ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES

US, 2018, 96 minutes, Colour.
Sylvester Stallone, Dave Bautista, Xiaoming Huang, Jesse Metcalf, 50 Cent, Wes Chatham, Chen Tang, Titus Welliver, Jaime King, Lydia Hull.
Directed by Stephen C.Miller.

Sylvester Stallone was successful in the original action thriller, Escape Plan. He resumed his character here in the sequel, freed from the prison using his techniques for studying methods for escapes, now runs a business and a staff which is quite extensive. He operates from Atlanta Georgia.

This is a film which went straight to video. It has the look and cinematic style of straight to video films of such stars as Jean- Claude Van Damme or Stephen Seagal. The action is for devotees of hard and tough thriller films. The plot pausing at various times for battles and confrontations.

The film opens in Chechnya with an escape plan gone wrong and one of the participants, played by Wes Chatham, is expelled from the company. Later, action moved to Shanghai and Bangkok and Asian members of the company are abducted, confined to a high technology impenetrable prison called Hades, presided over by total Titus Welliver.

Some of Stallone staff also find themselves in the prison, especially the Asian characters who are working on logarithms and methods for escape. Needless to say, the expelled member of Stallone’s team is the villain behind the imprisonment and the promotion of the new company.

Stallone contacts in all friend, Dave Bautista, who also investigates how to break into the prison. Stallone allows himself to be arrested but has a recording device in his tooth, rallies his collaborators, faces off with the villain, the company escape – into a third film, Escape Plan: The Extraction.

While the characterisations and action are somewhat low-budget, nevertheless the film has a very strong glossy look in terms of the technical side, computerisation, and special effects to indicate the repressive nature of Hades.