Escape Plan (2013)

Some things in life are certain. Death. Taxes. Stupid things coming out of Kanye West's mouth. Like heat causing particles to move faster, some forces at work in this vast universe are akin to an unstoppable juggernaut - heedless of anything other than their own indomitable wills. Recently we bore witness to another one of these irrefutable aspects of nature: The awesomeness of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.

Like gravity from a black hole, it's impossible to deny the inherent glorious majesty of these two titans of action. Their presence, physicality, action movie acting chops and humor bring an inescapable aura of fun and badassery to the films they star in, often adding watchablity to what would otherwise be worthless. Oh, they have their detractors, it's true, but I choose to believe those who doubt them are simply blinded by the sheer manliness of their presence - A cowed, shriveling girly-man who is lashing out in fear at what they do not understand.

EMBRACE ME.

Schwarzenegger and Stallone have both had films this year already, and while Arnie's return to lead roles in "The Last Stand" was solid, sitting through Stallone's "Bullet To The Head" was a painful, joyless experience. "Escape Plan," the first feature these two legends have ever headlined together, seemed like a fun, action packed romp that smacked slightly of 80's and camp, which to me made for a promising setup. That is, with the exception of the name inexplicably being changed earlier this year to the terribly bland title "Escape Plan" from the more mysterious and stylish moniker "The Tomb," which is a decision I really don't understand.

"Escape Plan" didn't unfortunately reach the heights of "The Last Stand," but it was head and shoulders above "Bullet To The Head." It's what was promised in the trailer, and is pretty much exactly what you'd expect it to be. It's silly and kind of campy while taking itself dead serious, not a whole lot makes sense but it's just plausible enough to not be technically impossible, the actors all look like they're having a good time, some so-bad-they're-good one liners happen, and by the end we are given what we paid money to see: Arnold Schwarzenegger mowing down hordes of bad guys while shooting a gun the size of an El Camino. I don't feel ripped off in the slightest.

The man's like Rembrandt with a .50 caliber. His victims become Jackson Pollock paintings.

"Escape Plan" is about Ray (Stallone), a man who makes his living and fortune by getting himself sent into the world's most secure prisons and then escaping in order to show the flaws in their security, kind of like a quality control job where each contract takes a few months and involves shanking. When he is presented with a super top-secret job to try and escape from a new prison that is reportedly 100% escape proof, he takes the assignment only to find himself in a prison that is incredibly dangerous and really does seem inescapable.

Wanting to pull the plug on the whole thing, he gives his extraction code only to find that the warden, Hobbes (Jim Caviezel), has no clue or interest in what he's talking about, proving that Ray has been backstabbed and has been left to rot in the one place he can't get out of. After making quick friends with Emil (Schwarzenegger), another prisoner who seems oddly anxious to go to the wall for Ray considering that they're strangers, together they craft the eponymous scheme to bust out and find the double crosser.

Occasionally confusing shakey-cam sequence aside, the action in "Escape Plan" was hard hitting and entertaining enough, and the last shoot out when Arnold gets to do his thing is a pretty awesome sight to behold, and proves the man still has it in spades. Although considering it is an R rated film it probably could have been a bit more graphic and not lost anything. Not saying that we needed something like "Machete" levels of gore, but when the villain who is second only to the Big Bad is taken out by falling down the stairs (off camera, by the way) it tends to smack of unsatisfying. But like adding it wouldn't have hurt anything, not having it really didn't take anything away, either.

Stallone is...decent here. It's not that he's not good, in fact his acting is fine, but I think all the lumpiness has officially reached the point of distraction for me. In "Rambo" he had that on-and-off-again-steroid kind of body, but he was still cut. Here he's just kind of a big mass of muscle and sinew like a sack of skin that had a bunch of bones stuffed inside in no particular order. And am I the only one who has noticed that he has the most absurdly small sausage fingers ever? Have they always been like that or have his hands gotten huge and started eating his fingers from the knuckles up?

At this point Stallone looks like a PS2 era video game version of himself.

Schwarzenegger runs away with this film, honestly. It's not Stallone's fault, since being the snarky one who knows more than he's telling, Arnold has the more fun character to play. But Arnold also seems to be putting slightly more effort into the role. And I've always liked Schwarzenegger as an actor, but I can't express how much fun it is to watch him having fun acting. It's infectious, and it becomes the reason we care. Stallone's character exists to move the story along, but Arnold's character is why we get invested in what we're seeing.

That's not to say "Escape Plan" is a brilliant film by any means. It's got its share of problems. The biggest fault with it is probably the fact that, with the exception of some of the bigger "trailer moments," it's not a very memorable film. That's not to say it's boring, but it's nothing very unique. Now that's not an automatic bad thing in of itself because what's important isn't originality but how well a film does what it set out to do. And "Escape Plan" does what it does well. But the fact that it's generally pretty predictable doesn't help it in the "stick in your mind" department. Again, that's not because it's bad but because it kind of runs together with a lot of other movies similar to it.

