ESCAPE FROM IN-FLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT: ESCAPE PLAN

So you missed some of last month's Oscar winners? You probably also missed last year's blockbuster action smash. And that is what airplane travel is designed to remedy. There are times while flying when it becomes prudent to find a movie whose plot will keep your attention without working with the low oxygen in the cabin air to further twist your brain. Recognisable stars, whose inability to play very far from their established personae, are a must, because you have to be able to flow with the character development despite missing crucial bits of dialogue because only one ear functions on your headset, or the first officer and head stewardess are hogging the microphone like neophytes doing their first stand up, or at least one person in front, behind, or beside you has their own attention span problem and moves you, bangs you, excuses himself past you, talks through you, at every possible moment. You'd like a villain who will ham it up and die with a wry ironic smile of self-deprecation. Maybe a comely woman or two, one of whom should be eye candy and another who should be one of a couple of cast members who really can act and be wasted in supporting roles which seem to have been written by a scripter on loan from Minecraft.

You are looking for something like Escape Plan.

It's a buddy picture, of course, and it seems written as a vehicle for Sylvester Stallone, as he gets all the good scenes that require minimal dialogue, although many with eloquent grunts. He plays a prison security expert who gets himself thrown into stir so he can figure out ways of breaking out. On behalf of the CIA, represented by comely Catriona Balfe, he gets himself rendered to a secret prison where he hooks up with Rottmeyer, supposedly an employee who holds the key to reaching a criminal mastermind. Rottmeyer is played by Arnold Schwartenegger who, with Stallone playing straight man, turns into a acting genius; Tom Hanks overdosed on Human Growth Hormone.

The new-found buddies team up to thwart evil prison warder Jim Caviezel, who somehow resists the urge to go full Alan Rickman on his role, and thus imbues it with an awkward gravitas which never gets resolved fully, because there is only one way anything ever gets resolved here. Caviezel's evil henchman is played by Vinnie Jones, the ex-soccer player best-known for squeezing Paul Gasgoigne's balls, whose presence in virtually any action movie is a more reliable signifier of schlock than Chuck Norris could ever dream of being. He's like what Jason Statham would be if Jason Statham couldn't act as brilliantly as he does.

The story moves smoothly enough, there's a small twist midway through and what must have seemed like a very clever twist closer to the end. But if the premise is Stallone's ability to plan and execute, he relies to an extraordinary degree on things he discovers by pure chance after his plan has broken down. And he is helped immensely by the deus-ex-machina Sam Neill, a doctor named Kyrie, which may or may not be metaphoric, disillusioned by his service to Cavaziel, who simply needs a few stiff drinks and a reminder of his Hippocratic oath to crucially help Stallone. And the best twist of all is that the Balfe babe turns out to be Arnold's daughter, not his girlfriend, a rare piece of generational Hollywood honesty.

It all erupts into automatic weapons, helicopter gunships, hordes of uniformed minions mowed down like extras in a Bond movie, flames, tidal waves...you know, the usual. And a final twist when Stallone's boss, Vincent D'Onofrio, turns out predictably to be not what he appears to be—he's too good an actor not to be a plot twist. The other wasted talent is Amy Ryan, though interestingly, like D'Onofrio, her intensity seems better suited to the smaller screen, or at least smaller movies, where her talent isn't subsumed by monosyllables and explosions.

It's directed competently by Mikael Hafstrom, who seems to specialise in horror, which when you look at it, is very close to what this movie is--two action figures trapped in the ultimate haunted house. I was impressed by the design; production designer Barry Chusid plays on the blueprints of the prisons Stallone is breaking down, but works in elements of sf, MC Escher-like, and even musical sets--I kept seeing Elvis doing 'Jailhouse Rock as I was distracted by my mini-bottles of wine. But even on the tiny seat-back screen, he keeps it interesting. 

