Still Clunking Along: "The Expendables 2"

The past decade has seen a steady stream of intelligent action films.  Doug Liman started the movement with The Bourne Identity (2002), based on Robert Ludlum’s bestselling novels about an amnesiac black-ops assassin.  Martin Campbell reinvented James Bond with Casino Royale (2006), which did away with the excess that had plagued the franchise.  And Jon Favreau’s Iron Man (2008) proved that a major studio could produce a fun, loud superhero film without sacrificing quality.

Yet there is always room for excess.  In 2010, Sylvester Stallone bucked the trend of character-driven action pictures with The Expendables, a smash-mouth movie that paid homage to and featured many of the stars of the 1980s and early 1990s musclebound blockbusters.  Two things were clear: the film wouldn’t challenge the intellect in any way, and, if it was even mildly successful, would be the basis for a new franchise.  Its worldwide box office gross topped $274 million and, just like the film itself, the prospect of a sequel was a no-brainer.

For The Expendables 2, this time directed by Simon West, our friendly mercenaries have returned, led by Barney Ross (Stallone) and his right-hand man Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), this time going up against a new enemy: the dastardly Jean Vilain (yes, that’s really the bad guy’s name), played by Jean-Claude Van Damme.  With a small army at his command, Vilain steals a device from our guys that indicates the whereabouts of a cache of weapons-grade plutonium which he plans to recover and sell to the highest bidder.  

It may not be the densest or most clever of plots but, to be honest, how much are we really expecting here?  This movie is about two things: one-liners and violence.

Expendables 2 has the former in spades.  Terry Crews, as barrel-weapons expert Hale Caesar, provides a slew of boisterous, mostly monosyllabic outbursts that are almost as entertaining as those from the series of Old Spice commercials he has starred in.  One would think that a man continuously screaming “What!” and “Oh!” at the top of his lungs would wear on the nerves, but Crews’ antics are consistently delightful.

Perhaps the film’s best moment comes courtesy of Chuck Norris as Booker, a veritable one-man army who swoops in from out of nowhere to save our pinned-down team.  “I heard you got bitten by a King Cobra,” Ross tells him.  “Yeah,” Booker replies, “and after five long, painful days...the cobra died.”  The perfectly delivered line, a reference to the ‘Chuck Norris Facts’ that have been circulating around the web for years, elicited a huge reaction from the audience, whio erupted in raucous laughter.

Yet where it really counts, there has been no improvement.  The sequel still suffers the same problem as the first installment: a disappointingly minimal amount of violence.  The opening sequence is quite satisfying, with our team compiling an impressive body count during a rescue mission in Nepal.  But what follows is a whole lot of nothing, with combat sequences that are mediocre at best.  Everybody knows that most of these guys are well past their primes, but even so there’s far less action than advertised, which leaves us wondering what the point of it all was.

The Expendables franchise will eventually come to a point where people will become so tired of its empty promises that they’ll simply refuse to buy a ticket anymore.  Yet Stallone seems determined to continually produce these movies until he ticks every conceivable action star off his list.

As gaudy as the casts of the first two installments have been, there’s still a slew of superstars that we could see in the future.  There will be talk of Steven Seagal, Wesley Snipes, and Nicolas Cage, all of whom would be solid additions, but I’m thinking bigger.  

If we are going to be submitted to more sequels, let’s at least see something different. What about bringing in more international talent, such as Hong Kong action veteran Chow Yun-fat, or Abhishek Bachchan (right), the leading man of Bollywood’s high-octane Dhoom series?  Going outside Hollywood would be a welcome departure, not to mention a potential boon for overseas box office receipts.  And, while they’re at it, the series could get more women involved, like Angelina Jolie, Milla Jovovich, or Kate Beckinsale, all of whom have proven their mettle as action superstars.

Though the film hardly delivers on the action front, it’s still a blast to watch these guys pal around with each other.  Thankfully, The Expendables 2 takes itself far less seriously than its predecessor, which makes it a hell of a lot more enjoyable to watch.  But just how much longer will we put up with these mostly hollow movies?  It all depends on who decides to show up next.