Review: Escape Plan 2: Hades

A couple of Ray Breslin’s top prison security-checking team disappear all of a sudden (starting with Xiaoming Huang and then Jesse Metcalfe). They’ve actually been captured and imprisoned in a hi-tech prison called Hades, by a man with a personal grudge against Breslin (Sly Stallone), prison warden known as The Zookeeper (Titus Welliver). It’s up to Breslin and the remainder of his crew (plus an old buddy played by Dave Bautista) to save the day. 50 Cent and Jaime King play the other team members, whilst Wes Chatham is a former team member fired for botching a previous mission.

When promoting the subsequent “Escape Plan 3” (filmed back-to-back), star Sly Stallone slagged this 2018 sequel as the ‘most horribly produced film’ of his career. Given this is the bloke who made “Cobra”, “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot!”, “Judge Dredd”, and “Assassins” among many other turds, I can’t say I entirely agree with him. However, it’s a pretty shoddy film undoubtedly, with Stallone himself spread very thin, spanning in total about 15 minutes on screen, and prominently billed Dave Bautista and 50 Cent getting even less screen time somehow.

We open with some nice martial arts, but a very confusing set-up that pretty much takes you out of the experience right away. Adding to the detachment are a bunch of terrible performances that make Mr. ‘50 Cent’ Jackson seem quite OK by comparison. Especially bad here – and sadly given quite a lot of screen time – is Wes Chatham as the disgruntled dumbfuck. He’s seriously amateurish, though I’ve read he’s far from a newbie on the scene. Also terrible – and surprisingly so – is a strangely slumming Titus Welliver as the clichéd warden. He looks to be held at gunpoint to appear in the film, to be honest. How in the hell did he end up in something like this and in a role like that? The Asian cast members meanwhile, are a mixed bag and speak English with varying degrees of success. Dave Bautista immediately impresses through sheer force of personality. Unfortunately, any promise of a fun buddy movie team-up with Stallone is wasted because Bautista is barely in the damn movie, unfortunately. As for Stallone (who seemingly only worked a day – max ), he ‘earns’ his pay-check by essentially appearing in a bunch of flashbacks for the most part. At least I think they’re flashbacks, the film has been edited into incoherence for the most part (There’s too many characters, 50 Cent and Jesse Metcalfe don’t need to be here, for one thing).

Stallone can slag off the film all he wants but he still appeared in it, profited from it, and turned up for the damn third film too. I will say that 70ish Stallone is slightly more convincing in a fight scene than poor Welliver who just isn’t right in something like this. It’s no surprise that this is from director Steven C. Miller who has been at the helm for several sleepwalking Bruce Willis cash-grabs (“First Kill”, “Marauders” and “Extraction” – not to be confused with the subsequent film in this series). The guy is a hack, plain and simple, and he has no respect for the audience whatsoever. But hey, I willingly watched it so why should I be demanding respect, I guess. I knew it wasn’t gonna be “Gandhi”. In fact, it more closely resembles a rip-off of the underrated Stuart Gordon futuristic prison movie “Fortress”, but with electrocutions instead of ‘intestinators’ as punishment. Yeah, that’s such a big difference. This movie’s weaker than a Christopher Lambert movie, let that sink in. In addition to being incoherent, the script by Miles Chapman (who wrote the first and third film) is absolutely shameless, getting pretty much all of Stallone’s team imprisoned just so he can go and rescue them himself. Ugh. What a waste of everyone else let alone the audience’s time having to watch people get imprisoned one by one like that. Dreadfully paced to boot, and with a truly half-arsed set-up for the next film to cap it all off miserably.

The first film was disappointing, this one’s just shamefully cheap and very cynical filmmaking from people not trying very hard. You know you’re watching a bad movie when you wish you were watching a Christopher Lambert movie instead.

Rating: D