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 Escape Plan 2: Hades 

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 Escape Plan 2: Hades 
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Escape Plan 2: Hades is an upcoming action film directed by Steven C. Miller. It is the sequel to the 2013 film Escape Plan. The film stars Sylvester Stallone and Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson reprising their roles from the first film, with Dave Bautista, Huang Xiaoming, Jaime King, Jesse Metcalfe, and Wes Chatham as the newcomers.


Wed Jun 06, 2018 1:49 am
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Escape Plan 2: Hades

It's not great. It is nothing compared to the articulated and well-written first film. In this one, which is pretty much a Huang Xiaoming vehicle (Stallone isn't in it much and is essentially a supporting actor until the final third), they have served up your standard Emmett-Furla actioner (think Bus 657) and your standard Steven C. Miller cut (think Marauders). It's lots of concealing closeups, choppily edited action, and a badly presented escape plan. I still don't really know how they got out, nor do I care. It is nothing like the first film where you were brought along for the ride with Breslin and Rottmayer, seeing each development and idea come to fruition to realise their eventual escape. This just powers on without you, takes a lot of cuts and conveniences, and by the time you've realised ... it's over, and Stallone sets up the third film.

Actually, whenever he is on screen it is way more watchable, but he's not used as much as his name on all the posters and trailers indicates. Same goes for Bautista. And the film totally misses Schwarzenegger's presence. I loved the prison in terms of concept, theme, layout, and costuming, and the science-fiction design makes it interesting, but this whole prison idea is not in the hands of a competent filmmaker. It had potential, but it is never explored. Never does the film give time to the rules of the prison, the internal dynamics, or to the geography and architecture. It's just powering its way to the finish line as fast as it possibly can, trying to unravel the convoluted plot they dreamed up instead of delivering enjoyment like the first did, and the film lost me because of that. Oh, and Huang Xiaoming is just a bad actor and isn't leading man material at all.

I still look forward to Escape Plan 3: Devil's Station because I'm a loyal Stallone fan and I know he makes good films when with the right director. And I obviously did not hate this film. It's just a disappointment compared to the brilliant first film and because I had been anticipating it so much. I'll still watch this at the cinema when it comes out. But from my first viewing, Hades generously gets a ...

C+


Sat Jun 16, 2018 12:44 pm
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
Unfortunately I could take pretty much nothing good away from this. I liked Bautista and Stallone is fine, but he feels so out of place here. It's just a pretty bad film through and through actually and it borders on terrible at times it just feels so cheap and poorly made. The Chinese guy is pretty much the lead and not a very good one, and the only thing that makes me think why Stallone did this was for the money. I don't believe he had any creative input and he really is better than this. I feel a bit generous with my grade too.

D


Tue Jun 19, 2018 12:57 pm
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
That electronic cicada or whatever bug device looked to be on the posters, I don't remember this once appearing in the film. They did make that red laser device, which felt odd in how that just provided them with the prisons layout too anyway.


Tue Jun 19, 2018 9:20 pm
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
Yeah I'm with stuffp on this one. This movie was bad and considering how much I didn't really care for the first Escape Plan that is definitely saying something. It's just hard to give a shit about anything in this movie outside of the scenes with either Stallone or Bautista who aren't in it nearly enough to save it, but enough to the point where my grade isn't lower. The supporting characters here were awful and the Chinese guy they chose to be the lead wasn't very good either.

It's a shame because I do think the concept behind the futuristic prison was kind of interesting and it did look cool at times, but in this director's hands it just falls flat.

D


Tue Jun 19, 2018 9:29 pm
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
stuffp wrote:
That electronic cicada or whatever bug device looked to be on the posters, I don't remember this once appearing in the film.


The cicada is just marketing for the Chinese release because, as I said, the Chinese title references a cicada. It has nothing to do with the film and its plot.


Tue Jun 19, 2018 9:30 pm
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
stuffp wrote:
The Chinese guy is pretty much the lead and not a very good one

Dil wrote:
the Chinese guy they chose to be the lead wasn't very good either.


It was clearly made for China. You can see that not just by the casting but also by the film-making. What producers are still getting wrong about China is that they will see and love everything as long as it has a Chinese star. That isn't true. Firstly, there is just one joke in the entire film. Chinese people loved the first mainly because it was funny (Arnie helped this a lot) and interesting, which are two things that Hades is not. And Xiaoming isn't even a loved star here. He is known. But mainly as Angelababy's husband. A lot of people actually dislike him because he's sort of lucked his way into fame, and is clearly not talented. He's just a face. And he's a smug cunt too. Lastly, the quality of the film-making is so important these days, and Chinese people (especially netizens) are actually quite adept in film viewing and will not grade a movie so highly, so easily, just because they "should". I don't expect this to be as well-reviewed as the first film in China. It has the interest. I checked on my ticket buying app yesterday and it had 100k people wanting to see it. More than any other film besides Chinese film Animal World, which had 138k. Luckily, China is not just made up of just netizens, and it has a huge population of older moviegoers that I think will still turn out to support Stallone, all of which have much lower standards in terms of film, so it can still do well enough, which is why it was made, but it won't be a breakout.


