Summer of Films: Escape Plan (2013)

Stallone and Schwarzenegger are back together again! It’s too bad their film stinks. Indifferent writing. Indifferent acting. Uninteresting settings. Weak action. Yawn. This was disappointing.

Plot

Ray Breslin (Stallone) has a talent for escaping from prisons. He’s so talented that the Department of Justice hires him to break out of supermax prisons so he can show them their weaknesses and they can correct them. Indeed, the film opens with him doing just that, though his escape stretches credulity.

Soon enough, Breslin finds himself visited by the CIA. Because they can’t “rendition” the worst of the worst anymore, they need a new system to hold the people who should never be allowed to see the light of day. To that end, they’ve contracted with a private sector company to build a prison where they can make these people disappear. Naturally, they want Breslin to attempt to break out of the prison to test their new system.

Stallone agrees even though they won't agree to any of his normal safety protocols. Of course, the minute he finds himself in the prison he learns that he has been betrayed and that someone wants him "disappeared." He also discovers that the warden is cruel and the guards are sadists who maintain control by beating prisoners. What's more, they built this prison using all of his ideas from his book on how to build an inescapable prison. Now he must break out or spend the rest of his life stuck in this prison. Helping him in this regard is another prisoner: renown assistant cyber-terrorist Rottmayer (Arnold Schwarzenegger). Can Stallone escape and regain his freedom? Take a guess.

Why This Film Stunk

In 1989, Stallone did a film similar to this. It was called Lock Up. In that film, he was a minor convict and model prisoner whose time was up, but the warden wanted to punish him after he went to the press about the warden’s treatment of prisoners. This caused the warden to try to set up Stallone to spend the rest of his life in prison, which leads to a sort of prison escape film/revenge film. Lock Up had solid motivations, strong emotions and high stakes. It may not have been the best film ever, but it got your attention.

The problem with Escape Plan is that it never really captures your interest. For one thing, this film is entirely predictable. You know Stallone is being set up the moment he agrees to take the assignment. You know Stallone will eventually escape. It’s just not possible that these things won’t happen. Moreover, throughout, you know when Stallone will be punished. You know when he will learn whatever he needs to learn to escape. You know who his friends will be, who will betray him, who he will kill and how it will all end. There are two twists, but they are so incidental to the plot that they have no impact. It’s hard to feel any tension when you know how each scene will end all throughout the movie.

The characters aren’t very interesting either. Arnold plays Arnold the action hero. He technically has a character, but it’s purely incidental to the movie and it’s nothing you care about, and you know he's never in any danger. Ditto on Stallone. James Caviezel plays the warden. Normally, I’m a fan of his, but here he plays the character so indifferently that he almost seems like a robot at times. There are other characters, but you won’t remember any of them.

The writing is really poor too. There isn’t a clever or memorable line. There isn’t a moment of insight. For a man who supposedly is a master of escaping from prisons, there’s no moment where he tells you something you don’t already know about prison, about the human state of mind as a guard or a prisoner, or even about how he perceives the world. Basically, every line of dialog is transactional: “I need to get into that room.”

The action isn’t very interesting either. For the most part, the action is entirely asymmetrical. Thus, the guards easily beat up the good guys when they want to. When the good guys escape, they easily crush the guards. Then in the final shootout, the good guys mow down dozens of guards without any real risk to themselves. There is never a fight where you don't know the outcome the moment it begins, and at no point is there any fight which feels like a payoff.

So what you have here are characters you don’t care about, a story that means nothing to you, a story you can predict moment by moment, fights with no tension, and an utter lack of cleverness and nothing memorable to take from the film. The end result is a film that is entirely devoid of tension and interest.

Frankly, Stallone can and should do a lot better. Stallone is a capable actor with a good deal of charisma who should be picking much more interesting projects at this point in his career.

Finally, as an aside, this film also has whiffs of politics that aren’t appreciated. It seems to be assumed that the CIA is evil. The CIA tortures prisoners. The prison guards are sadists. The worst of the worst are all Caucasians, with the one Islamist turning out to be a noble heroic character. The “good guy” (Arnold) has invented a plan to destroy the world’s banks. None of this was shoved in your face, but in a film with little else to hold your interest, these little leftist tropes became rather annoying.

Thoughts?

