The film doesn’t explore the environment much, and the intentional lack of prison guards means the film loses that flavour of inmates butting heads with the screws in charge. It’s also a shame the budget couldn’t deliver a better prison set, because Hades is effectively just a large concrete room filled with neon lights at the bottom of a big hole. Even if the camera operators seem to be wearing rollerskates and most of the action sequences have a flawed sense of spacial reasoning. Miller shot this movie in just 17 days, so he should be commended for assembling something that looks this good and has a consistency. The last act becomes the sequel one expected from the start, so everything leading up to that is just mildly entertaining hokum with scenery-chewers like Titus Welliver (Bosch) as the prison’s ‘Zookeeper’. It doesn’t manage that, meaning Escape Plan 2 only improves once Stallone’s thrown into Hades and has to help get his friends out from within. I find it distracting when you have a Hollywood superstar playing second fiddle, because one naturally focuses on Stallone’s minor exploits - when the film should be making us care about Xiaoming. Stallone certainly doesn’t have a glorified cameo, it’s just that the story might’ve been improved if he wasn’t in it. This includes Jesse Metcalfe, the erstwhile muscled gardener from Desperate Housewives.ĭTV sequels have a tendency to play tricks like this, doing everything they can do encourage an impulse buy based on what the front cover promises, although I’ve seen worse offenders. So it’s one of those lower-budget sequels where the big names (Stallone and Bautista) have overinflated billing, meaning audiences have to put up with a bunch of unknowns handling most of the narrative. The same goes for Curtis ’50 Cent’ Jackson (reprising his role as debonair hacker Hush), and Dave Bautista as Ray’s old buddy Trent DeRosa. It’s not clear why these fights are a big part of things, as all they do is encourage prisoners to become physically stronger and thus more dangerous.Īrguably a bigger problem with Escape Plan 2 is that Stallone’s character exists more on the sidelines this time, at least until the last half-hour. A win means a couple of hours in ‘The Sanctuary’, which is a small room with LED walls that create a tranquil virtual environment the winners can chill out inside. The Hades penal system (controlled by robot voice ‘Galileo’) rewards or punishes the inmates (or “animals”) based on the result of fights they’re forced into at the ‘Zoo’. Unfortunately, Xiaoming seems hamstrung by having to speak his lines in English, so he only really comes alive during a couple of the fight sequences. His involvement is clearly intended to make this an easier sell for the Asian market that helped the original turn a profit. As the previous movie involved Ray being thrown into an “inescapable” prison, the sequel avoids repeating that by handing most of the story over to young Huang Xiaoming- a popular singer-actor-model from China. It’s a convoluted setup (a few other details of which I’ve ignored because it would confuse matters further), which is one problem going into Escape Plan 2. Luckily, Ray’s voiceover reminds Shu of the three rules for how to breakout of any prison: learn the layout, learn the routine, and get some outside help. Shortly after landing in China, Shu’s kidnapped and thrown into a high-tech prison known as ‘H.A.D.E.S’, along with Yushend, and must survive the environment long enough for his teammates to break him out. One year later, another of Ray’s team, Shu Ren (Huang Xiaoming), travels to Shanghai to meet his billionaire cousin Yusheng (Chen Tang), a satellite technology entrepreneur, who wants protection from an aggressive competitor. You won’t know why any of this opening is relevant until a third act “twist”, alas. This time, Ray fires one of his team, Kimbral (Wes Chatham), after his reliance on technology results in a rescue mission in Chechnya going wrong and killing a hostage. Stallone reprises his role as Ray Breslin, boss of an Atlanta security firm that specialise in testing maximum security prisons. It’s now available on home video, simultaneously with a limited cinema release in the UK. It only managed to gross a respectable $137M in total thanks to strong business in the Chinese and European markets.ĥ years later, here comes the $20M-budgeted Escape Plan 2: Hades, written by Miles Chapman (who co-wrote the original with Arnell Jesko), and directed by respected B Movie workhorse Steven C. This double-act would have sent the box office into meltdown in the 1980s, but both Hollywood legends are years past their prime, so Mikael Håfström’s $54M prison break movie underperformed at the US box office. The first Escape Plan (2013) was notable for putting Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the same movie, for the first time in their long careers.
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