After waiting basically my entire childhood for a movie where Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger would team up, I ended up entering adulthood a disappointed, broken man. It wasn’t until 2010’s The Expendables that the two titans of my childhood would even appear in the same movie, and in that case Arnie just showed up for like thirty seconds and didn’t really do anything. It was kind of a slap in the face. Things might be different once The Expendables 2 comes out this summer; it’s a much more legitimate all-star gathering of action heroes than the first film, and Schwarzenegger is said to have a much more expanded role than he did in the first. But seeing as that first film was so boring and ended up being yet another disappointment, I’m not going to get my hopes up.
The Tomb though, now this is a movie that I’m willing to start naively anticipating. This one doesn’t just sound like the big Sly/Arnie team-up flick that I’ve always dreamed of, but it’s also the sort of dumb prison movie that I grew up loving. Stallone is set to star as Ray Breslin, basically the best guy in the world when it comes to designing prisons. That’s a good sign right there. The star of any action movie should always be the best in the world at something. But it gets better; this film sees him getting thrown in a prison of his own design and needing to figure out how to escape a trap that he himself created. How metaphorical.
Schwarzenegger is playing the role of Church, a fellow inmate who sounds like more of an anti-hero than Sly’s character, but who apparently ends up helping him in his attempts to escape. That’s a big, cool concept for an action movie with a big, cool cast, but it turns out things get even better. Every good action movie needs a smarmy villain you can hate, and in prison movies that means an asshole warden; and The Tomb has cast a doozy.
According to producer Mark Canton, “[Jim] Caviezel will be playing the role of the Warden of the prison in which Schwarzenegger & Stallone attempt to escape from.” Damn him and his handsome face and piercing eyes! I can just picture how smug and smarmy he’s going to be already. I can’t wait until one of these beefy olds guys gets the chance to knock his rotten block off. As far as I’m concerned, The Tomb can’t get here soon enough. [The Matthew Aaron Show via JoBlo]