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Film Friday: The Expendables 2 (2012)

I expected nothing good from The Expendables 2. I didn’t really care all that much for The Expendables and sequels are almost always crap, especially sequels of actions films. So yeah, I was pretty sure this was going to suck eggs. But do you know what? The Expendables 2 turned out to be very entertaining film. In fact, it was considerably better than the first one!

Plot

The plot isn’t really all that relevant. In fact, you probably won’t even notice it because you aren’t watching this film for the plot: you’re watching for the actors. In any event, the film opens with the Expendables conducting a hostage rescue mission in Nepal. They pull off the rescue and rescue Trench (Arnold Schwarzenegger) in the process. After this, they return to New Orleans, where they are forced by Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) of the CIA to accept a mission.

Soon, they are flying to Albania to retrieve an item. They get ambushed by an international arms dealer named Jean Vilain (get it?) (Jean-Claude Van Damme). He lets them leave after disarming them and killing one of their members. Naturally, the remaining members want revenge.

The rest of the story involves Stallone, Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Terry Crews, and Yu Nan chasing Van Damme, who is using slave labor to try to dig weapons grade plutonium out of a mine, where the Russians stored it at the end of the cold war.

Eventually, Chuck Norris, Arnold, and Willis join the fight and a massive shootout occurs at an airport as Van Damme and his army tries to get the plutonium out of the country. I’ll leave all the twists and turns for you to discover.

Why This Film Worked

I said at the intro that I didn’t really care for the The Expendables. That’s true. I loved the idea of all these 1980’s action stars getting together and making an action movie together. I also loved the idea that it was more like an 80’s action film than a modern film. The idea of those things rocked...

...but the execution left me cold.

When I watched the film, I felt that they made poor use of all these action stars. Some were only on screen for a few minutes and most didn’t do much. There was no “Battle Royale” so to speak either, where they all came together for one massive fire fight. Moreover, while the film had a bit of an 80’s feel to it, it wasn’t that different from modern action films. The ultimate problem was that the film took itself too seriously as an action film.

So what makes The Expendables 2 that much better than the original? Yeah, you guessed it: this movie doesn’t take itself seriously. In fact, this film is almost a loving parody of the entire 80’s action genre. For one thing, the action is much more over the top. There is a scene involving Chuck Norris that is just ridiculous and yet gets your fist pumping in the air.

The ending scene is another example. This scene takes place at the airport and it involves each of the guy from the 80’s shooting it out with Van Damme’s ever growing army. In fact, what seemed like Van Damme and about 20 guys quickly morphs into hundreds of guys armed with machine guns. Naturally, none of them can hit a thing and our collection of action heroes plow through them in rip-roaring 1980’s style cough cough Commando, Terminator, Rambo cough cough. In many ways, this scene is a parody of those old shootouts, and it is played very tongue in cheek, but that doesn’t keep it from being awesome to watch. Indeed, playing this as a bit of a parody keeps you from rolling your eyes at the way over-the-top action occurring on screen. And what makes this even better is that this shootout is CGI free. This shootout involves real extras and real stunts, and that gives it a level of reality you just don’t get from CGI, even as the action itself is ridiculous. This is a heck of a way to end this film, and it’s FAR superior to the 45 minute CGI cartoon fight scenes that end most action films today.

Ultimately though, there’s one more key that really makes this film work: the relationship between the action stars. Throughout this movie, they joke and play around with each other. They act like old friends. Arnold and Sly compete throughout. Norris is his old likable self and plays the lone wolf, but still is loyal to his friends. None of them, except Van Damme, come across as jerks or Prima Donnas. What’s more, throughout the film, they steal each other’s most famous lines. But they don’t just steal them, they do it at the right times for maximum relevance, which makes the film feel clever and funny and gives you constant reminders of who these guys were, and they do it with the other guy standing there so he can fire back one of the other guy’s lines. This makes you feel like you’re with old friends trading good-natured barbs or like you’re on the inside of an inside joke.

Ultimately, these things make this movie really enjoyable. This film absolutely captures the spirit of what this type of movie needs to be: a friendly trip down memory lane as you get to see all your old heroes joking around and having a good time as they have some fun with the excesses of their prior work. So is this a great movie? No. But it is a fun movie and it will leave you smiling. I definitely recommend this one.

