A Lament In Place Of A Review

Last night I finally saw the big current film that just must be seen: "Escape Plan". It stars Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger as two very old men who must escape from a brutal prison. It's a tremendously fun movie in spite of the two coming together with the same timing as two great heavyweights, which is to say years and years after people would really have wanted to see it happen. That's no bother to me.

They're really the only two guys who could possibly carry the movie in the way that it needed. That's the sad reality. Since the 80s, few if any top-of-the-line action hero actors have risen. There are men who would have been like that if they'd only come during the genre's fertile years, but at this point there are only last gasps with men grandfathered in. It's like what they say in the Air Force. The last fighter pilot has already been born.

Even a dying breath from the action genre is worth something. Old as they are, men like Stallone and Schwarzenegger still have something to give. The latter especially has shown that he knows how to make something of the fact that he has become old. Stallone would rather not admit that, which takes some of the shine off him. We must all strive to age gracefully, which means to yield like the willow tree instead of resisting like the oak. To resist is to be destroyed. To yield is to suffer the same fate, but with dignity.

How many more movies like this will there be? Perhaps the cycle will come back to where we were after the 70s, when a decade of sensitive, thoughtful movies was met by an opposing force of comparatively callous, blunt films made in the image of Reagan instead of his liberal predecessors (not to bring politics into the matter). Whatever does come, I will cherish these movies while they last. They may be no better for me than bacon cheeseburgers, but I want them both just the same.