Action Hero MoviesThis is more of a remake than a sequel. Nothing really continues from the original. It’s not an identical copy, but some particular scenes are pretty much identical (with inferior execution of course).
As expected by the promotional material and the level of the lead cast members, this movie has a considerably cheaper vibe than the original — especially on the cinematography front — but surprisingly the acting is pretty good and the movie does very well at keeping the pace going fast enough to sustain an entertaining vibe. Credit to Luke Goss who performs out of his skin, backed by supporting cast members like Sean Bean, Ving Rhames and Danny Trejo who action fans will be familiar with from other movies and are all about as big & strong in action movie stardom as Luke Goss, if not bigger, so he’s done well to score them in his supporting cast and the producers have done poorly in not making him also just a supporting cast member for someone markedly stronger — maybe they had Statham in mind for Goss’s role here until Statham turned it down.
There are a couple of minor returning characters from the original, although one of them was killed last time round: 14K (meant to be dead) and the nerdy fat white guy who worked in Statham’s car crew.
The cheapness of this movie is telling throughout, but the pace does well to make it tolerable, however when it gets to around an hour in, when the prisoners get acquainted with their vehicles and begin racing and killing each other all in one fast paced long monotonous scene, the cheap & nasty level of this movie really peaks. The original never would have overwhelmed us like that, which only resulted in a kind of boredom due to constant hollow action after a shocking burst of pace. The original would have been much more conscious of momentum and would have considered the execution of this one comically bad. From the start of the second hour it becomes tempting to fast forward through a lot of the hollow action. And although there are a couple of in between scenes and minor plot developments, it pretty much doesn’t let up with the shallow monotonous racing drama from the start of the second hour until the end. The first hour was the good part of the movie, the second is wildly all over the place and has entirely lost focus.
It’s not until the last quarter hour when we learn that this is actually a prequel to the original, since Luke Goss gets burnt to a crisp and becomes the original Frankenstein racer who was already 4 wins in at the start of the original movie. From here, the last 10 minutes are actually pretty good. It’s just a shame we had to sit through (or skip) the previous half an hour — the main course of the movie.
All things considered, I rate this movie So-So — that’s around a couple levels below average, and about 4 clean levels below the original. But it’s not worthless — it’s mostly watchable, and mostly mildly entertaining if you’re terribly bored and have not seen it before or in a long time at least.