Released: June 2019

Director: John Herzfeld

Rated R

Run Time: 88 Minutes

Distributor: LionsGate Studios/Summit Entertainment

Genre: Action/Thriller

Cast:
Sylvester Stallone: Ray Breslin
Dave Bautista: Trent DeRosa
Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson: Hush
Devon Sawa: Lester Clark, Jr.
Max Zhang: Shen
Jamie King: Abigail Ross
Melise: Daya Zhang
Daniel Bernhardt: Silva

It’s really bizarre that certain movies and certain kinds of movies that get sequels these days.  It’s especially bizarre to see sequels to movies that didn’t do very well at the box office.  To be fair, a good number of these films end up getting released directly to video.  The Dragonheart and Scorpion King sequels come readily to mind.  Obviously, some sequels are pretty much guaranteed to be made considering the success of their films: Star Wars, Fast and Furious, Saw, X-Men and Star Trek just to name a few.  But for some movies like I Spit On Your Grave, seeing a sequel to something like that has people going, “Where the hell did that come from?”  These days, I’m less concerned about where a sequel comes from.  I’m more interested in whether or not it’s any good.  So, today I am bringing my review of Escape Plan: The Extractors, the second sequel to 2013’s Escape Plan starring Sylvester Stallone.

Security expert Ray Breslin runs a company that determines how secure a prison really is.  One day, he’s approached by a Chinese gentleman, Shen, who tells him that the daughter of a billionaire tycoon has been kidnapped by the son of his former business partner.  While determining how best to rescue the hostage, Ray’s girlfriend, Abigail is also kidnapped and taken to a brutal and notorious prison in Latvia.  Calling on the services of his friend and partner, Trent, Ray and company head to Latvia to rescue the hostages.  Simplicity is the name of the game in movies like this, and I really do appreciate that.  It means the film doesn’t dick around playing with extravagant plot twists and conspiracies.  It gets right to the point.  That being said, we’ve all seen this movie before.  The original Escape Plan had a very interesting set-up involving Sly’s character busting out of prisons to prove how they are not entirely secure.  It was not a half bad film, but it wasn’t that great.  I haven’t seen Escape Plan 2: Hades, but from all accounts, it’s a terrible film.  For the third and final film, it plays out nearly exactly how you would expect it to, barring a minor twist or two.  The problem is, is that the story in The Extractors is about as far from the original story as you can possibly get.  The original film didn’t need a sequel, let alone two, but how this whole thing plays out is surprisingly underwhelming and not very compelling.

As far as acting is concerned, it’s not bad.  I’ll be honest: I’m a huge fan of Sylvester Stallone.  I’ve been a big fan for years.  Whether he’s playing Rocky Balboa, Rambo, or hell, even Judge Dredd, the guy is incredibly fun to watch.  As an actor, I think he’s definitely gotten better over the years as his performances in Rambo and Creed have proven.  Dave Bautista has always been an actor to watch these days.  Aside from Dwayne Johnson, Bautista is the only other former wrestler that I know of that has successfully managed to transition from wrestling to acting.  He’s actually a really good actor.  Most people will know him as Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy, but he’s put in some really strong performances in films like Final Score.  Max Zhang, who has become a huge star in his own right, plays Shen.  When it comes to Kung-Fu movies, Max Zhang is definitely one to keep an out for, as he’s done some really impressive stuff in films like Ip Man 3 and Kill Zone 2.  Devon Sawa…now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.  A long time.  The last time I saw him in a movie was 2000’s Final Destination.  While I’m not going to say that he’s a terrible actor, he hasn’t been in anything noteworthy since Final Destination.  He plays Lester Clark, Jr., the son of Breslin’s former partner, and seeks revenge for his father’s death.  I’m sorry, Sawa has too much of a “nice guy” vibe to him to really come across as a threatening villain.  Not really his fault, though.  Daniel Bernhardt, however, makes a pretty intimidating villain.  He’s an expert martial artist, and that always makes a villain intimidating.  He relishes being a bad guy, and he’s fun to watch.  Honestly, I would have made Bernhardt the main villain instead of Sawa.  Jamie King plays Abigail Ross, Breslin’s girlfriend and one of two damsels in distress.  Eh….?  She’s alright.  She’s certainly got more screen-time than 50 Cent, by at least 10 minutes.  Curtis Jackson, in my opinion, was a surprise from the original film.  I thought he was pretty good there, but he’s nothing more than an extended cameo in this film, despite the fact that he’s featured on the poster and DVD cover.

