West of Zanzibar (1928)

The second to last collaboration from Tod Browning and Lon Chaney is quite an entertaining, if not predictable, melodrama. Typical for Tod Browning, the setting is an exotic locale--first the circus, then Africa. Chaney plays a magician whose wife leaves him for a man seeking his fortune in Africa (Lionel Barrymore), but not before Chaney is debilitatingly crippled. Chaney spends the next eighteen years plotting his revenge, now known as "Dead-Legs" to the African tribes. For such a twisted film, it's pretty ordinary for Chaney and Browning. You could see the twist coming from a mile away, but that was mostly irrelevant because of Chaney's great performance. Tod Browning's direction has a solid, workmanlike quality to it. Consisting of mostly static shots, it lacks the movement and style of some its late 1920s peers, but makes up for it with Chaney and the African setting. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the film was paced, something I'm not accustomed to in silent films. The musical accompaniment prepared for it on TCM was quite appropriate and fit the picture well. West of Zanzibar is a quick, twisted, and enjoyable melodrama that is worth being considered as one of the lesser Chaney-Browning greats, but a great nonetheless.

7/10

Escape Plan (2013)

After several mediocre to mind-numbingly terrible attempts at reviving the 80s action genre, we're given the next best thing: Escape Plan. How many of those 80s action movies were really transcendent? Very few. That's the stuff all the critics compare this to. Die Hard. Total Recall. The more typical fare was the stuff from New World or Cannon Film--simple programmers that banked on the charisma of its talent. Well, here it is: Escape Plan. Sylvester Stallone stars as a prison security expert who gets put into the system then breaks out to reveal their flaws. Then, he takes a job in a prison run by a shifty, corrupt shadow government organization. Somebody doesn't want him out and so he faces the biggest challenge of his career. Is this the end? No, of course not. Helping him from within is Arnold, and thank God he's there because he greases the wheels that keep this movie chugging along. The dialogue is terrible and the plot is contrived, but I don't expect character development, clever writing, or even any depth to the logic when it comes to these kind of films. All I want is some good old-fashioned action that maintains a shallow level of verisimilitude. Escape Plan delivers. It's not a great film, but it's a slick and serviceable action thriller in the style of the Cannon or New World pictures of the 80s. It's exactly how the film was advertised, exactly what it promised when it started, and exactly how it played out. If you're looking for a return to 80s action, Escape Plan is a much better place to start than The Last Stand or the Expendables films.

7/10