Movie Review: Escape Plan 2 Hades

Escape Plan 2 Hades (2018) 

Directed by Steven C. Miller

Written by Miles Chapman 

Starring Sylvester Stallone, Jesse Metcalf, Dave Bautista, Curtis Jackson

Release Date June 29th, 2018

Published June 29th, 2018 

I have seen amateur movies on YouTube, shot on an IPhone, that have better special effects than the cheeseball fluff featured in the new movie Escape Plan 2: Hades. This Sylvester Stallone starring sequel to the not-so-great to begin with, 2013 feature, Escape Plan starring Sly and Arnold Schwarzenegger, is among the worst movies of 2018. Bad special effects, inept direction, and abysmal editing make Escape Plan 2: Hades, nearly impossible to endure.

Once again Stallone is playing the character of security expert Ray Breslin. Here Ray and his team, including Jesse Metcalf, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson and Jamie King, are hired to rescue hostages in a foreign country by developing an executing an ‘escape plan,’ get it? When the escape plan goes bad, Ray is forced to part ways with two members of his team, Jasper (Wes Chatham) and Shu (Xiaming Huong).

After firing Jasper, Ray let’s Shu take  a leave of absence and from there, Shu goes home to Thailand and reunites with his cousin, a tech millionaire. The cousin is wanted for his deus ex machina technology and when he’s kidnapped, Shu gets taken as well. The two end up in Hades, a state of the art prison, said to be inescapable. Naturally, when Ray finds out his buddy is missing he knows what he needs, as escape plan.

My plot description is intentionally snarky but the movie deserves it. Little care is taken by director Stephen C. Miller to make Escape Plan 2: Hades watchable so the film deserves my condescending descriptors. Miller’s direction is borderline haphazard, as if we’re lucky when he’s able to plant his camera in the direction of the actors. The editing is employed to try and hide the directorial and storytelling deficiencies, using quick cuts to try and distract from the bad production design and bored acting.

Sly Stallone looks as if he’s not getting enough sleep these days. His speech has always been a tad slow but here, words fall from his mouth as if pushed with great effort but little energy or life. He doesn’t appear to care much about what he’s saying and comes off as content to deliver the minimum effort needed for his check. Director Miller tries to cover for his star’s disinterest by giving newcomer Xiaming Huong most of the heavy lifting but his martial arts can’t overcome Miller’s inability to capture martial arts in a visually interesting fashion.

The fight scenes in Escape Plan 2: Hades are nearly as sloppy as the special effects are laughable. Huong appears to be a capable fighter but the slapdash camera work and quick cut editing do more to hide his abilities than to exploit them. There are times during major fight scenes where it was impossible to even locate the lead characters amid the chaos of the staging of these scenes.

The CGI of Escape Plan 2 is camp level bad. The effects rendering on something as routine as muzzle flair from a handgun are laughably inept with tiny fireballs that look like cotton candy popping out of a gun. A big explosion in the opening of the film looked like an effect from the legendary modern bad movie Birdemic: Shock and Terror. That film however, at the very least, was entertainingly terrible, Escape Plan 2: Hades is merely embarrassingly cringe inducing.

Just what the heck was Dave Bautista thinking when he accepted this role? Was he desperate to share the screen with Sly Stallone? Bautista is billed as the second star of Escape Plan, equal to Stallone and yet he’s barely in the movie. Bautista doesn’t even have a fight scene, content to just hold a gun in one scene and fire the gun while lightly jogging toward danger later in the movie. Bautista matches Stallone’s lack of energy with his own barely there performance.

Escape Plan 2: Hades was supposed to be released theatrically, nationwide this weekend but someone thought better of that idea. Instead, this abysmal effort will haunt the DVD and Blu Ray racks as of Friday, tempting Stallone completists and those who can be tricked into thinking Bautista is doing another Drax like character. Don’t be fooled, Bautista is barely there and Stallone, in a sense, is barely there as well in one of the worst movies of 2018.

Movie Review John Tucker Must Die

John Tucker Must Die (2006) 

Directed by Betty Thomas

Written by Jeff Lowell

Starring Jesse Metcalf, Brittany Snow, Ashanti, Sophia Bush, Arielle Kebbel, Penn Badgley, Jenny McCarthy, Taylor Kitsch 

Release Date July 28th, 2006 

Published July 29th, 2006 

The most striking thing about the new teen comedy John Tucker Must Die is its impressive online ad campaign. Taking full advantage of the zeitgeist grabbing MySpace.com, the producers of John Tucker Must Die created the films official website on MySpace. They recruited teens in the films target demo to spread word about the film on their blogs and on MySpace message boards and they plastered every inch of the site with pictures of star Jesse Metcalf whose hunky visage was the selling point for the films target audience of teenage girls.