It takes a little bit to get to the action, but when it hits, it’s non-stop, and I really enjoyed the action here.  There’s no wire-fu going on.  This is good old-fashioned action in a lot of ways.  The fight sequences are really good.  Max Zhang, as far as I’m concerned, is the real star of the show.  Not only does have the charisma to carry a movie, has talents as a martial artist are on full display here.  His best fight and arguably the best one of the film is Zhang’s fight with Daniel Bernhardt.  David Bautista even gets to face off against his stunt double in the film, which makes for a pretty fun display.  The real interesting fight, though, is between Breslin and Clark.  Evidently it wasn’t choreographed at all.  They just winged it and it’s brutal.  While the fight sequences are pretty damn good and some of the kills are very satisfying, there are some issues with the action.  There’s a lot of poorly CGI effects that populate some of the more explosive sequences.  The blood is mostly CGI and the explosions are definitely CG, and it’s pretty obvious.  One thing you should note about the film is that it’s ugly.  Not just in tone, but in the way that it was filmed.  Don’t get me wrong, you can see what’s going with the fights.  The framing is good, but the picture quality is dog-shit.  I picked this up on Blu-Ray and the picture is awful.  I get that this was a very low-budget film, but couldn’t they have used better cameras?

There are a couple of other issues that I want to bring up.  For one, there’s a degree of logical inconsistencies going on here.  For one, Abigail and Daya are both captured from the United States and flown to Latvia.  How exactly does that happen, in this day and age?  Even if you’re flying in a private airplane from a private runway, there’s a lot of security involved in dealing with really important people.  You would expect that the security guys that they used would have been thoroughly vetted and investigated.  Also, the logistics of flying kidnapped people OUT of the United States isn’t exactly kosher.  With security around airports these days, you would figure that somebody would have suspected SOMETHING.  Ultimately, though, those are just some quibbles that I have.  As an action movie, Escape Plan: The Extractors isn’t an awful movie.  It’s got some pretty good things going for it, but it’s hampered by a low budget, poor picture quality and an overly generic story-line.  The action is damned good though, and it hits hard.  I have to give props for that.  Honestly, though, it’s just not that great of a movie.  It’s far from the worst that I’ve seen, but it’s nowhere near the best.  It’s strictly middle-of-the-road for me.

My Final Recommendation:  You’ll want an escape plan to get away from this franchise. 6/10

Released: March 2018

Director: Ahmed Khan

Run Time: 144 Minutes

Not Rated

Distributor: Fox Star Studios

Genre: Action/Romance/Thriller

Cast:
Tiger Schroff: Ranveer Pratap Singh
Disha Patani: Neha
Manoj Bajpayee: DIG Ajay Shergill
Randeep Hooda: Loha Sing Dhull
Deepak Dobriyal: Usman Langda

If you told me a decade ago that I would actually enjoy Bollywood movies by the year 2019, I would’ve laughed at you.  Seriously.  I would’ve told you to get out of my face.  Of all the countries that I’ve seen movies from, India was the one that I avoided the most.  Why?  Call it a cultural misunderstanding, if you will.  A lot of India’s movies were not necessarily made for the rest of the world.  I heard about India’s movies having some decent action and stories but constantly peppered with bizarre musical numbers.  That turned me off of their movies for the longest time.  I’ve since learned that music has important functions in India.  It’s important not just in entertainment, but also in terms of spirituality and religious practices, both of which are deeply ingrained within Hindi culture.  It wasn’t until Heropanti that I got my first taste of India’s cinematic offerings.  I was shocked at how much I actually enjoyed it.  Was it a great movie?  Not really, but I saw what they could do and that is what draws me towards Bollywood, now.  To most Westerners, movies from India can come across as cheesy, overly sappy, and completely silly.  Some of them really are, but these films have become a large part of their cultural identity.  I don’t want them to change that at all.  I want them to make better films for sure, but not at the expense of their soul.   I’ve since seen a few Bollywood action flicks since Heropanti.  Baaghi, Commando 2 and Baaghi 2.  Baaghi 2 is what I’m going to be looking at today.

