Director: Steven C. Miller

Writer: Miles Chapman

Cast: Huang Xiaoming, Sylvester Stallone, Dave Bautista, Jesse Metcalfe, Wes Chatham, Chen Tang, Titus Welliver, Jaime King, Curtis Jackson

Running Time: 94 min.

By Kyle Warner

I enjoyed the first Escape Plan (2013). It’s nothing particularly memorable, but it’s good popcorn entertainment, and Arnold and Sly appeared to be having a good time. Though I was not against the idea of a sequel, one didn’t seem likely considering the movie’s weak domestic box office. But 2018 is weird and so now we have an Escape Plan 2 on our hands and a third film already on the way. Thank China, I guess. For while the original Escape Plan performed better almost everywhere but here, it did its best work in China, earning almost double what it made in the US. Right from the get-go, Escape Plan 2: Hades reveals itself as eager to tap into that unexpected market with a cast and story designed to appeal to its foreign audience. This is not a sin. It’s good business sense. But it is also the first clue that what we’re watching is less an artistic endeavor and more a cynically engineered product.

Sylvester Stallone returns as Escape Plan’s Ray Breslin. The cover art tagline promises “HE’S BACK” like it’s one of his more iconic roles. Or maybe it’s a tease about Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is not back, but we all know about his love for using the phrase? Or maybe I’m overanalyzing an incredibly dull tagline. This is a movie that thought adding “Hades” to its title was cool, after all. Whatever. We’re getting off to a bad start here. Let me try again… Stallone is back as Ray Breslin, the guy who makes a living busting out of prisons to show the architects/wardens/department of corrections the weak links in their security. In the previous film, Ray got locked up in The Tomb, a state-of-the-art super prison with clear prison cells so nothing went unnoticed by the guards. This time, Ray is less of a man of action and more of a teacher.

We open the film with Ray’s three protégés narrowly escaping a hostage situation. There’s the kung fu guy Shu (Huang Xiaoming) who follows Ray’s teachings like a student learning from his master, the eager to please Luke (Jesse Metcalfe), and the mathematically minded Kimbral (Wes Chatham). From there, Shu goes off to protect his tech billionaire cousin (Chen Tang) and they are both subsequently abducted. Shu wakes up in Hades (H.A.D.E.S. stands for High Asset DEtention Service), a black site prison designed by a prison architect who really liked TRON: Legacy.

Regardless of what the marketing might tell you, it’s Xiaoming’s Shu that’s the main character here. Stallone gets to participate as a voice in Shu’s head talking him through the situation (which we’re told is Shu’s ‘intuition’) while Shu tries to figure out a way to escape before the prison breaks his genius cousin into divulging all his tech secrets. On the outside, Ray and his crew try to locate Hades so that they can rescue Shu, and the more they learn about Hades the more it seems like this is all about Ray and the shame he brought upon the people who built The Tomb.

The movie is way too complicated and filled with way too many characters. At some point, Ray has to reach out to an old rival named Derosa (Dave Bautista) for help. But Derosa feels more like a need to acquire another recognizable face on the poster, because he actually does very little that other cast members (Stallone, Metcalfe, 50 Cent, Jaime King, etc) couldn’t have done themselves. And I like Bautista. One could argue his career is in a better place than Stallone’s at the moment. But he’s unnecessary.

So much of the movie is unnecessary. The prisoners of Hades actually seem like well-behaved chaps. But the AI robot program called Galileo which oversees the facility forces them to fight Mortal Kombat style every day – with the promise of visiting a brightly lit art room which dangles above the prison if they win. It is forced conflict and thus dull conflict. There are three different villains each essentially serving the roles of prison warden, which makes each of them less interesting as a result. There’s the AI Galileo, a top-secret villain, and a guy played by a very bored Titus Welliver (Bosch). Welliver’s character is named Faust but he prefers to be called the Zookeeper, because the writer is desperate to make you understand that he’s evil without wasting time on things like character development. The Zookeeper calls all his prisoners ‘Animals’ and the prison yard the ‘Zoo.’ Oookay? It looks like a cheap TRON sequel but we can call it the Zoo if you like. Zoo, Hades, Neon Nightclub Prison, whatever, we’re not really sticking with a theme here.

Throw in some unnecessary backstory for Shu (tragic childhood!), hints about a grand sci-fi conspiracy that’s spending millions constructing prisons just to get back at Ray Breslin, all that business with Shu’s cousin’s doomsday machine tech, and a subplot involving skinhead hackers who call themselves Legion and you have a very busy fucking movie. And as a result of trying to do a million different things, the movie forgets to do any of them particularly well.

Escape Plan 2: Hades is directed by Steven C. Miller (Marauders, First Kill, Arsenal, Extraction), who seems to have made a career out of coaxing aging movie stars through DTV action films. His work on this film is full of dull fights, repetitive action, boring performances, and wait-what’s-happening-now editing. The fight between Huang Xiaoming and Titus Welliver is the film’s action highlight. Writer Miles Chapman (who also wrote the original) provides some lame dialogue with too much reliance on exposition. Cinematography by Brandon Cox (The Collector) is a clumsy mix of shakycam action and shakycam close-ups. The production team does a decent job of stretching the relatively tight budget as far as it can go, but nobody brought their A-game to this movie.

Stallone is not only a supporting role this time around, he’s also clearly not as into the movie. Like Welliver, he appears noticeably bored. Xiaoming (Mission Milano) is a convincing action lead but it’s clear that English is not his first language as many of his line readings really could’ve used some work. To be fair, other actors who speak English more regularly than Xiaoming also deliver poor line readings, so it’s also just that kind of movie. I found Wes Chatham (The Expanse) annoying but I honestly don’t know if it’s because of how his character is written or if it’s the performance… and also it’s probably partly because he and Jesse Metcalfe (Dallas) sometimes look like the same damn person with their YA I-may-look-gruff-but-I-damn-it-I’m-trying-to-say-I-love-you-Jennifer good looks. Dave Bautista (Enter the Warrior’s Gate) is clearly into the movie but there’s not a whole lot for him to do other than play dress up and make big guns look small in his arms. Jaime King (Sin City) is a recast Abigail, previously played by Amy Ryan, the main lady on Ray’s crew. King ain’t slacking it here and makes even the weakest scenes better, like that strange part where Ray seems to come onto her at the workplace and then the movie cuts away before we have to think about how that would look—oh God, no, it’s in my head now. Curtis ’50 Cent’ Jackson (Power) is back as Ray’s hacker partner, Hush, and maybe it says something about a movie when the rapper leaves a better impression with the audience than his Oscar-nominated co-star.

Escape Plan 2: Hades ends so abruptly that Stallone has barely gotten the last word out of his mouth before the credits begin to roll, so desperate are the producers to just move on and get to the sequel. Whether or not the audience will turn up for more is an interesting question, because Escape Plan 3: Devil’s Station is coming regardless of how well this movie does. For myself, I guess I’ll watch it…? John Herzfeld directs the next one, and I liked his film 2 Days in the Valley, so at least there’s that.

This is a bad movie that only gets worse the more you think about it. Arnold is missed, but not more so than a decent script and capable hands behind the camera. The fact that it is noticeably cheaper than its predecessor is so far down the list of reasons why the movie is inferior to the original it’s not even funny. Escape Plan 2: Hades has to rank among the worst films of Stallone’s long, up and down career. By the end of it, the idea of a third film feels less like a promise and more like a threat.

Kyle Warner’s Rating: 3/10