Movie Review: The Expendables 2 (2012)

Action heroes led by Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger have stormed to the top of the North American box office chart with The Expendables 2.

The film took $28.8m in its first weekend. It knocked The Bourne Legacy into second place after the latter’s good first weekend run.

The Expendables 2 brings back essentially the same cast, with a few additions, and features approximately the same quota of explosions and butt-kicking as its predecessor did, give or take more flame-throwing, skull-bashing, explosions, butt-kicking and, oh well, more dead bad guys.

Sylvester Stallone returns as mercenary Barney Ross, who leads a band of muscle-bound merry men. Barney is usually found in the company of his sardonic sidekick Lee Christmas (Jason Statham). Statham is his usual coolness intact acting even when emerging from very violent situations.

Gunner Jensen (Dolph Lundgren), Toll Road (Randy Couture), Hale Caesar (Terry Crews), and Jet Li – one of the most appealing characters in the first movie – all appear in the film in their own time. Then, there’s a fresh new Asian face named Maggie (Yu Nan), who seems to exist solely to make moo-moo eyes at rugged he-man Ross, who's having none of that girly stuff. There's also a greenhorn named Billy the Kid (Liam Hemsworth).

Most of the action takes place in Bulgaria, where Ross and Co. have been dispatched by shadowy CIA go-between Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) to prevent a heap of weapons-grade plutonium from falling into the wrong hands. This requires crash-landing a plane, blowing assorted evildoers to kingdom come, and making the acquaintance of a village full of women whose menfolk have been enslaved and put to work in a plutonium mine.

 Director Simon West (The Mechanic, Con Air) guides the plot as well as the body count. Many may be quick to say that the plot and storyline of Expendables and Expendables 2 is too simple; show us an action film that needs deep thinking because people are coming to watch the action.

 The bodies really do pile up though. TheExpendables 2 is reasonably a boom-boom, rat-tat-tat, wham, wham comic book, which it seems to be. Honestly, people don’t buy comics for the story or even the plot. There’s more wit and jokes though, compared to its predecessor. Sometimes even the dialogue sounds comic-like: "Better duck!" "Oh, [expletive]!" "I got this!" "Fire!" "Yeah!" "Whoa!"

 If you can watch the film to the end without loving Jean-Claude Van Damme’s villainous role, there is something wrong with your sense of action movies.