In “Escape Plan,” Ray Breslin is the world’s greatest prison-break expert, a guy who wows the wardens by slipping into their prisons unannounced, then proving that their most secure facilities can be escaped — albeit only by him, because he has absolute knowledge of how everything in the world works. When you Google stuff? You’re basically just plugging into his awesome super-brain.
Naturally, he’s played by Sylvester Stallone.
Still, if you can dismiss the cheerfully improbable way everything works according to blueprint, you’ll find “Escape Plan” a diverting B-movie. Any prison-break yarn that includes Arnold Schwarzenegger delivering the line “You hit like a vegetarian” is OK by me.
Stallone, it need not be said, takes himself way too seriously as the Houdini of lockups. He and his associates (his tech wizard, naturally, is Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson) accept a $5 million challenge to test the security of a CIA black site at a location that won’t be revealed to him.
He finds himself in what looks like an Amazon.com warehouse, with maybe slightly higher morale. The dryly psychotic prison boss (a serpentine Jim Caviezel, a huge asset to the film) informs Ray that his bailout code is no longer operable: Apparently there’s been a double-cross, and Mr. Breslin truly is detained indefinitely.
The warden wants information from another inmate, Schwarzenegger’s Rottmayer, about a shadowy international Robin Hood for whom he used to work, and yet allows Breslin and Rottmayer to freely consort and cook up elaborate fake fights and scams in the course of learning more about the prison. Both prisoners are in solitary confinement when, despite constant video surveillance, the guards are so flustered by Rottmayer’s clowning that they fail to notice that Breslin has figured out how to pry a plate off the floor and slip through it.
Mostly, though, the movie — the first one ever to give Sly & Arnold equal billing — roars along pleasingly, with fun surprises popping up frequently and the script taking care to explain exactly how each amazingly contrived ruse works. Schwarzenegger misses no opportunity to be hilarious. How many actors can make you chuckle even when they’re being waterboarded? During the scene when the two inmates devise nicknames for the masked guards, he suggests calling one “Louisa.” Louisa? “His fat ass reminds me of my first girlfriend.” When Arnold finally gets hold of a giant machine gun, there is so much love in the room that you want to stand up and throw rice.
And the timing! The line is so banal that the pause in it must be precisely measured for it to work, and so Schwarzenegger nails it, to the microsecond, when he says: “Have a lovely day . . . a - - hole.”