ESCAPE PLAN

Come on, people, let’s hear it for the old guys. I refer to Sylvester Stallone, aged 67, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, aged 66, old-age pensions and heating allowances gratefully received, bus passes tucked into their top pockets, custom-built Zimmer frames no doubt on order, but still pluckily doing the superhero stuff and hurling themselves about in a reasonably engaging but basically daft prison escape yarn.

I was tempted to call them ‘wrinklies’ but, of course, they’re movie stars and somehow movie stars, however aged, don’t seem to do wrinkles. Maybe it’s some magic potion applied morning and night but miraculously their skin remains comparatively smooth – give or take the odd lump – while their contemporaries develop jowls and pouches. Perhaps it’s another potion that has turned Stallone’s hair prematurely jet black.

Mind you, there is a downside in that whatever the treatment, it does seem to render their faces immobile, but with these two actors it hardly makes much difference.

Stallone, we learn, earns a rich living by escaping from maximum-security prisons and telling the authorities how he did it. He’s very good, too: he can get out of jail using nothing much more than a toilet roll.

But one day he’s doublecrossed into trying to escape from a top-secret hellhole of a prison full of men so evil they’ve been banged up for ever without benefit of trial. It’s run by vicious Jim Caviezel and staffed mostly by black-masked sadists, the most brutal of whom is an unmasked but ever-scowling Vinnie Jones. No surprises there then.

Compared with this place, Guantanamo Bay is a holiday camp and in it Sly meets Schwarzie, an enigmatic German, who appears to have been imprisoned simply because he knows the whereabouts of someone the authorities want to arrest.

Naturally the pair have to fight each other before they become allies and – to give an example of the level of the script – this leads to the funniest line in the film. ‘You hit like a vegetarian,’ says Schwarzie. My, how we all laughed.

But can our heroes escape? And who betrayed old Sly? You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to guess the answer to both questions but, my goodness, you’d hardly believe the brutality they have to undergo while Sly puts his escape plan into operation. It has to be a good one, too; even toilet rolls are no use this time.

There’s a curiously oldfashioned feel about the film; it’s the kind of thing we used to see in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when both Sly and Arnie were at their peak. Maybe the lads were just trying to recapture the glory days, though heaven knows what agonies they had to put their poor old bodies through to get into such great physical shape.

And the acting? Well, there’s not a lot of that on view, except from Sam Neill as a reluctant prison doctor, who seems to be wondering why he ever got into this movie in the first place.