Escape Plan 2: Hades (2018)

Escape Plan 2: Hades arrives with the confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is and has decided not to improve on the knowledge. Sylvester Stallone returns as Ray Breslin, a man who breaks people out of prisons. This time the prison is a computer-run labyrinth called HADES that rearranges its floor plan each night. Dave Bautista looms. 50 Cent appears. Huang Xiaoming, a genuine star in his home market, takes a substantial role as Shu Ren, the operative whose kidnapping sets the machinery in motion. The picture went straight to video in the United States while enjoying theatrical runs in Russia and China, a distribution strategy that says more about financing than about art. Stallone has called it the most horribly produced film of his career. We defer to the man.

The casting is where any social consciousness begins and ends. Huang Xiaoming's prominence reflects a Chinese co-financing partner with an interest in the Chinese box office. The presence of 50 Cent and Tyron Woodley reflects a long tradition of action cinema stocking its ensemble with recognizable faces. Nobody in the film remarks on any of it. Race is not a theme. Gender is not a theme. The villain runs an organization, but the screenplay has no interest in wealth, labor, or the extraction of profit as a subject worth examining. It is interested in punching.

This leaves a prison that moves at night, a hacker named Count Zero, a cook who becomes an ally, and a final fistfight in a control room. The film carries no message, no sermon, no invitation to reconsider our assumptions about anything. It is an exercise in narrative inertia, and there is a strange integrity in that. A film that declines to lecture is not automatically a good film. It is, at minimum, a quiet one. We score it accordingly.