'Escape Plan' review: Not so great escape

Sylvester Stallone, right, in "Escape Plan." Credit: Alan Markfield

By MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICEOctober 17, 2013

Is Sylvester Stallone a better actor than Arnold Schwarzenegger? That burning question, for those old enough to have asked it and deluded enough to have never figured it out, is answered once and for all in "Escape Plan," an undemanding prison escape movie in the classic Sly and/or Arnold mold.

They're both in it, both locked up and both looking for a way out of a super prison that has all the escape-proof conveniences that private enterprise can cook up. The old pros hit their marks, and each other. They spill some blood and have theirs spilled.

Stallone plays Ray Breslin, who literally wrote the book on how security is compromised in maximum security prisons, and he co-owns a security company. He's inserted into prisons which he then breaks out of so that he can then teach the feds how to make their prisons more escape-proof.

His new challenge is a super-secure "secret" prison set up for the CIA and run by private contractors. It's a place for terrorists and their ilk, people who need to disappear. Ray goes in, but his team (Amy Ryan, 50 Cent) have their safeguards in place. Only they're foiled. There's no tracking Ray, no telling where he's been taken to and no way of explaining who he is so that he can get out.

Director Mikael Håfström is at his best studying his stars and their surroundings in extreme close-ups. The bonding scenes between Ray and the big, friendly Teutonic terror Rottmayer (Schwarzenegger) are clumsily written but have their amusing moments. The heroes have great hair and makeup. And the escape plans have a pleasant dose of "MacGyver" about them.

PLOT A structural-security authority must use his skills to escape from prison.

RATING R (violence, language)