The villain who gets the story rolling is Lester Clark Jr. Director John Herzfeld, who also rewrote the screenplay by Miles Chapman (co-writer on the first ESCAPE PLAN and the only credited writer on 2), wanted the story of the film to be a direct sequel to the first movie. The events of HADES are of little consequence here. Stallone has been there before – it's where the prison scenes in TANGO & CASH were filmed. This movie was shot in a real former prison, the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, which was built between 18, then closed down in 1990. THE EXTRACTORS is still an ensemble film, but it feels like more of a Stallone film than HADES did, and the prison in this story is the opposite of the hi-tech places from the previous films. Breslin's business partner Lester Clark (Vincent D'Onofrio) ending up betraying him and trying to get him stuck in a hi-tech prison called The Tomb for good, but with the help of a character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger our hero was eventually able to get out of the place and get some payback on Clark.ĮSCAPE PLAN: THE EXTRACTORS, the third film in this franchise, isn't on the same level as that big screen Stallone/Schwarzenegger team-up movie, but it is an improvement over last year's ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES, which went too over-the-top sci-fi for my liking and also shifted the focus away from Stallone for a substantial amount of the running time. REVIEW: Released in 2013, the first film in the ESCAPE PLAN franchise starred Sylvester Stallone as Ray Breslin, a man whose security firm tested the integrity of maximum security prisons by passing off Breslin as a convict, dropping him into the prisons, and seeing if he could escape from them. It also plays that DTV trick of promising big name stars on the poster and failing to deliver - Dave Bautista appears fitfully and Stallone only a little more.PLOT: Ray Breslin and his associates take on a vengeful villain who runs a hellhole black site prison. This one is rooted firmly in bargain bin action licks circa 1992 and has little invention or charm to up the ante. Previous Escape Plans had a sci-fi tinge. Daya and Breslin’s partner Abby (Jaime King) are being held hostage by a goon (Devon Sawa) with a grudge against Breslin that stretches back to events in the first film (don’t worry we didn’t remember either). The reheated old guff that passes for a plot sees Breslin and his cohorts (Bautista, Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson, Jaime King) looking to extract Daya (Malese Jow), the daughter of a Hong Kong tech giant (Russell Wong) from a giant Latvian penitentiary ominously known as Devil’s Landing. Rather than a prison break, this time round it’s a break in. Third time round for Stallone’s 4th string franchise ( Rocky, Rambo, The Expendables are all higher up the cinematic food chain) the emphasis here is less on the problem solving of previous outings and more a dull cycle through grim punch-ups, bad acting and blatant attempts to woo the Chinese market - The Grandmaster’s Jin Zhang and Crazy Rich Asians’ Harry Shum Jr have prominent if, like everyone else, underwritten roles in the melee. “I’m done with prisons,” drawls Sylvester Stallone’s security expert Ray Breslin and watching Escape Plan 3 it’s hard to disagree.
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