Dumbing it down further

Johnson Thomas

The 2013 prequel had buddies Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger teaming up for nostalgia-driven thrills but the sequel doesn’t even have that going for it. Escape Plan 2 is basically a B movie aiming for A status on the weight of its lead star’s presence. Sylvester Stallone though has little to do other than mumble a few dialogues and make a late entry into the action design. So, what you get is a dumb sequel that has precious little to offer other than a few, largely uninteresting fight sequences and the last gasp flash of rudimentary firepower. 

Breslin’s elite security team, consisting of Hush (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson), Abigail (Jaime King), Luke (Jesse Metcalfe), and Jaspar Kimbral (Wes Chatham) are back. Their job, as we saw in the first effort, is to break in and out of the world’s most un-breakable prisons. Kimbral is kicked out of the unit for disobeying orders and new team member, martial arts-kicking badass Shu Ren (Huang Xiaoming), is kidnapped and thrown into Hades, to unravel the mysteries of the most fortified prison ever designed.

Hades was obviously named after the Greek God of the underworld, but that’s as far as the philosophy goes. There’s a singular lack of intelligence in the plotting and even the science fiction aspect, conveyed through CGI and bad lighting falls flat because of the rather shabby treatment. The script is over-dependent on contrivance. The plotting is banal and the pacing is totally off -  making an 85 minute movie feel like an exhausting marathon. The action sequences involving Xiaoming are diverting enough, but the rest of it plays out in an uninteresting fashion. The forced mix of Chinese martial arts with traditional western firepower doesn’t come off as combustive or volatile. Stallone’s presence here is mere window dressing and the young guns, lack the charisma to hold the audience attention. This sequel would have been better suited to the idiot box.