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Dom Robinson reviews
Escape was never thought possible… until now.
Columbia TriStar
- Cert:
- Cat.no: CDR 27880
- Running time: 89 minutes
- Year: 1999
- Pressing: 2001
- Region(s): 2, PAL
- Chapters: 28 plus extras
- Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1
- Languages: English, German
- Subtitles: 17 languages available
- Widescreen: 1.85:1
- 16:9-Enhanced: Yes
- Macrovision: Yes
- Disc Format: DVD 5
- Price: £19.99
- Extras: Trailer, Filmographies, Featurette
Director:
- Geoff Murphy
(Absolute Zero, Blind Side, Fortress 2: Re-Entry, Freejack, Race Against Time, Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, Young Guns II: Blaze of Glory)
Producer:
- John Flock
Screenplay:
- John Flock and Peter Doyle
Music:
- Christopher Franke
Cast:
- John Brennick: Christopher Lambert
Susan Teller: Pam Grier
Peter Teller: Patrick Malahide
Elena Rivera: Liz May Brice
Marcus Jackson: Anthony C. Hall
Nussbaum: Willie Garson
Sato: Yuji Okumoto
Gordon: Fredric Lane
Max Polk: Nick Brimble
Fortress 2: Re-Entry starts off ten years after the original, released in 1994, as some faces from the past show up to ask him to help them wreak revenge on the Men-Tel plant who gave him such a shitty time last time. Before you know it, the authorities are onto them, John Brennick’s (Christopher Lambert) house is stormed by the futuristic FBI and blown up. As he’s captured, he is left wondering whether his wife and child, who he led through to an escape tunnel under the house, are still alive. Oh, the pain of it all (!)
For those who saw the first film, you know the drill. For the rest, you can rest assured that Brennick will eventually escape with a few of the others, despite the not-so-fat controller Peter Teller’s (Patrick Malahide, still making a bad-guy career out of American action movies since Minder finished) threat that, being up in space this time, they are 26,000 miles away from the nearest bus station and anyone who steps out of line will be subjected to pain via their neural implant, or the really bad ones will be forced to, literally, step outside (!)
Most of the rest of the no-name cast are instantly forgettable, while Pam Grier has a completely pointless cameo that makes you wonder why she’s there. If you must watch this film which isn’t half as entertaining as the original, rent it, but don’t buy it.
The anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen picture looks very good indeed, with a few print flecks but no noticeable artifacts. It handles the dark scenes well, which is handy since there’s rather a lot of them. The average bitrate is 5.52Mb/s, occasionally peaking above 8Mb/s.
The sound comes in Dolby Digital 5.1 for English and German, but the latter doesn’t have as much ‘oomph’. For a sci-fi action film, there are plenty of chances for the speakers to shine – explosions, gunfire and meteor showers are just three examples.
In the extras dept., there’s just a 90-second theatrical Trailer, a four-minute Featurette that throws up no surprises and filmographies for Lambert and Grier.
There are 28 chapters, the menus are static and silent and subtitles come in 17 languages : English, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Icelandic, Hindi, Hebrew, Dutch, Croatian, German, Turkish, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Greek, Norwegian and Arabic.
PICTURE QUALITY
SOUND QUALITY
EXTRAS
OVERALL 
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.