The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

Okay, full disclosure, it turns out A Car's Life isn't actually by Video Brinquedo. I should probably have guessed that, since they didn't call it "The Little [insert thing here]," it probably wasn't theirs. That and the big American flag on the back saying it was "Made in America" probably shouldn't apply for a Brazilian company.

So, this week's proper entry in the Deep Hurting Project is Escape Plan 2: Hades. I decided to watch the first one last week to get me up to speed on the movie, and on a scale of Rocky 1 to Stop or My Mom Will Shoot, it's more of an Expendables 2. It was fairly decent, and it's nice to see Ahnold and Sly exchanging barbs, although the twist that the prison was on a ship in the middle of the ocean was really dumb and I legitimately cannot fathom how impossible something of this magnitude is. And it got a sequel so bad that even Stallone himself considered it the worst movie he's ever done.

• So, full disclosure, it turns out that not only do we not get Ahnold in the movie, it turns out there's barely any Stallone in this movie, either. He only shows up about 10 minutes in. The real protagoinst, someone who isn't even mentioned in the summary on the back of the case is a guy named Shu, played by Huanh Xiaoming
  
• And our first look at Hades is a lot more lackluster than The Tomb. Say what you will about the Tomb, at least it looked interesting, like a modernised version of something out of Piranesi. This, it just ruins our suspension of disbelief with this cheap sci-fi crap. And what's with the really-bored sounding Magic Voice telling these prisoners when to fight?
  
  
  I know this is the same studio that brought the world the Wicker Man remake, but seriously, going from the semi-realistic to this futuristic shit? This is just pimp-slapping willing suspension of disbelief.
• And it's not even interesting sci-fi with elaborate set pieces and significant amounts of technology that can easily be explained in the context of the film. It's our world with some inexplicably advanced tech built into a prison that looks a lot like something out of the Star Wars prequels.
  
• Sly returns as a disembodied voice (and a flashback) reminding him of lessons in prison breaking 20 minutes in. Fucking Hell, they're really not even going to give him much to do in this remake to one of his films, are they?
  
• This includes one of the worst instances of the "two disperate conversations intercut to show how similar they are" trope I've ever seen, if only because, from both sides, it's 100% exposition delivered really fucking boringly.
  
• And it looks like Sly's back in action, trying to save Shu from Hades, and it's kind of disheartening to see the sequel completely buggering up the central conceit of the original film: one man trying to escape from a prison that's impossible to escape from, and I strongly suspect that if we saw someone from Breslin's team try to save him intercut with his escape from The Tomb, it would be a lot less interesting. A lot less suspense, knowing that someone had his back, like they do here.
  
• Also, the electricity is clearly bad CGI. Really a shitty move when your villain's main gimmick is electric torture.
  
• Well, it looks like there's at least one redeeming quality: while Shu's English is heavily accented and it can be difficult to understand him at times, at least he's got a good grasp of his Rs and Ls. Then again, many Chinese dialects do have different R and L sounds, so it's a lot more nuanced than, say, Japanese, but it's still nice to see Shu bucking this stereotype.
  
• And Hades is in Atlanta? This feels like a more mundane kind of dumb than the revelation that The Tomb is on a ship in the middle of the ocean.
  
• And apparently, this movie was not actually fully legal to make, because the people who owned the rights to the original are litigating the studio behind this for making two sequels. 
  

... and it looks like the original Baby Geniuses is actually on the So Bad It's Horrible/Film list now, so I think that means it's now officially part of the Project, the first, and perhaps only, retroactively added entry in the Deep Hurting Project.