Film pick: Escape Plan (NC16)

116 minutes

3/5

Action stars Sylvester Stallone, 67, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, 66, continue to shoot them up in cinemas as though it were the 1980s.

Ray Breslin is a security expert who escapes from prisons to point out the flaws in them. For his latest assignment, he is planted inside a top-secret facility. Ray soon realises he has been incarcerated for good and will need the help of fellow prisoner Emil Rottmayer (Schwar-zenegger, with Stallone) to make his escape.

This is a B-grade thriller with a straight-forward high concept: Watch Sly and Arnie bust out of a state-of-the-art prison, where the cells are transparent and the inmates' every move is monitored by cameras. There are no openings to the outside world and they have no idea if it is day or night. The guards are masked and heavily armed. In the cramped isolation cells, they get blinded by blazing artificial light.

Yet there is never any doubt Arnie and Sly's characters will escape.

Still, there is a certain pleasure in watching how the carefully set-up hurdles are overcome one by one. Just do not quibble too much over the plot details.

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