Escape Plan

Escape Plan is a specimen of remarkable cultural inertia, a film that has apparently received no transmission from the modern world. Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger team up to break out of a prison, and the narrative proceeds with the mechanical efficiency of a 1985 action picture, simply relocated to 2013. The film demonstrates no awareness of contemporary social consciousness, progressive frameworks, or cultural concerns of any variety. It is, in the purest sense, a film about men doing things in a confined space.

The ensemble cast includes actors of various ethnic backgrounds and Amy Ryan as a supporting character, but this demographic reality carries no thematic weight or narrative significance. They are simply present, occupying the roles that the plot requires. There is no engagement with identity, perspective, or experience. The prison itself functions as nothing more than a set piece, a location for sequences of violence and problem-solving. One observes no critique of incarceration, no examination of justice systems, no feminist consciousness, no environmental concern, and certainly no attempt at cultural commentary of any kind.

The film exists in a hermetically sealed world where social consciousness has never emerged as a concept. It is neither good nor bad on the spectrum of progressive sensibility because it does not acknowledge that such a spectrum exists. This is not a political position so much as an absence of position, a film from no particular moment in cultural history despite its October 2013 release date.