A Year of Garbage Movies #99, “Escape Plan 2: Hades” (2018)
Well, I thought I was off the hook for Number 99 because I’d already seen it. Unfortunately I under-estimated how quickly movies at the top of the garbage scale could change and Super Mario Bros. got replaced with a canned action movie starring Sylvester Stallone.
As far as I can tell, “Escape Plan 2: Hades” isn’t any stupider than other low-budget action movies. It just made the mistake of going for a theatrical release, possibly in the hopes of making money overseas. The Transformers franchise has proven that this is a viable strategy, so I can’t say that I blame them for trying. Where this film’s strategy falls apart however, is in forgetting that people in Asia have seen movies before, so slapping bottom-shelf effects onto an hour and a half of shaky-cam footage isn’t exactly going to sell out the cinema.
The basic story, though not told very well, is fairly straight-forward. Breslin, played by Stallone, runs a security company/mercenary/ rescue group. One of his employees(Shu, played by Xiaoming Huang) is acting as a bodyguard for his adopted brother Yusheng (Cheng Tang), who is a rich young entrepreneur. They both get imprisoned in a high-tech, futuristic penitentiary by Yusheng’s competitor. The rest of the team has to break them out.
According to IMDB, the movie had an estimated budget of $45,000,000. I can only assume that nearly all of that went to Stallone and Bautista to get them to sign up for this, with a million or two allocated for 50 Cent to play a middle-manager. Let me now explain where the money didn’t go.
Not the to the writers, because the story doesn’t make a lot of sense. The whole reason that the rich dude was abducted in the first place was because the bad guy wanted details on a patent Yusheng owns. The thing is, patents aren’t secret. All of the details are in the patent filing. They could have just popped open the website for the U.S. patent office and punched in that number and I wouldn’t have had to watch this. We can’t pin all of this on the villain, however. Yusheng explains to Shu that he filed that patent to “bury it”, since this technology is so disruptive it would be chaos if it got out. I suppose your moral alignment has no bearing on your ability to comprehend the finer points of the patent system; like the definition of a patent.
Aside from that, there’s a lot of lazy writing in here. One of the main characters awakens in the middle of some sort of arena fight, leading us to assume that he has blacked out for hours if not days with no physical side effects whatsoever. Early on a team member gets fired because he acted on the instructions his “algorithm” gave him, as if a computer simulation can account for dozens of humans’ actions down to the second. We are also treated to the sort of “hacking” scene that would make NCIS proud.
We’re also supposed to believe that this is a black-site prison, where people are taken instead of killed because it’s supposed to be less noticeable. Putting aside the fact that people will notice if a millionaire goes missing, it’s not clear why this black-site prison has a weird battle royale system set up. Or why fighting outside your designated time slot is punishable by electrocution. Or why winning the fight gets you 2 hours in a solid white room where you’re allowed to color.
The action sequences are also poorly done. We kind of just jump from the middle of one sequence to the next with no real setup or explanation. Some of this might be the editing but it’s really confusing when you’re watching Stallone chilling in a bar, shooting someone in the face then suddenly you’re in the middle of nowhere watching a slow-speed car chase through a junk-yard.
Not the Special Effects team, since the very first explosion we see looks like it was added using a trial version of Adobe After-Effects. We see the same quality later when Shu gets eloctrocuted by a bowl of eggs. You read that correctly, a bowl of eggs causes an electrical storm used to render a man unconscious. This same electricity also shoots out of the walls and floors whenever anyone does anything wrong, like fighting outside the designated fighting time.
All in all, 99th place is probably about right for this movie. It’s not as painfully bad as some of the others I’ve had to sit through, but given the budget they had it’s insane that the quality was this low.
Pros:
- Bautista has something he can fall back on if the Marvel Universe doesn’t become an on-going thing.
- Boiled eggs are part of a nutritious breakfast, and more kids might eat them if they believe they can shoot lightning.
- This movie did the right thing and replaced Super Mario Bros on the Worst 100 list.
Cons:
- While you may believe him to be the star of this movie, Stallone doesn’t have much screen time. He shows up long enough to mumble about playing “Go” and the value of teamwork to Shu. Perhaps a team-based game would have illustrated his point better, although having this conversation during a game of water polo may have diminished its gravitas somewhat. He also carries out some managerial duties, like letting someone go for poor performance and shooting a guy in the face for wearing a clown mask.
- Low-budget action movies are supposed to be for completely washed-up action stars. Stallone isn’t quite there yet, and Bautista definitely isn’t so it was strange seeing them in something of such abysmal quality.
- There is a lot of fighting in this movie, and in addition to the exaggerated impact sounds that we’ve come to expect, they’ve added a “swish” sound to accompany any and all movements. The result sounds like a flock of seagulls trying to escape from a small box.
After this I’m back to the normal progression with #93, “Norbit”. I’m not looking forward to seeing Eddie Murphy like this but I’m in too deep now.