But on the other hand, what were his options? NOT getting to da choppa? That's what you do.

And like any action flick, a lot rides on the performances of the villains. "Escape Plan" is sadly lacking in that department. Jim Caviezel is really bad at being a bad guy, and comes across as more obnoxious than threatening. He simply acts really uppity, fixes his tie a lot while brushing off his lapels and snaps his fingers anytime he wants something done, a character trait which gets annoying really quickly. Essentially he's just a monocle short of being the snooty rich guy in a cartoon who inevitably gets a pie in the face. Intimidating he is not. That role belongs more to Vinnie Jones as the #2 Baddie, but there's really not anything to him other than being a slightly larger and more psycho prison guard. He doesn't do anything to make me particularly notice him besides being an actor I recognize. And every other guard is literally faceless. It's difficult to care much.

You know, all these thing are pretty easily overlooked for me. I'm easy to please when it comes to Stallone, but even more so when it's Arnold. When he's spouting lines like "You hit like a vegetarian," there's bound to be some smiles to be found on my face. Even the post-kill one liner he has at the end that was so bad that it was honestly kind of awesome managed to put me in a good mood. By Crom, I missed that man.

Check out the trailer for "Escape Plan."

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Escape Plan" is a solid action flick. It's a good time, and just entertaining enough to forgive some of the sillier nonsense. If you maintain a forgiving mindset and thoroughly suspended disbelief, it's as much fun as any random 80's action flick starring one of these guys. Its biggest fault is weak casting in the villain department, but Stallone and Schwarzenegger more than make up for it.

Red Dawn (2012)

I love action movie cheese, whether it's "Top Gun" or "Point Break" or anything starring Dolph Lundgren. But there do exist a few films deemed classics in the "badly awesome" category that I am not a fan of. One of those is the original "Red Dawn." I know it occupies a special place in many hearts, but for some reason I could never get behind it.

There's a lot of reasons to like it to be sure, be it the amazing cast or the stunningly absurd plot that screams out for high-octane action movie shenanigans, but I honestly slept through most of "Red Dawn." I have a hard time pointing to exactly the reason why, but there's something about that movie that just makes me drift off into a stupor worthy of post-Thanksgiving dinner. Considering that there's a calculated 2.23 acts of violence every minute of the film (seriously, at the time it made the Guinness Book of World Records), it's quite an accomplishment to make something that action-packed boring, but hey there it is.

I always found "Red Dawn" inexplicably dull, and because of that I didn't like it. Well, that and it was really creepy watching it knowing that there are people in America who look at it like it's a precognitive documentary. Honestly it made me feel a little queasy because it was like looking at the world through the lenses of their paranoid, gun-nut, conspiracy theory laden crazy goggles. It's an unsettling feeling.

That's a thing I want to watch: Alex Jones' spank material.

So sure. Remake it. Whatever. At this point I'm not even going to rant about them remaking everything. At least it's a remake of a movie I don't care about. It could be much worse. And when a movie has been sitting on the shelf for 3 years after being completed (true story, it was shot in 2009), you know you're dealing with some quality material, am I right?

This is going to suck, isn't it?

Well, the answer is unfortunately "Yes, it did suck." This is not a good movie. Not even by the standards of unnecessary remakes is it a decent film. It's barely coherent in its narrative, the plot does the impossible and is even dumber than the original, all but one of the characters are essentially walking cardboard cutouts spouting dialogue equivalent to a dog gnawing on a squeaky toy, and the admittedly plentiful action is squandered by the watered-down PG-13 rating. I would ask how something this easy is messed up so much, but honestly there wasn't much to work with to begin with, so I can't even be that mad about it. It's not like I'm surprised it sucked. I'm just tired.

All that being said, I still liked it better than the original. At least I stayed awake this time.

You know what the deal is at this point with the story, and little has changed from the original in that respect. Very early on, a foreign army invades America, and with a pillaging that would make the beginning of any fantasy movie proud, the townsfolk of Spokane, Washington are promptly slaughtered and interned. Escaping from the invader's clutches is a group of high schoolers who decide to flee into the woods and fight the good fight, calling themselves The Wolverines and eventually throwing a big enough wrench into the enemy's plan as to suggest eventual victory in the near future. Since "Red Dawn" doesn't feel the need to have an actual ending.

Cower in fear, North Korea. She's going to make duck-lips at you.

In the original film the invaders were the Russians. And in 1984, I'm sure that made some sense. In the remake, it's North Korea. It was supposed to be China, but when MGM decided they didn't want to make them mad, since it might eat into the box office sales in...well, China I guess, they changed it to North Korea, a place where barely anyone has electricity let alone a movie theater to go to. It's not even worth it to mention how stupid the idea that they could successfully invade us is. But I'll still say it. That's stupid.

The whole invasion is explained to be possible because of "a new weapon" that destroys all communication or something, kind of like an EMP, except North Korea's stuff is immune due to a MacGuffin they needed for a third act plot device. Of course, the film never explains how all the radios and TVs and communication that was not protected is still working after the invasion, but there I go nitpicking "stuff that doesn't matter" like the buzz-kill I am.

