Expendables 2 practically has an action star for every year of your life! Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Willis, John Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris. . . that’s a lot of names on the Expendables poster, but do great names necessarily make a great movie?
When there are so many big names in one movie the director (Simon West) is handed one heck of a challenging task. How can so many stars be balanced out in the plot without it snowballing out of control? It can’t and it doesn’t.
Sylverser Stallone leads a band of mercenaries who must ecover a plutonium Macguffin from a fiction Eastern European country. But oh oh, here comes muscles from Brussels Jean-Claude Van Damme’s villain Jean Vilain (genius naming truly). So it is that you have a basic plot that makes room for the action you would expect. The action rolls through typical action movie locations, including an abandoned village, an abandoned mine, an abandoned army base. . .I guess these abandoned locations make sense given the abandoned plot. . .
What you’d want from Expendables 2 is top notch performances parodying the stars’ selves. What you get is the worst of all of them. The cheese is off the scale. It’s some form of triple-matured-farmhouse-cheddar. It doesn’t taste good. It leaves a bitter taste in your mouth. The sort of bitter taste that makes you feel like you’ve been jipped out of a few quid and a couple of hours of your time.
I guess if you really really really love every star in this flick you might conceivable smile a little while watching it. But you’re more likely to find yourself wondering why you didn’t just watch Terminator, Rocky or one of the other movies starring this band of once-great-now-disgraced stars.
Pop stars, movie stars, other celebrities. .. why oh why oh why do they have to launch comebacks which will inevitably lead to their humiliation and completely destroy the great memories you had of them?
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