I particularly liked the guards wearing expressionless plastic masks--by coincidence on the return flight I watched the opening 40 minutes or so of Cool Hand Luke. I'd write an extended comparison of the two films, but it would be useless: Luke makes you care about the people (even though I let my melatonin work and went to sleep; but then I've seen it 3-4 times already) while Escape Plan asks you to care only about the plan. Anyway, those masks are the 21st century equivalent of the mirrored shades worn by the chain-gang bosses in that film. But nothing is made of the masks, just as nothing was made of Stallone's rendition. Wider points are beyond the remit of Escape Plan.

So who cares if the headset is broken, the guy in front keeps changing the angle, and the captain can't make up his mind about wanting those seat belts buckled because of turbulence? Stallone just fell 100 feet down an industrial strength air vent, and wasn't hurt at all. What could happen to us?

HUNTING IN PIANO TERRITORY: WILLEM DAFOE IS THE HUNTER

Willem Dafoe is the eponymous hunter, sent to Tasmania to follow up on reported sightings of the last Tasmanian Tiger—a species of wolf believed to be extinct since the last known tiger died in captivity in 1936. Dafoe has been sent by a biotech company that wants extracts from the tiger's glands, and then wants it eliminated. When he arrives in Tasmanian he's met by a local guide (Sam Neill) and set up in lodging with Lucy (Frances O'Connor) living in a drug-addled haze since her husband, a zoologist, disappeared in the wilderness searching for that same tiger. She's got two kids, adept at looking after themselves—the younger of whom, a boy called Bike, doesn't speak. Dafoe of course keeps the nature of his hunt secret, but he's also landed in the middle of a dispute over protecting the forests from lexploitation, and is assumed to be another ecologist by the local loggers.

There is a lot to like in this quiet drama, not least the way director Daniel Nettheim and DP Robert Humphreys use the landscape to reflect the story—not only the struggles against the harsh territory, but also the isolation of the characters (particularly Dafoe's Hunter) and the mysteries of the tiger itself. As Dafoe gets drawn closer and closer to the family, he becomes suspicious of the husband's disappearance, and of his own mission, and eventually he too will become hunted, the metaphor of a 'last of his species' kind of extinction never far from our minds.

It's a slow burning film, which apparently reflects the pace and mood of its source novel, by Australian Julia Leigh, which won the Betty Trask award. It was originally adapted by Nettheim and Wain Fimeri before Alice Addison wrote the screenplay. Apparently the result is somewhat different from the book, which I haven't read, so I can't say whether the film is more tragic or less so. But sometimes the film gets trapped in a sort of nether-zone between wilderness family drama and international conspiracy thriller, with the former generally winning out, but only nudging along.

There's a lot of suspense, some ambiguity, and the opportunity for double-cross; though Neill's presence is virtually a give-away from the start. It's odd the way internet coverage can be good and phone coverage bad at the same time, and whole sub-plot with unfriendly locals doesn't go very far. But it's biggest flaw is that when the suspense is finally broken, it happens off-stage, and that dilutes its impact. It does build to another climax, and then a touching coda that seems completely impractical, but I can't an audience by that point worrying about the details. O'Connor's performance is first rate, holding in emotions almost as strongly as Dafoe. She reminds me of a young Barbara Hershey (and in this film, the Barbara Seagull version might be closer), but her part, if anything is understated; her character is never able to fully engage with Dafoe's, which is part of the point, but which ought to be, in contrast with her husband, driving the film. The young actors, . Finn Woodlock as Bike and Morgana Davies as his sister Cass are both very good.

 Dafoe and the landscape are the real stars, however, and both are excellent. But in the end I kept feeling like I was watching a less-prententious but almost as self-consciously arty revisiting of The Piano, with the mother in a daze and the child not speaking, and the man who's gone native replaced with the man who learns to go native. And whether this was simply an instinctive reaction by the adapters, or something lodging in the novel. Either way, this element of familiarity, this suggestion that muteness may be the only way to avoid adapting to the landscape, this sense that maybe the it's trying too hard to be sensitive, is the only thing that stopped my liking this likeable film even more.

The Hunter opens in London today