A hellish descent, a lazy effort

The biggest warning about the sort of movie Escape Plan 2… is can be found in its tagline. ‘He’s back’ would have been lazy if the movie were Terminator 6; it’s just bizarre for the sequel to a forgotten Sylvester Stallone flick.

Escape Plan 2 is the sort of movie that, until a few years ago, would have been restricted to a home-video release. Admittedly, the filmmakers aren’t pushing it very hard in theatres. We didn’t know it was coming until a couple of weeks ago; and it’s only being shown in Mumbai in a dubbed version.

Stallone is back as security specialist Ray Breslin. He is once again embroiled in a plot that involves supposedly impenetrable prisons. But instead of breaking out like he had to the last time, this time he must break in.

A member of his team has been double-crossed and incarcerated in the rather dramatically named Hades, a fictional institution that we are repeatedly told is ‘the most elaborate prison ever built’. Inmates of Hades are forced to participate in gladiatorial bouts that may or may not involve robots. There’s a belligerent bearded man introduced as a Chechen terrorist, who turns out to be undercover, but concludes his grand journey as the supervillain of the piece. The script gives the impression of having been dashed out in a few hours, at gunpoint. A lot of the lines sound like they were written by Donald Trump. So when a character says “10 million bucks”… he follows it up with “lotta money”.