Escape Plan 2

Sylvester Stallone returns as the head of a company testing the security of prisons where society's most ruthless and violent bad guys are incarcerated, but this outing sees his trusty lieutenant Shu (Huang Xiaoming) behind bars after being kidnapped while protecting his billionaire cousin. As his shadowy captor throws him into bare-knuckled face-offs with an assortment of thugs, Shu's buddies on the outside race to locate the mysterious clink and use every ounce of their expertise to free him. The original first film was propelled by the combined star power of Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but with Arnie absent and Sly's participation reduced to an extended cameo, the second instalment is little more than a succession of misfiring fisticuffs (the film went straight to DVD in the US). The hi-tech prison setting remains the same, but it feels more like a series of tediously bone-crunching undercard cage fighting scenes in a lacklustre episode of The Crystal Maze.