Tue Jun 19, 2018 10:20 pm
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
Algren wrote:
stuffp wrote:
That electronic cicada or whatever bug device looked to be on the posters, I don't remember this once appearing in the film.


The cicada is just marketing for the Chinese release because, as I said, the Chinese title references a cicada. It has nothing to do with the film and its plot.


Right I did remember the poster from the other thread, but not the background anymore.


And this should make some money in China, enough to make it's money back maybe, it couldn't have been very expensive to make.
I'm still a bit curious to Devil's Station, but expectations are really low right now.


Wed Jun 20, 2018 12:46 am
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
I'm sure it will live up to expectations.


Wed Jun 20, 2018 1:11 am
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
The South China Morning Post's 1/5 review is pretty accurate. My favourite part:

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Operating on a significantly lower budget than its predecessor, the film is shot in nauseating close-up and cut to the beat of a jackhammer. While the first Escape Plan was preposterous yet entertaining, director Stephen C. Miller (First Kill) can only cobble together a patchwork of half-realised ideas and poorly executed set pieces into a frenetic, largely indecipherable collage of shapes and sounds.


Mon Jun 25, 2018 11:47 am
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
Absolutely dreadful, though at times it is an entertaining curiosity in a perverse way. There is almost no point even comparing it to the first, which is a proper, entertaining, wily old-fashioned action film with a healthy budget, an eclectic cast, and a decent screenplay laced with humor and even a bit of ingenuity. This is a cynical and cheaply produced belch of a sequel. What holds one's attention is watching its seams spectacularly come apart. It plays as if Sylvester Stallone and randomly-introduced-new-compatriot Dave "Not Quite Arnold Schwarzenegger" Bautista were on set for four or five days, and the film is straining to stretch the footage it has of them as far (and as thinly) as it can. Actual protagonist Huang Xiaoming is felled by his dearth of personality and his flat, heavily accented, honestly rather irritating line delivery. The prison set is a garish potpourri of lava-lamp lighting and cardboard walls. There is no sense of an actual escape unfolding (no coherent set pieces, no clever revelations or crafty subterfuges); the plot always conveniently lurches forward with a character randomly typing on a keyboard and shouting a generic line such as, "I've accessed the mainframe!" or "We're in!" In general, there is no flow; events do not lead to other events in an organic or involving way, they just haphazardly unfurl with no concern for continuity or basic storytelling etiquette. And since, God help us, Escape Plan number three is already in post-production, the entire enterprise is rude enough to end with an anticlimactic quasi-cliffhanger (no pun intended). This is a career low for Stallone. We can reflect on inglorious moments in his career (Rhinestone, Oscar, Driven, Grudge Match), but at least those were...I don't know, relatively polished failures. Here he is not waylaid by A-list hubris or a poorly judged appraisal of what audiences want, but B-list apathy; he has willingly lent his name and brand to an obvious debacle for an easy ka-ching, and I hope he does not follow this path as far as, say, Bruce Willis and John Cusack have.

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Fri Jun 29, 2018 3:29 am
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
"ALL PRISONERS, RETURN TO YOUR SPOKES!"

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Fri Jun 29, 2018 3:48 am
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I saw it again today. This time at the cinema, and it's a badly made film. I think it's all Steven C. Miller's fault, though. The script, while not great, at least [mostly] makes sense, albeit sloppy. But it suffers from a big amount of incoherence. It's simply badly and lazily directed. There are about three acceptable shots in the entire film. The fights are too up-close and the whole film is like one long music video, never a moment un-scored. The villains are generic as fuck. It would have been so easy to add a quirk to at least one of them (preferably the "zookeeper" warden) to make them stand out a little from all the nonsense. There are 2-3 jokes in the film, none of which were given space for the audience to see them as jokes. Again, badly directed.


Fri Jun 29, 2018 5:40 am
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
David wrote:
Absolutely dreadful, though at times it is an entertaining curiosity in a perverse way. There is almost no point even comparing it to the first, which is a proper, entertaining, wily old-fashioned action film with a healthy budget, an eclectic cast, and a decent screenplay laced with humor and even a bit of ingenuity. This is a cynical and cheaply produced belch of a sequel. Actual protagonist Huang Xiaoming is felled by his dearth of personality and his flat, heavily accented, honestly rather irritating line delivery. There is no sense of an actual escape unfolding (no coherent set pieces, no clever revelations or crafty subterfuges); the plot always conveniently lurches forward with a character randomly typing on a keyboard and shouting a generic line such as, "I've accessed the mainframe!" or "We're in!" In general, there is no flow; events do not lead to other events in an organic or involving way, they just haphazardly unfurl with no concern for continuity or basic storytelling etiquette. This is a career low for Stallone. We can reflect on inglorious moments in his career (Rhinestone, Oscar, Driven, Grudge Match), but at least those were...I don't know, relatively polished failures. Here he is not waylaid by A-list hubris or a poorly judged appraisal of what audiences want, but B-list apathy; he has willingly lent his name and brand to an obvious debacle for an easy ka-ching, and I hope he does not follow this path as far as, say, Bruce Willis and John Cusack have.