Baaghi 2 opens as Neha is dropping off her daughter at school when she’s attacked by two masked gunmen.  After knocking her out, they kidnap her daughter, Rhea.  2 months later, Neha is continuing to look for her child, but either nobody cares, or they’ve never seen her little girl before.  Desperate, Neha contacts her ex-boyfriend, Ranveer, to help her.  Ranveer is a Captain in India’s Special Forces, but gets permission from his commanding officer to go on leave.  Ranveer decides to help Neha find her daughter, but soon discovers a sinister conspiracy.  Baaghi 2 is a sequel to 2016’s Baaghi in name only.  In fact, it’s a remake of a film from 2016 called Kshanam.  See?  Western cinema isn’t the only industry in the world to be plagued by remakes.  So, what do I think of the story?  It’s really not that bad, at least in my opinion.  The first half of the film is more about establishing what’s going on and character set up.  It does get a little too convoluted for it’s own good, though.  The second half of the film feels like an entirely different movie altogether.  It becomes more of a thriller and straight-up action flick.  The tonal differences between the two halves are night and day, and I don’t think it works the way that Ahmed Khan wanted it to.  I think the first Baaghi did it better.

In terms of performances, I think this is Tiger Schroff’s best performance yet, given what I’ve seen in previous years.  He actually puts more of an effort into actually acting than just looking good for the camera, although there’s plenty of that to go around.  Disha Patani plays Neha and…well….she’s certainly beautiful, but it takes more than good looks to have chemistry on screen.  I didn’t really see any of that between the two characters.  Yeah, there was a romance between them, but it didn’t feel natural, but then again, this is Bollywood we’re talking about, so there is a certain amount of give-and-take that you have to consider.  Overall, the acting isn’t terrible.  The musical numbers look pretty good and the songs are catchy, as they tend to be in these movies, but you can definitely tell that the singing isn’t done by the actors.  There’s a reason for that.  They may have been trained to dance, but singing is not part of their repertoire, that being said, I’ve long since learned to give Bollywood movies a lot of leeway when it comes to these things.  It’s just how they are, and on certain levels, it’s wonderful.

If there’s one thing that Baaghi 2 delivers on, it’s the action.  While the film can overdo it with slow motion, a lot of the time, you can definitely see what’s going on, and the fight sequences are well-choreographed.  There is a little bit of wire-work here, but like a lot of Bollywood films, the exaggeration is often on purpose to highlight the hero doing what he or she does best.  As I have stated on my other Bollywood film reviews, I try not to apply the same kind of standards that I do with other Asian or Western movies.  If I did that, the film would come across as being much worse than it actually is.  If there’s a complaint that I have with the action in the film, it’s the last half-hour.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s very spectacular, with Tiger’s character being a one-man army taking on a ton of bad guys.  There’s something inherently satisfying about that.  However, the film borrows a little too much from Sylvester Stallone’s First Blood.  Certain lines are literally ripped from the first Rambo film, which is ironic because Tiger Schroff is going to be Rambo in India’s remake of Stallone’s film.  Now, I’m curious, but I digress.  The actual hand-to-hand combat sequences are surprisingly hard-hitting and violent.  There’s a sequence where Tiger does a front flip and caves a guy’s head in.  Damn.  Tiger is an undiscovered action star, as far as I’m concerned.  I would really like to see him branch out from India’s film industry and be a part of something from other Eastern and Western films.