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Stallone v. Schwarzenegger

It’s funny how perceptions change. In the 1980s, there was this huge competition between Stallone and Schwarzenegger for the title of biggest action star in the world. It was pretty close at the time, but it seemed like Schwarzenegger was just a hair better than Stallone. His films had more buzz, they were more consistently hits, and he just seemed to have an edge in the culture... everyone quoted his dialog and thought of Aaaanold when they thought of action heroes. Stallone, not so much. So presumably, Schwarzenegger would be better remembered than Stallone by future generations too, right? Well, no. Not really.

Schwarzenegger hit it big in 1981 with the amazing Conan the Barbarian. Then in 1984, he struck gold again with The Terminator. This was followed by a string of hits: Predator, The Running Man, Twins, and Total Recall. By the time Kindergarten Cop and Terminator 2 came around, he was a bankable star who could do no wrong, even though he had -- Raw Deal and Red Heat weren’t great. But in 1993, he had his first huge bomb, Last Action Hero. And his career slipped after that.

Stallone, on the other hand, hit it big with Rocky in 1979, though he appeared in some cult films before that (like Death Race 2000). He rocketed to the top a few years later when he did Rocky II & III and the First Blood series (1982). Outside of those two franchises however, his 80’s films were questionable... Rhinestone, Cobra, Over the Top. It wasn't until the 1990s that he started having hits like Demolition Man and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot and Judge Dredd.

When you compare the two, you see that Stallone had the longer career - Schwarzenegger faded after 10 years, whereas Stallone seemed to improve for about two decades. On the other hand, Schwarzenegger had more big hits and fewer bad films. And unlike Stallone, he didn’t rely on two franchises to support his fame. I think this contributed to Schwarzenegger seeming like the bigger star because you really were going to see an Aaaanold film, not see his characters; whereas Stallone films were seen as “the latest Rocky movie” or “Rambo film.” But you know, this may ultimately be Schwarzenegger’s undoing, at least as far as film history is concerned.

Indeed, I’ve been watching their old movies lately and I’ve come to realize that Stallone movies are just better. His films hold up very well, Schwarzenegger's don't. Most of Schwarzenegger's films feel dated. They feel like "Aaaanold films" from the era of the 1980's action hero. The only exceptions to this really are Conan and two Cameron films, Terminator 2 and True Lies. Stallone’s films, by comparison, all have different feels to them. Sure, they can be dated by wardrobe or whatnot, but they don't feel dated. I think this is because Stallone is the better actor, and whereas Aaaanold films were about Schwarzenegger hamming it up, Stallone actually tried to play the character. Stallone's films also played to timeless themes, whereas Aaaaanold's films were just about this weightlifter who gets wronged and seeks revenge.

And I don't think I'm alone in this judgment. I've noticed that a lot more of Stallone's films still get play on television, whereas Schwarzenegger's films are slowly vanishing. All that seem to be left for Schwarzenegger are his Cameron films, which became franchises, Predator and Conan. For Stallone, you still regularly see the Rocky films, Night Hawks, First Blood, Demolition Man, Judge Dredd and more. I find this interesting because it suggests that films based around the personality or star power of the actor may not have much longevity, even if they were huge when they were hot. This could be bad news for much of the careers of people like Tom Cruise and Al Pacino. Interesting.

Thoughts?

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Film Friday: Cop Land (1997)

Imagine a film staring Sylvester Stallone, Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Robert Patrick and a dozen more people you’ll recognize. Now imagine if the thing is really well written. Yet, few people know about it. That’s Cop Land, and this is truly an excellent film.

** Major Spoiler Alert **

Plot

Across the Hudson River from New York City lies Garrison, New Jersey. This is a town populated by NYPD cops who found a way around the NYC residency requirement. As the story open, one of these cops (Murray “Superboy” Babitch) kills two thugs on the George Washington Bridge. To save him from arrest, and from questioning by Internal Affairs, a group of these Garrison cops, including Superboy’s uncle Ray Donlan (Harvey Keitel), try to cover this up. In the process, Superboy jumps off the bridge.

This begins a chain of events that slowly spin out of control. And as Ray tries to solve the problem created by Superboy, Internal Affairs is watching in the form of Lt. Moe Tilden (De Niro). Stuck in the middle of all of this is the local Sheriff (Stallone), through whose eyes we see the story.