Our main heroes de jour are played by Chris Hemsworth (pre-"Thor"), Josh Hutcherson (pre-"Hunger Games"), and Josh Peck (post-proving he's a terrible actor). There's also Jeffery Dean Morgan and Brett Cullen who show up to throw some acting chutzpah at us, but they are extremely underused. So overall the cast is alright, but then again, among The Wolverines we've also got Adrianne Palicki, who played Wonder Woman on the failed TV reboot, and Isabel Lucas, who was the Decepticon in "Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen" who could turn into a human (since Decepticons can do that now), so I guess we've got to pick our battles here.

"I'm the only reason you're watching this, aren't I?"

When the cast is good, it's pretty darn good. Morgan and Cullen are of course great, but Hemsworth is carrying the movie nearly the entire time, being the best actor of the main cast by as far as Thor could chuck Mjolnir. It also helps that he is given the most interesting character, being a soldier recently back from the war who has some issues, but obviously becomes indispensable when North Korea attacks. Hutcherson is okay, but he has the same problem most of the cast has, being that his character is so anonymous that he kind of fades into the background, and it's a struggle to even remember his name. Even Will Yun Lee, playing the essentially nameless Big Bad doesn't really do much besides get killed via impossible convenience, although he is fairly intimidating.

But when the cast is bad, it becomes borderline unwatchable. The worst offender of this is Josh Peck as Hemsworth's younger brother. I knew I was going to hate this character the instant he showed up as a hotdogging quarterback who ends up costing his team the game because he felt he could win it single-handedly. He was mistaken. And true to that character trait of selfish impulsiveness (which is about the only one he has), he ends up getting one of his friends killed at a later point in the film. I thought that perhaps that may have proven to be a learning experience for him, but nope. Not happening. He doesn't learn anything and ends the movie the same character he started as despite suffering horrendous loss. What a character arc.

And Josh Peck is such an unlikable actor that it really is nails on a chalkboard for me to even look at the damn guy. And it took me the longest time to place where I'd seen him before. At first I thought he was that mattress selling prick from "Devil," but then I finally realized where I'd seen him before.

IT'S THAT LITTLE TURD SMUGGLER FROM "ATM."

Of course it is. Why wouldn't that be the actor they got for "Red Dawn?" He's only the most soul-punchingly obnoxious and irritating actor I've seen since Ryan Reynolds or Dane Cook. Sounds like a great time. Make him one of the heroes. In fact, make him essentially the main character, as he's one of the few who survives till the end. Fantastic. I'm glad I'm watching him in this movie.

Aside from the shortfalls of the cast, the rest of the movie does tend to make itself not boring by having a good amount of bombs, bullets and guys screaming "AAAAAARRGH!" as they shoot the enemy troops, all of whom seem to have the survival instinct of a duck with a sexual attraction to spinning helicopter blades. The problem with all of that is that pretty soon scenes start feeling less like a cohesive narrative and more like a slideshow of explosions that happened in no particular order. "Red Dawn" will jump from scene to scene with no lead-in or establishment of when or even where we are in relation to the thing we just saw, making the story quite hard to follow. And it's not too long before it starts getting really hard to care one way or another.

 It's the amazing Wolverine Brothers, Douche, Square-face and Talent!

By the way, isn't it nice when we don't have to see blood during our sequences of horrific violence? Much like "Alex Cross," there's a shocking moment in "Red Dawn" featuring a sniper rifle. But in this movie, instead of the chest, the person gets shot in the head. But don't worry! Just because the dude would have gotten his head half removed with that large-caliber bullet doesn't mean we have to see blood. Because just like real life, that's a very tidy affair. They wouldn't have even had to wash the carpet he fell on. Man, why can't every violent action movie be PG-13? It makes it so much better!

"Red Dawn" feels to me like a 5 hour long TV mini-series that was trimmed down to an hour and a half and released in theaters. And that compression does make it go by at a very brisk clip, but at the cost of knowing what in the world is happening. I'd prefer it as a mini-series. And maybe if it had been a series we could have actually gotten to know the characters instead of just knowing them as "The annoying one," "The one with the weird face," "The black one," "The one Josh Peck got killed," and Chris Hemsworth. 

I don't know what else to say, honestly. "Red Dawn" isn't the worst remake I've ever seen, but some of that probably has to due with the fact that I never liked the original. So even if it did suck, hey it's no skin off my back. I just don't care.

Check out the trailer for "Red Dawn." BTW Chris Hemsworth is not nearly as prominent in the actual film. Of course.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Red Dawn" is relatively harmless, and the action is admittedly plentiful, but it's ultimately not worth the time or effort it takes to get the disc, put it in the player, go back to the couch, hit play, chapter skip through the previews and commercials, play the movie, and then sit there for an hour and a half. There are better things you could be doing.