Baaghi 2 is not that bad.  It’s a hell of a lot better than Commando 2, I can tell you that right now.  However, I don’t think it’s as good as the first Baaghi.  The tone of the film is all over the place and some of the acting and musical numbers feel really out place.  It also runs a little too long at times.  144 minutes is kinda stretching it a bit.  It’s well-shot, though, with some pretty decent cinematography and the action is spot on and a lot of fun to watch.  Yeah, Bollywood is bonkers, but you know what?  That’s fine by me.  I could use a few more bonkers movies in my life.

My Final Recommendation:  It’s time to kick-ass, take names, and….dance? 8/10

Released: February 2019(Vietnam)

Director: Le-Van Kiet

Run Time: 98 Minutes

Not Rated

Distributor: Well Go USA

Genre: Action/Thriller

Cast:
Veronica Ngo: Hai Phuong
Cat Vi: Mai
Hoa Tran: Thanh Soi
Than Nhien Phan: Luong

Back in 2008, a tiny film starring Liam Neeson was released.  Taken was a story about a retired CIA operative whose daughter was kidnapped by human traffickers in France.  After hearing the kidnap take place on the phone, Neeson’s character set out on a one-man rampage to find his daughter and bring her home, whilst punishing those responsible.  It was a real solid action film in its own right that was really intense from beginning to end.  While the kidnapping sub-genre has been around for decades, Taken made the sub-genre explode with two sequels and inspired a whole ton of similar films including Traffik, The Call, Kidnap, and Acts of Violence.  It wasn’t just Western cinema that really got a taste of what Taken brought to the table.  We’ve seen multiple films across the Far East that deal with kidnapping such as Merantau and Paradox.  If handled right, kidnapping movies can be some of the most compelling and intense films in cinema.  Now, we have a new kidnapping thriller from Vietnam called Furie.  Is it a good kidnapping thriller or is it among the hundreds of poorly conceived thrillers that nobody remembers?

The film opens as former gang boss Hai Phuong is collecting debts from various people so that she can have her daughter, Mai, get an education so she doesn’t end up like her mother.  During a trip to a local market, little Mai is accused of stealing somebody’s wallet, and when Hai argues with her, Mai runs away.  Mai gets kidnapped by a group of thugs while Hai gives chase only for them to get away with her little girl.  Discovering that they went to Saigon, her old territory, Hai heads to Saigon to find her baby girl and destroy the gangsters responsible.  A good kidnap thriller requires a few things in order for the film to work.  One:  The story needs to be as straight-forward as possible.  The thing about kidnappings is that there is a time limit.  The longer that someone remains missing, the chances of finding them alive decrease dramatically.  In a film, you need to maintain that level of intensity by avoiding going off the beaten path for extended periods of time.  You can have a twist here and there to shake things up a bit, but they shouldn’t derail the main story very much.  That’s what I love about movies like Taken and Furie.  They know to keep the audience engaged by keeping the story focused on a single point.  Furie does a very good job with this by focusing on Hai and her struggle to recover her child.  It’s simple, doesn’t deviate from the main story and is better for it.  It’s not the most original story, but it’s done very well.

The next thing a kidnap thriller needs are characters that feel human and real.  The first half of this are characters that you empathize with.  The second of this idea is to have villains that are still human but are vicious.  You don’t get more brutal than human traffickers.  Furie’s focus is on the character of Hai.  Hai is not a perfect person, in fact she’s done some pretty awful things in her life, but her daughter gives her reason enough to try and turn things around.  You get to see the relationship between Hai and Mai for the first 10-15 minutes, and it’s remarkably effective.  The way the character is written is as someone who is vulnerable, yet determined and bad-ass when she needs to be.  Veronica Ngo’s performance in this film as Hai, is one of the best female performances I’ve seen this year, so far.  This is her movie and she carries it like none other.  I’ve always been a fan of Veronica’s since I first saw her in The Rebel about a decade ago.  Cat Vi plays Hai’s daughter, Mai, and she’s a little spitfire.  She’s a very willful kid and she’s adorable, which makes her kidnapping a pretty rough affair.  On the villain side of things, you have Hoa Tran playing Than Soi, the gang leader.  The character is a ruthless and vicious bitch of a woman that doesn’t care about the harm she’s causing.  Hoa is absolutely fantastic as the villain and extremely intimidating.  Most of the men are relegated to the side-lines except for Luong, a detective that’s been investing a string of child abductions for about three years.  Aside from him, this is a woman’s show with women playing both the hero AND the villain, and I think it works very well for this film.

