Signature Entertainment
Sylvester Stallone and Dave Bautista return for another round of hell in a cell (sadly not an awesome WWE tie-in) with the third installment in the Escape Plan franchise.
You’d be forgiven for never betting on the 2013 film Escape Plan to spawn a trilogy. That flick may not have inspired much in the way of glowing reviews, and neither did it set the box-office ablaze, but it is a solid high-concept prison movie with a fun leading duo in the form of Stallone and Arnold Schwarzengger. These sequels have, however, taken a different tact.
With Schwarzenegger not returning, and the convenience of direct-to-on-demand film-making (with a limited cinema run), whatever cinematic gloss the original did have (and it didn’t have much to spare anyway) has been sidelined in the name of a cheaper turn around, with this third installment following quickly on the heels of last year’s first sequel, subtitled ‘Hades’ in some markets.
While ‘Hades’ attempted to compensate with some over-lit, highly stylised prison design, it showed its weaknesses in pretty much every other aspect. The camerawork was poor, the performances worse, and the selling point of having Stallone and Bautista together was, perhaps obviously, marketing bluster, with the two barely sharing or even appearing in the film at all.
I wish I could say things are different this time around, and that more time and consideration has been taken into how they can make a smaller budget more effective. But sadly, Escape Plan 3, subtitled ‘The Extractors’ in some territories, is just as rough an experience as ‘Hades’ turned out to be.
When Ray Breslin (Stallone) becomes involved in the rescue operation of the daughter of a Hong Kong tech mogul, the very same mogul who helped fund the prison from the first movie, he finds himself also fighting for the life of his girlfriend (Jaime King) when he discovers that the man behind the kidnapping is the vengeful son of his ex-partner. You could say that this time, it’s personal.
Escape Plan 3 seems an even cheaper experience than even the second seemed to be. Gone is the attempt to deliver some high-concept tech to the franchise, which the second at least attempted to do with its prison setting. Instead, we get something much more akin to a run-of-the-mill 80’s revenge thriller, one that uses a deserted prison set, terrible lighting and punctuations of bloody gore to keep proceedings moving.
Related: Escape Plan 2 review
Very little seems to happen in this film, and yet it can often be a struggle to follow, what with its ill-defined supporting characters and a plot that becomes needlessly convoluted in its attempts to tie all three instalments together. It also stands as a testament to just how lost one can become in a film where the blocking and geography of the players in a scene just aren’t competently established. It’s a film of harsh to little to no lighting design, choppy editing, and aggressive camera movements, pausing occasionally on a bloody kill in order to allow the effects guys enough frames to paint in some garish and tacky splashes of CGI blood.
Once again, Stallone and Bautista seem to sleepwalk through their roles, separated for large portions of the film. While martial artist Max Zhang gets one well-choreographed action beat, the only performance that really leaves much of an impression is Devon Sawa as the baddie of the piece, who at least adds some villainous relish to numerous bad guy speeches. Oh, and 50 Cent is back as the hacker inexplicably named Hush, but he only pops up for so long that’d you’d be forgiven for forgetting he was in it.
While it was hard to see a reality in which this film could be any worse than Escape Plan 2, but ‘3’ blows all expectations out of the water, managing to find a way to be an even rougher experience, laying into the cheap and the nasty to deliver a sequel that is largely a waste of time and talent. Lock it up.
Escape Plan 3 is in Cinemas and Digital HD from 5 July 2019.