By the time the film actually arrived in theaters it really didn't matter if the film was any good, the marketing had worked like gangbusters in turning out the exact audience demo the studio had been trying to attract.

Now that that is out of the way the question remains; is the film any good? It's not a simple answer. On the one hand I as a 30 year old male film critic felt the picture was derivative, lazy and not nearly as funny as it thinks it is. On the other hand, watching the film in a theater crowded with teen girls cackling at the films every turn of plot, I can't deny the film is effective in many ways.

Jesse Metcalf is the titular star of John Tucker Must Die but the lead role actually belongs to Brittany Snow as Kate. Always the new girl, thanks to her mom (Jenny McCarthy) and her misadventures with men, Kate arrives at yet another new school once again as an outcast. Being her usual anonymous self, Kate flies below the radar observing the goings on at her new school and particularly the goings on surrounding the school super-stud John Tucker.

Tucker is captain of the basketball team and is currently dating the head cheerleader Heather (Ashanti), the valedictorian Carrie (Arielle Kebbel) and the schools top causehead Beth (Sophia Bush). Because the girls run in different circles they know nothing of each other and John Tucker. Kate knows because John has taken each of them to the restaurant where she works.

One day John's girls are fatefully thrown together and one just happens to mention John. All hell breaks loose between the three girls and eventually engulfs poor Kate. Asking the logical question why they are beating on each other when it's John they should be mad at, Kate sets in motion a plot to get revenge on the cheating, lying John Tucker.

The plot and poster might give one the impression of a dark comedy about a high school murder plot. Unfortunately, John Tucker Must Die is not nearly as ambitious as its title. The girl's revenge plot is more mean spirited than it is vengeful. The early plotting involves turning John into the poster boy for STD's, spiking his water with estrogen and tricking him into wearing a thong in front of all of his buddies.

When none of these plots is able to derail the surprisingly resilient John Tucker, the girls hatch one final plot. After John finally breaks up with each of the three plotters, they decide to turn Kate into John's ultimate fantasy girl. Using their inside knowledge of his likes and dislikes, they will get John to fall for Kate and then have her dump him like he dumped them.

My plot description is a little more straightforward than the film itself which is often distracted ogling its supermodel cast. There is no one in the cast of high school age and rarely do you see a face that does not belong on a magazine cover. Seriously, what planet is this movie from planet Maxim in the FHM universe. It's difficult to take anything in the film seriously when you are distracted by more than fifty of Maxim magazine's future and even former cover girls (star Arielle Krebbel is one of Maxim's top 100 hotties).

Like so many broad teen comedies, John Tucker Must Die wants it both ways. It wants to be broadly comic but also have honest pathos and characters we care about. Well, you can't have it both ways. Director Betty Thomas and writer Jeff Lowell needed to make up their minds at some point and decide if John Tucker Must Die was going to be a dark teen comedy a la Mean Girls or a more sensitive but broad film like those awful Freddie Prinze Jr movies from the late 90's early 2000's.

Is this American Pie or a movie Hillary Duff turned down. John Tucker Must Die doesn't know what it wants to be. Thus it winds up a beaten mutt of a movie with elements of any number of different movies with no real center of its own.  

With all of the obvious problems of this film I certainly cannot and will not recommend it. However, I can't completely write the film off either. Watching the film with a nearly sold out audience filled with girls from 12-16 who roared with laughter throughout, I could not help but be struck by the effect the film had on its target demographic.

I'm not actually sure if I am impressed or a little frightened by how well John Tucker Must Die hits with teen girls. It tests so well that it must have been tested to death upon its initial completion so that each scene would hit the target audience just right. A scientific approach to filmmaking that I find terribly disturbing. I'm honestly conflicted. On the one hand, who am I to deny people a calculated good time? On the other hand this is not art in any way shape or form.

There likely was little to no artistic effort put into crafting John Tucker Must Die. It is a product tested and sold to a market of consumers pre-destined to want to consume and enjoy it. A filmic symbol of our mechanistic society that meets the exact needs of consumers no matter what needs they may be. This mechanism however robs us of humanity and experience.

Watching a film should be an experience that reaches out to the audience and leaves them with a sense of having been a part of something, like all great art. Movies like John Tucker Must Die are merely mass consumed quantities like popcorn or chocolate bars. Easily digested and disposed of. They contain minor pleasures and empty calories but leave no trace of themselves later.

An example of what I hate about modern Hollywood, John Tucker Must Die is the ultimate in product placement. The product just happens to be the film itself rather than a McDonalds or Coca Cola. John Tucker Must Die is itself a mass consumer product of disposable value and forgettable minor pleasures. The ad campaign and MySpace site may have a place in marketing history, but the film is more forgettable than that bag of fritos you finished off sometime ago and cast into the abyss of an empty garbage can destined for a landfill.