REVIEW: Escape Plan: The Extractors (2019)

Run Time: 96 Minutes
Rated: R
What To Expect: Cheap, awful nastiness.  So bad it’s bad.

I called Escape Plan 2: Hades, the worst Sylvester Stallone movie ever made.  Sylvester Stallone himself even took to social media to denounce the movie as ‘awful, the worst’.  Stallone promised a turn around for the series in Escape Plan 3 though.  It would have a new director and it would lose the crappy SyFy-tier ‘hi-tech’ look and go to ground, using the Shawshank Prison itself.  Dave Bautista would also return.  Well, as Escape Plan 2: Hades was the worst Sylvester Stallone movie ever, this is one of the worst.  It’s worse even than that recent Matthew Modine VODmit he was in, which I legitimately can’t even remember the name of.

In this one, directed by John Herzfeld, Ray Breslin (Stallone) is recruited to bust out the daughter of a Hong Kong tech mogul from a formidable Latvian prison.  Extra emphasis is added for Breslin when he girlfriend is also captured and imprisoned.  Breslin must take his tech boffin 50 Cent (this is surely an in-joke in the series?) and Trent DeRosa (Dave Bautista) to plan and carry out the raid.  Of course there is escalating violence and uh… action.

Sylvester Stallone isn’t in the movie much, at least for something that has him billed as the lead star.  Over its 90 minutes, probably less than 20.  Dave Bautista is in it even less, a real extended cameo (with one mediocre fight scene with a heavy).  There are a lot of no-name actors here, acting as filler, trying to drive along a God-awful ‘intrigue’ plot that really tries patience and nerves, especially in the first half hour.  Some fight scenes are included, but they are ruined by a hack editor and director.

I was looking forward to Sylvester Stallone and Dave Bautista raiding the old Shawshank prison.  Well, as the director of that cult 1990’s movie made it look old, classy and full of character, in this movie you couldn’t tell it apart from an abandoned building in Uzbekistan.  Dark, ugly hallways (the film has terrible lighting) and a real Z-list production feel — I swear they didn’t even bother hiring a full roster of prisoners – how much does it take to call in some extras for a Stallone movie?!  The whole movie is phoned in, lazy, cheap and a blemish on the resume of everyone involved.  Stallone’s big ‘extraction’ sequence starts off with him phoning it in in a badly lit sewer!

Bautista, Stallone… why?