OLD CIRCUS BEARS ain't got shit on Sylvester Stallone. Or Arnold Schwarzenegger. They're heading into their dotage, but they can still fake a fight—and torture, like waterboarding (!)—with real gusto. That's the first thing I want to say about Escape Plan, a team-up movie that would have murdered the box office if it were made in 1985.

The second thing is that Schwarzenegger—who was twice elected as the governor of California and had to be taken seriously at press conferences, where he talked about serious things like tax reform and domestic violence—gleefully simulates fellatio. He also has a beard and finally lets us hear what his accent sounds like when he's actually speaking German.

The third thing is that 50 Cent is brilliant as a computer genius and that Vincent D'Onofrio has gotten pretty fat.

The last thing is that the movie clearly knows (like some sentient being) that most of the people watching it have probably guessed most of the plot twists. And it lets you know that it knows you know.

"Didn't see that coming," Stallone's character says near the end.

"You should have," Schwarzenegger's replies.

The action itself is mercifully simple. Stallone plays Ray Breslin, a softie who makes his living breaking out of federal prisons and telling the wardens how. (As the movie makes painfully clear: He wrote the book on jailbreaks. Literally.) And when faced with the ultimate prison, assembled right from his very own case files, he can't help himself.

And so off he goes, renditioned into some off-the-grid, black ops Arkham-Asylum-cum-Gitmo, lorded over by an all-seeing warden with a fetish for butterflies. He quickly meets a man named Rottmayer (Schwarzenegger), the Red to his Andy Dufresne—and they quickly go about doing exactly what you figure they'll do. Which is find Schwarzenegger a massive machine gun and then set off a whole mess of Hollywood stunt performers' blood packs.

The end.