How 2013’s Escape Plan Breaks Out the 1980s Action Formula

From their 1980s action-movie ascendance onward, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger earned their iconic star status by playing some of the decade’s most memorable movie tough guys. But as anyone who’s ever seen (and loved) Tango & Cash or Jingle All the Way can tell you, it was their affable inclination to show a softer, sillier side that helped buoy their broad and enduring popularity into the 1990s and far beyond. 

Like an action A-lister’s family reunion, 2013’s Escape Plan (streaming here on Peacock!) found a way to balance both the action and the comedy star traits that Sly and Ah-nold had, by then, long been famous for. And just like Stallone’s contemporary 2010s franchise vehicle The Expendables, Escape Plan accomplished the feat with the same refreshingly brazen approach to how preposterous its whole setup really is.

Escape Plan: Watching two 1980s action heavyweights collide

Overall, the 2010s already was a ripe time for renewing fans’ appreciation for a bevy of high-T, muscled-up stars; actors who’d built whole Hollywood careers on churning out 1980s and 1990s-appropriate action-movie cheese. 

The Stallone-directed The Expendables (2010) was the first action A-lister ensemble flick to really nail the basic revivalist formula, teaming Stallone with Schwarzenegger (in a cameo role that would later grow with the franchise) alongside an absolute treasure trove of action badasses (Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Bruce WIllis, Terry Crews, Jet Li, Randy Couture, Mickey Rourke, and Steve Austin). It was a little bit meta, it was a lot over the top, and — for 1980s fans who’d grown to cherish the unironic action-flick beatdowns that helped define their big-screen childhoods — it all felt absolutely glorious.

Story-wise, it was also utterly preposterous — which, if we’re being real, is an almost-mandatory feature of the aging-action-star mini-genre rather than some kind of distracting bug. Like The Expendables, Escape Plan understands its keep-it-silly assignment to a tee: Take a couple of titanic 1980s action ambassadors and toss them together amid ridiculously implausible circumstances — and then stuff the whole thing full of old-school movie tropes that aim to stoke, rather than upend, fans’ expectations. 

Will Stallone and Arnold have an actual face-to-face fight? (Of course they will!) Will they come at each other with verbal zingers that slyly recall their greatest action catchphrases from the 1980s? (It cannot be otherwise, Socrates!) Will they indulge just a little in the ‘80s zeitgeist that framed each actor as the other’s natural Hollywood rival? (By now you get the picture… and you already know the answer.)

The basics of Escape Plan

Stallone plays Ray Breslin, the escape artist at the center of Escape Plan whose multimillionaire business model relies on prison-industry government types — agencies who need a professional like Breslin to break out of their toughest max-security facilities and then offer an analysis of their weak points. Schwarzenegger shows up already incarcerated as Emil Rottmayer, a high-priority black site detainee who’s been pinched by the world’s off-grid intelligence agencies for committing high-level international crimes. 

Stallone and Ah-nold eventually end up imprisoned in the same black site complex (ominously known as “The Tomb”), with Stallone’s character (Breslin) quickly learning — in the rudest of ways — that his voluntary cooperation to enter the place as a phony prisoner suddenly doesn’t count for squat, now that he’s on the inside. Why? Through some evil scheming backchannel machinations, it turns out, one of Breslin’s backstabbing business pals (an always-awesome Vincent D’Onofrio) has secretly orchestrated the whole thing, all to permanently remove Breslin from the competitive field of play. 

Curiously, Rottmayer (Schwarzenegger) takes an immediate interest in Breslin once he’s found his feet inside The Tomb, a buffed-out, insanely secure and guard-infested prison complex whose actual location on Planet Earth may not even appear on any known map. From there, the buddy-flick formula starts to really kick in, as the pair of unlikely allies takes up the twofold task of revealing the real baddie who’s behind the mystery while also, y’know, figuring out a way to actually escape. 

There’s nothing in Escape Plan’s story that surprises or subverts — but with a killer cast that’s long on personality, there’s definitely a ton of stuff that delights. Curtis Jackson (50 Cent) plays the resident computer wiz within Breslin’s company (Breslin hilariously calls him his “techno-thug”), while a barely recognizable Sam Neill brings a pensive tension to his role as The Tomb’s morally anguished prison doctor. The movie’s sleeper performance comes from Jim Caviezel as Warden Hobbes, The Tomb’s methodically sadistic, impeccably dressed overseer with a sick psycho’s knack for staying quiet and low key… even when he’s basking in his torture victims’ screaming madness. 

To date, the action franchise spawned by Stallone’s Escape Plan has spawned two additional sequels: 2018’s Escape Plan 2: Hades and 2019’s Escape Plan: The Extractors. Like the original film, each stays seriously funny and seriously entertaining by staying, well, seriously over the top — and best of all, you can stream all three movies right now on Peacock.

Stream Escape Plan on Peacock here, Escape Plan 2: Hades here, and Escape Plan: The Extractors here.