Bang on! :clap:


Fri Jun 29, 2018 5:43 am
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
David wrote:
This is a career low for Stallone. We can reflect on inglorious moments in his career (Rhinestone, Oscar, Driven, Grudge Match), but at least those were...I don't know, relatively polished failures. Here he is not waylaid by A-list hubris or a poorly judged appraisal of what audiences want, but B-list apathy; he has willingly lent his name and brand to an obvious debacle for an easy ka-ching, and I hope he does not follow this path as far as, say, Bruce Willis and John Cusack have.


I hope this just gets very little of a release in the US and most parts of the world so his reputation would stay mostly intact despite it.


Fri Jun 29, 2018 6:18 am
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
It's being released most places today, so hopefully it's all out in one shot and everyone moves on to other things soon. Good job it's also the World Cup and Sicario 2 is coming out in the US to hopefully distract action fans. Not that I want it to do badly, but people are going to hate it, so I want to spare them the bad taste from a Stallone film.


Fri Jun 29, 2018 6:25 am
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
The film could be improved in 1,000,000 ways by more careful and tasteful direction. Consider the "yard" scenes in Hades. None of the prisoners have any personality, and they only interact when the plot has to stumble forward (see: the random introduction of the albinos). They could have populated Hades with distinctive characters similar to, say, Con Air's ensemble (eccentrics, egos, muscles, psychopaths, etc.) and created a lot of fun scenes.

Titus Welliver is a charismatic character actor with an impressive resume in television (Deadwood, Lost, Sons of Anarchy) and film (Assault on Precinct 13, Gone Baby Gone, The Town), and his Zookeeper role is absolutely begging to be more colorful. This is pulpy material...turn him into an over-the-top sadist pervert we love to root against. Instead he is just allowed to stand there sullenly repeating the same lines: "time's up!," "give me the tech!," etc.

They also squander even the plot developments with potential. It could, for instance, be cool to learn Hades is a constantly moving structure, so no distance measured will be the same the next day. They almost get there, but then they highlight the point in the most tawdry and low-brow way. I hate when the camera "enters" Shu's head, rendering his thought process as a bizarre CG light show. So...crap.

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Fri Jun 29, 2018 9:53 am
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
And something that Algren hammered me on several times, EVERYTHING is so close-up...we see so very little of the prison. It's a film of great limitations. I think what I liked the most about it probably was the shoot-up in the bar.


Fri Jun 29, 2018 11:07 am
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
The colour aesthetic is also ugly. A sort of constant lens-flared blue gloom interspersed with shaky-cam action.


Fri Jun 29, 2018 12:20 pm
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
And the visual effects are dreadful, particularly whenever a character is electrocuted.

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Fri Jun 29, 2018 8:19 pm
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
I didn't mind that. It's going for a certain futuristic-ness. Or maybe it was lack of a CG-budget. Who knows. But the explosions and CG-blood did grate.


Fri Jun 29, 2018 8:46 pm
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
I didn't realize this at first, but did Jaime King replace Amy Ryan as the character Abigail?
Or was she just a different Abigail?


Mon Jul 02, 2018 6:32 am
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
Wow, yeah. She really did. I also didn't notice that! Stallone got older, but his love interest got younger!!! :funny:

This Abigail Ross (Expendables crossover potential perhaps??!) character seems to change AGAIN for the third film. I've not seen King or Ryan on any of the set images, and apparently Breslin's love interest (which I thought was this Ross character) gets kidnapped, and there is no mention of King or Ryan on its Wikipedia page.


Mon Jul 02, 2018 9:17 pm
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
Just watched it again. It's an extremely interesting case study of how not to make a film. There are so many things wrong. We couldn't possibly go into them all. But one thing I just noticed on this viewing is the stupidity of the central story. So Kimbral gets Lusheng into Hades in order to extract a patent from him. Firstly, isn't a patent a document? Seems the last thing I'd do if I wanted someone to hand over a patent is to put them in prison where they do not have access to their patents. But anyway. Apparently the patent is for next-gen satellite tech that can control and take over the world's defence systems, etc., etc. This is what I find hard to believe. Not that there exists this tech that could do that, but instead the idea that just patenting it is likely to stop the type of madmen that would want this newfound tech. Why would he think that patenting it would "bury" it? People will still be able to invent it, and those sort of people will not be deterred by someone saying "hey, we've already patented that, you cannot start World War 3 today, no sir!". It's as if the villains of this franchise are actually law-abiding, lol.

Finally, isn't a patent just describing how and why your invention is unique and for what its use is? Patents are public info anyway, certainly obtainable by a patent lawyer. Couldn't they just buy it to see what's inside? And it in no way will contain secrets of how to build this new satellite tech. Maybe I'm off on this stuff but I have had some experience with patents so I think this whole central story is just shit and not well-thought out.


Thu Jul 05, 2018 1:44 pm
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Post Re: Escape Plan 2: Hades
The idea of the patent burying the invention is just not making sense. And putting him in a prison neither, wouldn't the best way be to threaten his loved ones to give it up.


Thu Jul 05, 2018 8:22 pm
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