Movie Review: The Expendables 2

The Expendables 2  $$ 1/2

R

103 Minutes

Starring: (Are you kidding? Who isn’t in this movie?)

Director: Simon West.

 

            Just in case you didn’t see the first Expendables movie let me explain it to you. Throw together all of the top action stars into a single movie and have them shoot and endless parade of victims. Then toss in a very vestigial plot to connect all the violence. Ta-da! You have the Expendables.

            Oops. That was the review.

            Really, what is there to say about this movie? It has an all-star line-up: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Jet Li, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jason Stratham, and Dolph Lundgren. That is the main attraction.

            Put guns and knives in their hands and give them bodies to attack. The film is E-X-T-R-E-M-E-L-Y violent. There is plenty of obviously fake blood splattering everywhere. And there is a fair amount of profanity. This film earned it’s ‘R’ rating.  

            For those of you wanting more than a grocery cart full of action heroes, here is the plot. Barney (Stallone) owes Church a favor (Willis). Church wants Barney to take his team into the former Soviet Union and extract the contents of a safe that are in the remains of a crashed plane.  The Villain (Van Damme) gets the drop on Barney and his crew and takes the mysterious item. Then the good guys spend the rest of the moving killing a veritable army of thugs.

            You know the story is unimportant when the credits just list the major antagonist as “villain”. Think I’m kidding, look it up. The Expendables 2.

            The one redeeming element of this film is the dialogue. Quips and one-liners are the life-blood of action films and the writers did an excellent job with filling this movie with everything from the clever to the down-right cheesy. And they work.

            I have an unusual situation for this review. The film earns a measly 2 ½ movie bucks for bad acting, horrible writing, and low-to-average special effects, but I am going to urge you to see it in the theaters. Why? Because this is the worst movies that I thoroughly enjoyed watching.       

  

            Randy’s Rating System 

$$$$   = Full Price    See this movie right away and pay full price, it’s worth it.

$$$     = Matinee      Catch this as a matinee or other discounted showing.

$$        = Discount     Wait until this movie reaches a discount theater near you.

$          = Rental         Wait until this movie reaches your local video rental outlet.

0          = No Sale       Don’t see this movie at any price.