Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Scott Adkins Chuck Norris
Director: Simon West
Running Time: 103 minutes
Released Out Now
Released by: Lionsgate UKMany, many years ago it was every action fan's dream to have all his heroes in one cinematic basket. Sure, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Jean Claude-Van Damme all had successful parallel careers, but the closest you could get to seeing them together was to hang out vainly at Planet Hollywood and hope for a premiere or special event to spontaneous occur.
An actual film in which they all appeared together... it might have been cat-nip for studio executives, but whether it was ego, money or sheer time-tabling it never happened. As each of their careers began to dip into DVD territory (or in Arnie's case... a different black hole politics) it seemed even less likely that we'd see a big-screen team-up that was anything more than a cheeky cameo or reference. Bruce Willis continued to have an A-List career, but there were a new generation of pretenders-to-the-thrown and a growing market for a more eastern-style of action with trained martial-artists.
So, in many ways The Expendables (2010) franchise achieved the impossible, combining some of these irresistible forces and immovable objects and creating a gung-ho romp built on testosterone and nostalgia. Sure, the director and star, Sylvester Stallone only shared one real scene with his fellow resteraunters, but the likes of Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke and Jet Li were there to bring in the audience.
"Bluntly, the script is appallingly vacant, the dialogue strained and creaking and the banter painfully tilted, loaded with more signposted movie in-jokes and references than an automatic rifle has bullets... and yet in many ways it doesn't matter because the film never takes itself seriously..."
There may have been mixed reactions and reviews, but The Expendables created enough impact to generate the idea of a follow-up... but they'd have to go bigger, wider, longer and louder. So they did.
It would be utterly pointless to tell you the sequel's plot other than Barney Stone (Stallone) vows vengeance for the death of a colleague and issues his surviving team members with the key instruction about the enemy: "track 'em, find 'em kill 'em". There in a nutshell is the whole ninety-minutes and within that time-frame all you will see are explosions, bullets, tanks and a team who love the smell of testosterone in the morning.
... in many ways it doesn't matter because the film, directed by Simon West of Con-Air fame) never takes itself seriously. Though it sometimes falters along the line it tries to walk between in-your-face standard action and overt parody of the genre to which it owes its lineage, it finally plumps to throw any credibility out the window and just toss everyone and everything into the frame. Casting Jean Claude Van Damme as the bad guy (and calling him Jean Vilian), having Chuck Norris turn up as a 'Lone Wolf' mercenary, having Schwarzenegger say "I'll be back..." so many times that even Bruce Willis calls him out on the catchphrase are all masterstrokes in meta-textual mock-machismo... literally doing everything except look into the lens and physically wink at the punters.
Though they make light of their senior age themselves, there is the genuine constant shadow hanging over the whole production that they've missed their REAL opportunity for an superb action-outing by a good decade. Though as tough as old boots, Schwarzenegger and Stallone look like walking, talking weathered, leathered, botox'd punchbags rather than real action men and the only way this can work is to make themselves the punchline of the punch-fest. On one hand this is terrible in every regard, in another it's a romp so absurdly silly that you are brought along with the madness until it becomes more like a steroid-enhanced guilty pleasure. The cast are clearly having a ball and with the exception of Jet Li who disappears a third of the way in, everyone gets a good amount of screen time, including the likes of current action-man Jason Statham and another British actor Scott Adkins who scores well as Vilain's chief henchmen.
Expendables 2 does nothing more than it says on the tin, but there's really no excuse for not knowing what you'll get before you buy your ticket. If the action genre is the one for you, you'll be pleasantly concussed by this wide-load juggernaut.
3/5
1 comments:
Solid review. I had a great time watching The Expendables 2. It’s a bad movie but it’s so much fun to watch and it’s very easy to defend because everyone involved was in on the joke. And that’s all that mattered to me.
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