman as well as near ten minutes worth of deletes scenes.