Escape Plan 3: The Extractors

So, hey, remember a while ago when we rapped about Escape Plan 2: Hades? For a refresher, it was a lazy, sorta-rushed sequel to an okay-at-best film, a sequel that barely remembered what its progenitor was all about and actively courted a Chinese audience in order to try to maximize its profits. It wasn’t very good. What got me then, though, was that star Sylvester Stallone announced that another sequel was in the works even before everything wrapped for the second installment. Not sure if that was hubris or even balder greed, but I knew then and there that I would be back to talk about it whenever it came out.

I am a man of my word.

For Escape Plan 3: The Extractors (I wanna note here that the number isn’t in the title, I just like to add them for two reasons: 1) To remind myself of where I am in a given series, and 2) So that everyone who reads my words remembers how many films have come out in a given franchise, something the filmmakers are often reticent to mention for fear of sequelitis), we move even farther from the original concept of a dude who’s so good at breaking out prisons he gets paid to do so. Here, the daughter of a very wealthy Chinese businessman is kidnapped for ransom. The culprit? The son of Stallone’s former partner (hopefully y’all remember Vincent D’Onofrio from the first film, ‘cause, not gonna lie, I did not). You’d better believe this means Stallone’s gettin’ involved! Unfortunately, it also means Stallone’s girlfriend is also kidnapped, upping the stakes for the third entry. It’s up to Stallone, his usual cohorts (let’s not forget 50 Cent!), and a pair of Chinese bodyguards to break into a Latvian prison (just go with it), rescue the women, and get some tasty vengeance.

The trend of focusing on the Chinese characters that began in the second entry continues at an accelerated pace here, to the point that the Chinese actors feel like they have almost twice the screen-time as Stallone and his folks (I think the scales get closer to even if you include the villains, though). I would normally mean that negatively, but they have the better action scenes, particularly Zhang Jin, a veteran of martial arts cinema (including, like, five Ip Man movies) who puts everyone else to shame with his abilities, including genre stalwart Daniel Bernhardt and his strange accent, which I can only describe as “foreign”. Stallone isn’t quite sleepwalking through things here, he occasionally seems slightly involved in what’s going on, but he hardly changes his blank facial expression throughout. A similar affliction affects Dave Bautista, whose recently-discovered talent and charisma are barely on display here. Devon Sawa, playing the string-puller, is probably the best overall actor, but even he occasionally bursts into fits of overacting. Everyone else either barely registers or is hopeless (I can sympathize with the latter, given my lack of skill).

Visually, the film is terrible. Several scenes are bathed in a coating of sickly yellow, there’s a general griminess to every shot (as though either the camera or the “film” (yeah, like they used actual film in this production!) was covered in a layer of dirt and/or dust), and the editing is amateur at best. The whole affair feels like one of those straight-to-video Wesley Snipes joints, the waste of a decent martial artist and all. The setting feels arbitrary, as though they found a cool exterior in Eastern Europe (where it’s relatively cheap to film) and just wrote the film around it, especially considering it didn’t seem like as nasty a prison as the characters constantly spout. Oh, and the dialogue’s not very good, either, and I’m as surprised as you right now.

If this film is any indication, any future Escape Plan installments will have even less to do with breaking out of interesting prisons and come off as somehow lazier than ever. This is a sad waste of the talents of Stallone, Bautista, and Zhang (shit, even of Sawa), who all look as though they can’t wait for their paychecks to clear. I didn’t expect anything more, and I’ve rarely been as correct in doing so. Skip it, kids.