Why This Film Works

Cop Land holds your attention throughout and pulls you into its world by constantly throwing the unexpected at you. Indeed, the main story keeps twisting as the plot evolves in unexpected ways at each turn. What starts as the story of a guy jumping off a bridge quickly turns into a battle with Internal Affairs as the plot digs deeper. Did he really jump? Is the mob involved in all of this? Who is a good guy and who isn’t? Why won’t Ray look at the picture of a murdered cop? Who tried to kill Figgsy (Ray Liotta) or did anyone? What is Stallone going to do as things get worse and worse all around him? Almost every scene adds some new piece to the puzzle and moves the plot in a different direction. The end result is a story that simply cannot be predicted and which builds tension moment by moment as you approach the ending. . . which is itself unique.

Adding to this are some surprises in the characters. I’ve said several times in the past that one of the best ways to give your audience something unexpected is to take a cliché and twist it. Another good way is to play your characters or actors against type. Cop Land does this extremely well.

One of the early scenes in the movie demonstrates this perfectly. We all know that Stallone is a hero. He’s always a principled hero who stops misconduct no matter where he sees it and no matter what the consequences, right? Well, early in the film, we see Stallone and his deputy pull over Ray for speeding. Ray is abusive to the deputy. So naturally, we expect Stallone to put an end to this and to slap Ray down. Only, he doesn’t. He doesn’t because this Stallone is useless and pathetic. He’s stupid and cowardly and easily pushed around. Indeed, the other cops constantly push him around and even mock him as “not a real cop.” Stallone is even too pathetic to pursue the woman he obsesses over, and in a very un-hero-like moment, he tells us that he wouldn’t repeat his sole act of heroism today if he had to do it all over again. Stallone even put on forty pounds of fat to look less effective in this role. And the result is that you simply can’t predict what he will do. There are several plot points where you know what the hero Stallone always plays would do, but you have no clue what Sheriff Freddy Heflin will do.

Or consider Robert De Niro who always plays the most street smart guy in the room. This time, he plays a guy with no power to solve the problem he faces. He’s not the tough guy with the heart of gold either, he’s just an Internal Affairs cop with a problem he can’t solve.

Even a character like Ray, which Harvey Keitel plays to form, shifts enough throughout the film that he remains a constant surprise. At first, he seems like a good cop who wants to protect his friends. But that fades little by little as you learn about his connection to the mob and the people he’s killed. By the time you see him let a cop die to settle a score over an affair, he’s become something you never would have expected when you first meet him, but which you can absolutely see in hindsight. That’s excellent writing and solid acting, especially as Keitel never changes the way he portrays the character as his character seems to change.

Beyond the surprises, the film is also extremely well-written. The dialog is strong. It doesn’t give away anything too quickly, but it doesn’t hide anything either – this actually makes the film highly re-watchable because the meanings of the characters change once you know their true motivations. The characters’ actions make sense in the real world too. There are no phony film moments here. The film is also full of the kinds of touches that make films like this feel worthwhile, like teaching you new things about being a cop, such as the diagonal rule and that “it’s just as easy to tail a man walking in front of him.”

Lastly, the film does a great job of making the characters complex by giving each multiple motives for their actions. For example, does Ray save Superboy because he’s a relative and wants to help him? Or does he save Superboy just to keep Internal Affairs from getting him? He must have known what would need to happen with Superboy eventually. Does Ray let Randone die because he’s become a problem in the Superboy affair or because he knows about the affair with his wife? Is Stallone finally doing something because he’s a wants to do the right thing or because he hopes to prove his own worth to himself or does he want to prove himself to Liz? Is Figgsy helping Stallone to help him or to use him against Ray. . . to come at Ray sideways? And so on. Almost every action taken in this film can be interpreted in one of two ways.

This movie is not an easy movie for general audiences. It takes its time to explain everything that is going on and to work you into the plot. It relies on you to remember what you’ve seen. It relies on context more than exposition. (Surprise, surprise, Ebert gave it 2 stars.) It also twists expectations in ways that will feel disconcerting to those expecting to see the same thing they’ve seen over and over. You will not, for example, see Judge Dredd or Rambo make an appearance. But that is what ultimately makes this film shine: you’ve never seen this story before and you can’t guess the twists and turns before they happen. Combine that with solid dialog and strong acting and you get an excellent, gripping film.

Finally, as an aside, while both De Niro and Keitel are strong actors in this film, Stallone is the real gem here. This was the first film where I really felt like Stallone proved he could act.

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