With Con Air's Simon West taking over the directing reins from Sylvester Stallone, The Expendables 2 is the star-studded, action epic many fans had hoped for with the first film. The plot is simple enough: The titular mercs (Stallone, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Terry Crews, Randy Couture and new team members Liam Hemsworth and Yu Nan) lose one of their own during a mission overseas.
They then seek bloody retribution against the sinister Jean Vilain (Jean-Claude Van Damme) and his private army, who also just so happen to have access to six tons of weapons-grade plutonium! The Expendables will have to call in some help from fellow, long-in the-tooth badasses -- Trench (Arnold Schwarzenegger), CIA operative Mr. Church (Bruce Willis), and the enigmatic Booker (Chuck Norris) -- to get the job done.
The action lover's dream team doesn't disappoint in The Expendables 2, a sequel that's bigger, bolder and more badass than the original. This isn’t a great movie in the by-the-book sense, but it's loads of dumb fun and an old-fashioned action flick that works as a nostalgia trip for fans of the muscle-bound shoot ‘em-ups of the ‘80s and ‘90s.
The film’s action is non-stop, from the team’s opening rescue of a kidnapped Chinese billionaire to a climactic airport battle pitting the entire lineup against Van Damme and his henchmen. The much-hyped mano-a-mano brawl between Stallone and Van Damme is as brutally awesome as you’d hope, with the former showcasing his boxing badassery and the latter his still formidable kickboxing skills. Indeed, Van Damme is arguably the best one in the movie. He makes for a wonderfully sleazy bad guy – the film has a villain named Vilain! – and Van Damme really seems to be enjoying himself throughout.
Hemsworth brings some heart and not-too-saccharine nobility to his role as Billy the Kid, the young heir apparent to Sly’s Barney Ross, while Yu Nan holds her own with the testosterone-heavy ensemble. The funniest (and most meta) parts of the movie are the scenes with Norris. The movie has great fun playing on Norris’ now comedy fodder mystique in a role that’s a direct nod to his characters from Lone Wolf McQuade and Good Guys Wear Black. Norris’ character here is a one man army-meets-deus ex machina.
Willis seems to rouse himself from his now-predictable sleepwalking through movies long enough to have a nice, tense scene with Stallone early on, and it’s an undeniable hoot to see him and Arnold in action together (especially their funny Smart Car gag). That said, their jokey nods to their most famous movie lines are groaners that fall flat.
Surprisingly, Schwarzenegger is pretty rusty here; his comedic timing is off and he seems like he needed a few more takes to be more like his old onscreen self after so many years away from movies. Lundgren gets a few moments to shine here, with the movie managing to work in a few nods to his impressive academic background, and Statham has a few thrilling knife fight scenes.
As said earlier, The Expendables 2 isn’t a great movie by any stretch – there are some dramatic scenes that play as unintentionally funny, the characters are all paper-thin, and Stallone’s delivery makes Bane sound positively eloquent – but you’d have to be a real tightass to not enjoy seeing Sly, Arnold and Bruce finally kicking ass together on the silver screen. The Expendables 2 certainly ends this summer movie season with a helluva bang.
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