The final thing a kidnap thriller needs is the conflict between the hero and the villain.  In this case, it’s between Hai and the gang that kidnapped her daughter.  In this arena, Furie excels.  The chase sequences are intense and the fight sequences are brutal.  What separates the fights in this movie from many others is in how much emotion is infused into these battles.  Hai is a woman on a mission and nothing is going to stand in her way.  Each fight that happens is drenched in desperation and hatred.  There is a fight sequence in which Hai tracks down a reformed criminal in order to find out where the gang took her daughter.  She gets into a fight with this guy when his mother tries to intervene and pleads with both Hai and her son to resolve the situation.  It is a scene that is both exciting and emotionally engaging.  I appreciate the fact that the film-makers took the time to make these sequences as much about the characters as they are about the action.  The story and characters should always drive the action, not the other way around.  The final battle on the train at the end of the movie is one of the best final battles I’ve seen in a movie of this sort.  It’s intense, hard-hitting, and well choreographed.  The cinematography is absolutely amazing as well.  A lot of the film takes place at night, but in the underworld of Saigon, the colors and hues just pop out at the audience while maintaining that kind of grit that these movies use.  It’s a fantastic looking film and you can see what’s going on.

While I loved Furie overall, I couldn’t help but notice a few dings here and there.  For one, there are a lot of flashbacks that are supposed to flesh out Hai’s backstory a bit.  While one or two may have sufficed and I would have been fine with them, there were quite a few and they got in the way of the film’s pacing a bit.  Not too much, but it was noticeable.  Some of these flashbacks felt very redundant as we learned about Hai and what she’s capable of with the first ten minutes of the film.  That being said, Furie is one of the better kidnap thrillers that I’ve seen in recent years.  I’ve been a huge fan of Vietnamese action movies for about a decade now, and Furie is another home-run for Vietnam.  They should be proud and Veronica Ngo should be extremely proud of the performance that she delivered here.  She’s been in a handful of Western films including Star Wars: The Last Jedi, but she’s been criminally under-used.  She’s a fantastic actress and action star in her own right.  I wish that Western film-makers would recognize that fact.  If you like action movies and/or kidnap thrillers in the style of Taken, then you should check out Furie immediately.  I think it’s a fantastic film that delivers on all fronts.

My Final Recommendation:  Hell hath no fury like a mother with a particular set of skills.  8.5/10

Released: March 2017(USA)

Director: Deven Bhojani

Not Rated

Run Time: 122 Minutes

Genre: Bollywood/Action

Distributor: Reliance Entertainment

Cast:
Vidyut Jammwal: Karanvir Dogra
Adah Sharma: Bhavna Reddy
Esha Gupta: Maria
Freddy Daruwala: Bhaktawar

I can honestly say that I have now seen movies from every populated continent on the planet: North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia.  Each continent and subsequent countries have a tendency to bring their own unique flavor to the film industry, especially when it comes to certain genres.  Action movies from China have a distinct look and feel and are very different from somewhere like France.  Obviously, Hollywood is the biggest film industry in the world, so the influence that Hollywood has had on other film industries around the world is incalculable.  There are certain countries in Asia that have recently really begun to churn out some pretty solid action flicks.  Thailand, Indonesia, the Phillipines, Cambodia, and Vietnam have been putting out some pretty solid flicks over the past decade.  One country that’s managed to surprise me a bit in the action film scene is…well….India.  I got my first taste of Bollywood action movies with films like Heropanti and Baaghi, starring Tiger Schroff.  Let me tell you:  Bollywood is an experience.  I just checked out another action film from India called Commando 2: The Black Money Trail.  Did India surprise me again?  Uh….yes….and no.

