The Expendables 2 Review

 

Gearing up for battle in the Expendables 2 

The Expendables 2

B-

 

 A review by Frederick Cholowski

Stallone, Statham, Willis, Schwarzenegger, Van Damme, and Norris amongst many others have all been piled in to one of the biggest 80’s action hero fest ever, the Expendables 2. The Expendables 2 is big, bloated, and stupid featuring many gun fights, explosions and bad dialogue. However, The Expendables 2 has going for it what other recent films like it don’t; it’s a whole boatload of fun. It’s self referential, oddly satirical, and one of the single most fun movie experiences I’ve seen all year; despite it being big, bloated and stupid.

Barney (Stallone) and his rag tag group (including Statham, Couture, Lundgren, Li, Crews, and Hemsworth) have set out on another mission. This time it’s to help Church (Willis) and Trench (Schwarzenegger) stop the villainous, get this, Vilain (Van Damme) from using lots and lots of weapons grade plutonium. Also Stallone and company pick up a female for the ride this time, a CIA agent named Maggie (Nan Yu), who, like the rest of the crew, gets to beat people up and explode things as well.

If you’re looking for plot, character development, or great dialogue you’re walking into the wrong film. The Expendables 2 is all about action, action, action, and lots of self referential one liners. For the most part it doesn’t get tedious because of a few spots. At the beginning it starts to get tedious after a while…. Then Chuck Norris comes and makes the best extended cameo I’ve seen in a long time (I mean he gets to come in only to make a Chuck Norris Joke, be amazing and then leave. Plus The Good, The Bad and The Ugly music doesn’t hurt either). The middle gets a little tedious and then Schwarzenegger comes and steals the show. It just somehow works despite there being no character (throughout the movie I constantly forgot each character’s name and just went by the actors name), no real plot (just excuses to shoot more people and blow more things up), and dialogue that make the Star Wars prequels look like Shakespeare (seriously when *minor spoiler* one of the group dies near the beginning of the film he literally says “I’m dying”).

Also if you’re looking for good acting, you won’t find it here either. Most are terrible at delivering terrible dialogue and overall just add to the laugh factor (this time not on purpose). The standouts (if you can call them that) are Norris, Lundgren, Van Damme, and Schwarzenegger who manage to provide light to the screen when they appear. The worst of the crew is Bruce Willis who is so very, very wooden whenever he tries to speak his lines (which may be no fault of his own considering how bad the dialogue is). Even so this is just old action stars having fun and the bad acting is just all part of the fun of spoofing the old movies. Plus this film never takes itself seriously so the acting never really gets in the way.

The meat and potatoes of this film are the action scenes and this film definitely delivers on the promise of being big and loud. Lots of fist and gun fights and explosions are to be had here with most of the scenes feeling very much like the 80s. It’s all over the top and ridiculous, like the rest of the film, and provides some great moments of pure entertainment (*minor spoiler* when Vilain kills the Expendable who gets killed he spin kicks the knife from his henchman’s hand into said expendables heart, totally unnecessary yet so awesome). All the sequences are nicely shot (good direction from director Simon West) and work well as individual scenes that are big and loud.

Not much more needs to be said about The Expendables 2. It’s big, bloated, stupid, and a whole heck of a lot of fun. It seems like all the actors are in on their own joke, and they constantly make witty jokes about their older movies, and about bad 80s action movies in general that make the film more than barely watchable. If one goes in with the right mind set The Expendables 2 (and likes to laugh at amazingly bad dialogue) is defiantly one of the most entertaining movies of the summer; despite being big, bloated, and stupid.