The new action movie Escape Plan stars Sylvester Stallone as a security expert who finds himself incarcerated in a high-tech, futuristic prison. To escape, he joins forces with another aging inmate, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. For even the biggest die-hard fan of Rambo and Predator, the image is symbolic: The most powerful muscle-bound icons of the 1980s and ’90s team up against an ever-evolving technology that they can’t destroy with a punch.
Recent box-office figures suggest that our old-fashioned macho men are weaker than ever before. Schwarzenegger’s The Last Stand sold $6.2 million in tickets on its opening weekend this past January. Two weeks later, Stallone’s Bullet to the Head fared even worse, with $4.5 million in ticket sales. The disappointments pile up like bodies in Total Recall, including Jason Statham’s Parker and even the most recent Die Hard movie. Of course, the stars of all four of those films were also inThe Expendables 2, which fared somewhat better with a relatively soft $85 million last summer on a budget of $100 million.
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