The film opens as special forces agent Karan infiltrates a criminal hideout to take down a notorious money launderer.  Finding out that the actual leader behind the scheme is in another country, Karan sets out to find the criminal known as Vicky and to locate the billions of rupees that were stolen.  Look, I’m not going to tell you that I’m some kind of expert on Bollywood movies or how they are made and what they entail.  My experience with Bollywood movies is very, very limited.  Three movies, in fact.  But I did manage to brave the strange and the bizarre that is Bollywood, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening there.  The aformentioned Heropanti and Baaghi films are indicative of that.  That being said, the story-telling and film-making standards in India are vastly different to their Western and Eastern counterparts.  It all comes down to cultural differences, of which there are many.  With that in mind, the story in Commando 2 is not very good.  I haven’t seen the first film, mostly because I can’t find it anywhere, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the 1985 Schwarzenegger film.  The problem here is that the story is not very engaging, and that’s most likely due to my lack of knowledge about what’s happening in India right now, outside of what’s being said in the mainstream media.  It also comes down to the writing, which, even by Bollywood standards, is not very good.  The twists and turns that are constantly being thrown at the audience make no sense whatsoever and the film is trying to be smarter and more clever than it really needs to be.  It’s okay for a story to be simplistic, and more often than not, that can engage the audience a lot more than something that is convoluted.  The complex story-telling here just doesn’t work, at least not for me.

The acting here is…..passable.  Again, the standards that I use to judge acting in other films kind of has to be adjusted a bit for Bollywood movies.  Vidyut Jammwal does a lot of mugging for the camera and really does nothing more than that outside of the action beats.  The ladies in the film are obviously very beautiful and do a very good job looking fantastic.  But that’s really about all they do.  I’m not necessarily faulting the actresses for that.  Again, the writing comes into play here.  Vidyut is a martial artist and stunt-man, so I can forgive him somewhat for being bland as an actor, but he does deliver some pretty good stunts and fights.  There’s a lot of gorgeous people here, just not a whole lot of substance.

The movie opens with what I consider to be the best action sequence in the entire film.  Vidyut’s character storms a criminal hideout taking down crooks left and right with his flips, kicks and gunshots.  It’s actually pretty good.  Some of the fight choreography isn’t half-bad, and some of the camerawork is pretty solid, as in we can see what’s going on.  Unfortunately, even with a solid action star like Mr. Jammwal, a lot of the later action sequences aren’t a whole lot of fun, because they feel very generic.  The director of the film is clearly inexperienced in making action films, because the majority of action is flat and mostly uninteresting.  The director is apparently a veteran of comedies and such, and it’s really obvious that he just doesn’t understand how action is supposed to work.  The final battle that takes place on a roof-top involves a surprising amount of wire-work, which bugs me, because most of the action in the film is wireless.  The stunts and the parkour sequences don’t use wires.  Also, the extreme use of slow-motion through-out these sequences just slow the movie down.  Slow-motion is a fantastic tool when you want to high-light a specific moment.  Here, it’s used way too much and is very distracting.

Ultimately, I can’t recommend this one, even to casual action or Bollywood fans.  It’s not very good.  The writing is terrible with some really half-baked performances.  I mean, there is no chemistry between the characters whatsoever.  A lot of the action sequences are very pedestrian, even by Bollywood standards, and the whole thing just feels uninspired.  While I was expecting musical numbers to show up during the film, as they tend to do in Bollywood films, the only musical sequence shows up in the end credits.  I think those would have spiced up the goings-on considerably.  Yeah, this isn’t a good one.  Skip it.  Check out Baaghi or Heropanti instead, if you want your Bollywood action fix.

My Final Recommendation: 3/10.