What's Next On My List? Escape Plan 2: Hades

Welcome to the eight installment of #StalloneMonth, which I have to say, is my favorite time of the year! In February we look over the filmography of this wonderful actor, Sylvester Stallone, three-four movies at a time. This year I tried to keep a "prison" theme. So let us jump right into it!

Escape Plan 2: Hades (2018)

Ray Breslin (Sylvester Stallone)'s team is imprisoned in a super facility meant to defeat even the best of prison makers and escape artists, such as Breslin himself. The team plans to get out both the latter's protégé Shu (Xiaoming Huang), and to finally find out who has been trying to best Breslin over the years. 

I decided to use this poster, because the American one features Stallone and Dave Bautista on it, without any of the other actors, despite the fact that Stallone isn't a leading man, not really at least. And as much as I love Bautista, he is barely in it, so much so, that despite showing up for the final fight, I do not really remember what he did. For the longest time I thought he was gonna betray Breslin, and I am uncertain if that is what the writers were going for. And coming back to the poster, the biggest issue with this movie is in fact NOT ENOUGH STALLONE. The movie did absolutely nothing to make me like the main character, and that is not on actor Xiaoming Huang, as he clearly played the character as he was told to play. And we have seen hundreds of these kinds of movies, where the protagonist learns his lessons and we grow along with them, we root for them, but poor protagonist here did not seem to learn a single lesson. He just understood how his enemy was thinking and did the opposite long enough to escape. Really, until Stallone joins the game I was very unimpressed, unfortunately, not to mention that Jesse Metcalfe never looked better, and the movie did not make the best use of him either. This was a great cast, it is such a shame. Is the story the same as the first one? Sure. But the great cast does not compare to the banter between Stallone and Schwarzenegger. (I reviewed that movie last year, click here to read it!)

Watch it? You know, it is hard for me to be hard on bad movies too. This is not really a memorable film, and it is too bad, because with a couple more twists it could have been far more entertaining than the original one. The cast and the idea was there, that is for sure. We still have one more movie in the prison theme, so stay tuned for next week!

Until my next review in #StalloneMonth!