Stallone. Schwarzenegger. Who else do you need to fill your hankering for an action flick? Even without knowing anything other than the title, I was already on board with this movie.

Ray Breslin (Stallone) is a professional jailbreaker, working for a firm that ensures that America’s prisons are escape-proof. For the better part of eight years, Ray has accepted jobs and broken out of 14 prisons using various techniques which he has compiled in a book to serve as a guide for prison officials. Unfortunately for Ray, his infamy has reached the CIA, who hire him to do his thing on a “privately funded” facility that houses characters and criminals that governments around the world would prefer not to deal with. Accepting the challenge, Ray is taken to an undisclosed location where his contact is nowhere to be found and his evacuation code is worthless, and he realizes that he is stuck in a prison system unlike anything he has encountered before. Luckily for him, Rottmayer (Schwarzenegger), a tough guy who is being held for the  vital information  that he possesses, has taken a liking to him and has expressed his willingness to help Ray break out of the facility.

What can I say? This movie is basically a run off the mill action blockbuster whose plot is a modification of many other movies  that came before it. Writers Miles Chapman and Jason Keller must be really great fans of Stallone because some of the scenes in the movie are eerily similar to Daylight and Lockdown. The double cross element was also nothing new, but the combined starpower of the two leads is enough to lift Swedish director Mikael Hastorm’s movie from straight to DVD B-movie to summer hit.

Truth is, people come in to watch Escape Plan for one reason only — to see Stallone and Schawarzenegger kick ass. And to some degree, they will get what they came for. Schwarzenegger with a big gun, Stallone getting beat up (and doing some beating in return), some funny scenes involving the two and some sinister threat coming in the form of Jim Caviezel, who is surprisingly effective as a semi psychotic warden trying to best the best jailbreaker in the world (Breslin). What makes Caviezel such a force to reckon with is his ability to exude such an evil vibe with just one look. The filmmakers picked their villain quite well, which works great with the easy banter of the two action icons (who seem super comfortable with each other).

All in all, there really isn’t much to analyze. I grew up on Sly and Arnie’s movies and I am yet to be disappointed by a single one of them.  This film is a great popcorn movie with a lot of action, some comedy, highly entertaining, and moderately action packed — not exactly in the level of Expendables, or Olympus Has Fallen but good enough to spend 116 minutes and a couple of bucks to see.