Escape Plan (15) 116 mins **
What’s the most
preposterous aspect of this not-so-great escape: that Sly Stallone should be
playing the brains behind the weighty tome “Compromising Correctional
Institution Security”? That he should blithely accept Government coin to test
the perimeters of an off-the-grid panopticon where Vinnie Jones commands
greater authority than Sam Neill? Or simply that he’s then obliged to accept
the protection of Austrian anarchist Arnold Schwarzenegger? (A brawnily tender
shower scene may have hit the cutting-room floor.) Director Mikael Håfström
clears some space for his hotchpotch cast, and delivers one smartly concealed
twist, but he’s stuck with increasingly ropey material, and the problem of
setting semi-crucial structural talk in mouths that haven’t formed a coherent
sentence for decades. It’s basically Prison
Break for dopes, and – in everything from the prisoners’ jumpsuits to the
streaks in Arnie’s hair – decidedly grey pulp, never quite distinctive enough
to merit anything more than a tardy, generally unmemorable DVD viewing.
Escape Plan is in cinemas nationwide.
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