The 2013 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that was decades in the making: “The scripts were horrible”
Many of cinema’s greatest characters have come unstuck at the hands of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Over the decades, he’s battled the T-1000, the Predator, Batman, Thulsa Doom, and even the Devil himself, all without breaking a sweat. In real life, he’s conquered the California gubernatorial elections and the Mr Universe contest, but his most fearsome non-fictional foe has to be Sylvester Stallone.
The rivalry between two of action cinema’s greatest stars is legendary. Supposedly beginning when Arnie laughed at Sly when Rocky didn’t win at the Oscars, this tête-à-tête raged on for the better part of a decade. Not only would the musclebound performers launch their biggest box office hits at each other, but they would go after each other in the press, too. Ivan Drago, the Eastern European villain of Rocky IV, was supposedly created so Stallone could get a victory over a Schwarzenegger stand-in on screen.
Eventually, as was the case between Rocky’s USA and Drago’s USSR, relations thawed between the two Hollywood superpowers.
The two became co-founders of the Planet Hollywood restaurant, alongside Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, and Stallone even donated to Schwarzenegger’s re-election campaign in 2005. On screen, the pair would finally join forces in the bloodthirsty Expendables series, getting their first co-billing in 2013, when they starred in the prison-based action thriller, Escape Plan.
Speaking ahead of the release of the film, which also starred Vincent D’Onofrio, Amy Ryan, and 50 Cent, the ‘Governator’ seemed happy to finally be sharing the screen with his former rival. As he explained, it could have happened a lot sooner, but the right project just wasn’t there.
“The interesting thing really is that for decades, they’ve tried to put us together in a movie and the scripts were horrible,” he revealed (via the Irish Independent), “We could not have accepted any of that. One movie wanted us to be undercover agents in drag, and another movie wanted us to change from human beings to animals. So he was the dog, and I was the cat, and we were fighting each other. It was some comedy. It was all this ludicrous stuff.”
Given how awful Escape Plan turned out to be, those other scripts must have really been something. Stallone plays Ray Breslin, a man who poses as a prison inmate to test the security of correctional facilities, but when one job goes wrong, and he finds himself actually behind bars, he has to team up with fellow prisoner Emil Rottmayer (Schwarzenegger) to fight for their freedom. It got thoroughly average reviews across the board, but at least it made a bit of dough at the box office.
If Schwarzenegger and Stallone had been allowed to work together at the peak of their powers, then it might have resulted in one of the greatest action movies ever made, but instead, we got a humdrum thriller starring two middle-aged blokes trying to recapture their former glory. Escape Plan is interesting from a historical standpoint, but it could have been so much more.
