Ni hao, fellow readers. Welcome to my website, where I show how to do martial arts, respect the elders, follow a code of honor and eat zongzi, malatang, baozi, chow mein, Peking duck, jian dui and water chestnut cake. What does that have to with Escape Plan: The Extractors (2019)? Just like the movie tries to appeal to the Chinese audience with forced Chinese plots, I too have to awkwardly cram in China-related words until the Chinese start liking me, that is, if I want to get a piece of that lucrative Chinese market. Please like me, China!
The movie is really shameless about putting its Chinese protagonists front and center. Within the first minute, we get Chinese actors speaking Chinese and discussing investments in failed Detroit economy. There's a really subtle jab at the American way of life in this scene, when a Chinese actor gets left alone with two Yanks, one of which cautiously asks: "So, do you like barbecue?" and the Chinaman gives a sideways glance full of contempt.
Chinese people in the US discuss things in Chinese and then a Chinese girl gets kidnapped by the son of a character from Escape Plan (2013), who is now thirsty for revenge. This son character beats up the Chinese expedition, kidnaps the girl, who is the daughter of a Chinese tech magnate, and leaves a USB stick with "Ray Breslin" on the scene. Now the Chinese bodyguard finally has the excuse to visit Stallone, who barely slurrs his lines. I was shocked upon seeing him – the guy's 73 years old! He should be behind the camera, not in front of it.
The script is so nonsensical during the first 40 or so minutes, I might as well say something interesting about China. Did you know there's a Chinese story written using just one word, shi? Called "The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den", the story warns of loss of nuance in Chinese as the words get more and more westernized through pinyin. The story is translated thus:
In a stone den was a poet named Shi, who loved to eat lions, and had resolved to eat ten. He often went to the market to hunt for lions. At exactly ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market. At that moment, Shi had just arrived at the market too. Seeing those lions, he shot them with his arrows. He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den. The stone den was damp, so he had his servant clean it. After the stone den was cleaned, he tried to eat those ten lions. When he ate, he realized the corpses were in fact ten stone lions. Try to explain this matter.
The son character takes the girl to fictional Latvian prison called "Devil's Station", of all places. It's at this moment that I woke up from my China-induced coma and started paying attention. The location is phenomenal: peeling walls, claustrophobic corridors and corroded metal all over the place. I actually thought this was a genuine Latvian prison but the movie was shot in Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio. Seeing real people interact with real objects on a real location is a touch of filmmaking that stands out from the rest of CGI-infested mocktainment, regardless of how the rest of the movie sucks. Speaking of which, in the second part the movie gets a whole lot more intense.
Extraction plan goes sour and Ray Breslin now takes things personal. There are some brutal fight scenes where our heroes stand neck-to-neck with villains, bleeding, dancing on the knife's edge and going for the jugular. Things get messy and protagonists get dirty but ultimately they prevail. In the second half of the movie Stallone starts resembling his old self from action movies and shows that he's still got the fire in him.
So, why did the Chinese girl get kidnapped? The son character turns out unfathomably stupid, as he takes a Chinese dude from her expedition and gives him an internet-connected laptop to hack into her father's company and steal patents and technological secrets that can be sold on the black market. A while after, a henchman visits the Chinese dude, who shows him – a webpage filled with middle finger icons. It's contrived and perfectly implausible but without the Chinese girl kidnapping plot there's no Chinese rescue effort, which could have been easily done by Stallone and his pals.
There are good moments in Escape Plan: The Extractors (2019) but none of them are in the first half. If you have the patience to wait until the movie climbs out of the sewer, you'll have the pleasure of seeing something actually watchable.