The Expendables 2
Director: Simon West
Writers: story by Ken Kaufman & David Agosto and Richard Wenk, screenplay by Richard Wenk and Sylvester Stallone, based on characters created by Dave Callaham
Producers: Basil Iwanyk, Avi Lerner, Danny Lerner, Kevin King Templeton, John Thompson, Les Weldon
Stars: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Liam Hemsworth, Scott Adkins, Nan Yu
The Expendables 2 is unlike any action movie I have seen, even The Expendables. Whereas the original used its Legends-of-the-Weight-Room casting stunt as both a throwback posture hearkening to days of large biceps and guiltless mayhem, and a source of an occasional wink, its sequel seems to be in full-wink throughout its 103-minute length. And a 103-minute-long wink isn’t a playful gesture, it’s a sign of possible nerve damage.
With a higher budget, the experienced Simon West (Con Air, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider) spelling franchise co-writer/star Sylvester Stallone in the director’s chair, and an expanded ensemble of heroes past, the movie does not fail to be bigger. Even the knives seem longer. But with its premise and the audacity of its blood-spillage less surprising in repetition, this movie makes the conscious choice to push even further into the meta territory of an all-star variety show, with Stallone appointing himself Chairman of a Rat Pack of ultra-violence.
The characters have names, but are they even relevant? What we are watching are veteran movie stars, kidding each other with old catch phrases and characters they have played over the last 35 years in-between killing people who make less money than them. We are there not for the back story or character flourishes of mercenary crew leader Barney Ross (Stallone), but because Stallone has promised us that in this movie, he is going to get into a fight with Jean-Claude Van Damme, and we have watched the both of them fight other people so often that seeing them fight each other, even past their physical prime, sounds appealing. The character played by Van Damme is named “Jean Vilain”, which is in the fine tradition of classical theater and silent melodrama which named characters by their types. You could bill him as “Jean – A Villain” and waste no one’s time.
The story, such as it is, finds Ross’s crew of beer-chugging, motorcycle-riding, one-liner-barking roustabouts enlisted by the ambiguous Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) to retrieve a high-tech black box from a crashed plane. This they do, only to be ambushed by Jean – A Villain – who seizes the box (which contains a map to some deadly old Soviet plutonium) and murders one of the crew. In what surely must be a self-aware sick joke, the hallowed cliché about the colleague who is going to quit and run off with his girl after this one last mission sees itself reassigned to a different age group than the norm; with no less doom attached.
As this fallen friend is mourned, Barney Ross raises a question that punctures the movie’s reality into ours – why is it that men of his breed haven’t been killed off and replaced? Why are they still alive and starring in this adventure? A story of this type requires a certain type of hero, and when the youngest regulars in The Expendables are Jason Statham and Terry Crews – both 44, according to IMDB – you begin to reflect that one generation’s stories reflect one generation’s struggles. And different struggles produce heroes who just aren’t made for The Expendables.
One of the action settings is a rotting and fake “New York” street purportedly built by the Soviets for Cold War training; but it could be the bombed-out skeleton of any stock New York street on any movie studio lot. Effectively, the movie acknowledges that the gunfight is taking place in an arena constructed only for that purpose, and that what we are watching, beneath the quips and fireballs, is men wandering the abandoned playground where their generation came of age, trying to recover something. The fighting is less fresh, but it is strangely poignant.
The faces which have already graced so many posters are here not weathered by life and the elements like you might see in a Leone epic, but by the weird stretching and slicing of cosmetic surgery. Van Damme’s eyes, especially, have become so peculiar that it saves us from distraction that he keeps the sunglasses on through most of the picture. And yet in this colorful turn to the darkside he is entertainingly odd, unhinged in the best tradition of international do-baddery. It makes so many of his straight turns boring by comparison.
Most of the calisthenics are left to the “junior” members, while cameo superstars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris use the hallowed and butch battlefield tactic of walking slowly around, without cover, spraying bullets from the hip indiscriminately. Obliging stunt players then run into the path of them and fall over dead. While Schwarzenegger’s rival mercenary Trench is allowed some rudimentary logic for his appearances, Norris simply wanders in shooting, with scant explanation of why he is there, or what kind of vehicle he used to catch up with the plot.
If there is a difference beyond the physical ravages of time, I would identify it as being in the self-awareness of its stars. When in their early years as heroes on the rise, they spouted cornball quips, they did it with charm and ambition. In a way, they willed themselves into believing they weren’t cornball quips. These days they are too wise to pretend, which unfortunately makes the delivery less fun. Just as the soundtrack refuses to countenance songs less than twenty years old, the fact that “Houston, we have a problem here!” is a line that should be put out to pasture becomes the very reason it must be spoken.
Does any of this make for a good movie? The design of The Expendables 2 goes out of its way to demonstrate that there is ample precedent for what you are going to see, so base your judgments on that. As a sequel to a nostalgia trip, it underlines as well as any movie could that every generation is expendable, eventually. I can say that I didn’t begrudge these men who have provided me so much entertainment another victory lap; but if they wanted to take a third with me watching, I would expect them to work a little harder than this for it.