Christopher Lambert; the king of newer B-movies. The guy has been in every(I think) Highlander movie so far, despite the fact that only the first was particularly popular. He's done so many B-movies that one has to wonder if he is aware that the films are bad and doesn't care, or if he really doesn't realize their quality(or, rather, lack thereof). Here, he returns in a sequel to the fairly low-budget B-movie action-science fiction flick, Fortress. In the first one, the prison was huge, and underneath the ground. Here, it's... well, it's still huge, but this time, it's in outer space. I guess the writer thought, hey, the first time, it was underneath the ground... the only place that could be worse than that would be outer space. I hope he's right... I surely do, because if he is, maybe we won't see anymore half-cooked action-sci-fi flicks like this. Lambert portrays the exact same character, which I suppose is good, as he was a decent character in the first. A few somewhat big names also join the cast, most noticeably Pam Grier. The cast of characters from the first are pretty much remade(apart from Lambert himself), meaning that the new cast pretty much just fills the shoes of the characters from the first(anyone who knows how the first ended knows why). Unfortunately, that means that the film seems more like an overblown remake with the same guy portraying the lead, rather than a sequel. The hacker from the first(who was a neurotic, nervous guy, beautifully portrayed by great horror-talent, Jeffrey Combs) is replaced by an annoying black-guy stereotype. The female lead is replaced by a girl from the resistance(which Lambert's character is said to be a member of as well... odd... I don't remember that from the first... does that mean he joined the resistance after he got a kid? Who'd do that?), instead of his wife as it was in the first... apparently mainly because the scriptwriter couldn't find a good way to capture both Lambert and the wife-character, without capturing the kid. The Men-Tel prison commander(who was played by the cool bad-guy actor, Kurtwood Smith, from RoboCop fame) is now an annoying wimp with a ridiculous British accent that really gets on your nerves(as opposed to the cool Smith, who was a menacing and threatening presence). The plot is a rehash of the first. The pacing isn't particularly good. The very scenes in the movie seems to be(for the most part) remakes of the scenes of the original(talk about lack of originality...) and the action is mostly just rehashes of the first, just made a little less exciting(remember those way-cool machine guns with three barrels in the first? They're replaced with dull futuristic-looking stick-stun-guns). The special effects are decent at best. The script is a weak rehash of the first, with a few added sub-plots, none of which being particularly good... most of them are just there to keep the film going, or put it an action scene, in order to distract the audience from the poor writing. The dialog is pretty bad, with one or two exceptions. All in all, the film is just a tame rehash of everything the first was(which isn't even a lot). Somebody took the first film, said, "hey, this is popular... but it's not very good... how about if we try to do something of even lesser quality and see if people will like it?" Probably writer/producer/actor John Flock, who, going by the plot and the writing of this film, really is as dumb as he looks. I recommend this only to huge fans of the first Fortress, Lambert or B-movies. Everyone else; don't bother. There's a million better ways to spend 90 minutes, and there's at least as many reasons not to see this film. 5/10
