The first Expendables movie was a fun romp through memory lane, as the collective bad asses through the 80's, 90's, and Aught's joined together to form a collective group of mercenaries out to fight the dregs of humanity. It was a typical tried and true 80's movie plot, nothing that we haven't seen in the original Rambo movies, or any of the Van Damme or Schwarzenegger flicks that rotted our brains as we picked them up from the video store. It wasn't a great movie by any means, but it was entertaining and all in all, a good bit of cheesy fun.
The second Expendables film takes the original film and expands the premise and cast accordingly. In this film, Barney Ross (Stallone) and his rag tag band of psychopaths (Statham, Lungdren, Crews, and Couture, with a brief appearance of Li) are dispatched by omnipresent CIA man Church (Willis) to obtain an item from a safe with one of Church's best operatives (newcomer Nan Yu). However, upon the retrieval of the item, a detailed plan for a buried soviet stockpile of weapons grade plutonium, the group is ambushed by mercenary Jean Vilain (Van Damme). The plans are taken, but the Expendables lose one of their own (hello and goodbye to Liam Hemsworth). With the grief of losing their comrade in arms, and the embarrassment of having been taken by surprise still stinging, the Expendables head off on a journey of vengeance and mayhem, as they hope to avenge their loss while stopping Vilain from pulling off his deadly nuclear caper.
For starters, let's get the bad out of the way. This is essentially every nuclear scare movie that those of us who remember the cold war got to be entertained with, with the added twist of the heroes of these movies still kicking ass. The writing is average for the most part, the villains (especially Van Damme's Vilain) are nothing more than caricatures of every evil mercenary stereotype encountered, and the plot is fairly predictable, with very little in the form of twists. This isn't Oscar material, in other words.
Thankfully, the film knows that, and doesn't try to do anything more than simply entertain. And because of that, this is a very fun film. In terms of the character development department, we get very little, the only real nugget of knowledge being that Ross owes Church a huge debt of service from years before and that Gunner (Lungdren) was a chemical engineer before he went insane. But beyond that, we simply get to see the Expendables go out and kick ass in predictable, and over the top ways, many of which are beyond the laws of physics.
The best part of the film, and which makes it superior to it's predecessor, is that there is much more interaction between the entire group, while the previous film tended only to focus on Stallone and Statham. With this addition, there is a great deal more comedy, usually involving Lundgren, Crews and Couture, all of which is at another's expense. It's hard to describe, but the dynamic is hysterical. Even Yu, who really just replaces Jet Li as the asian component of the group, is funny, both in terms of her dialogue, and in some of the facial expressions that she makes out of her seemingly genuine disgust of Lungdren's crush on her.
The action isn't just limited to the Expendables themselves. Others get in the act, namely Van Damme, Willis, Schwarzenegger, and Norris, both in the fighting and wisecracking departments. Willis and Schwarzenegger are comedic gold during their asskicking sequence, and even trade each other's trademark catch phrases. Norris is hilariously portrayed as a human force of nature, and even manages to integrate his infamous Norris jokes into his sequence. And even Van Damme, who really has never played a villain before, does a good job of being rather disgustingly evil and ruthless. It's almost a shame that he meets his end in the film so permanently.
Overall, it's not a great film, again, but it is a very entertaining one, and worth seeing it in theaters for the novelty of seeing these old codgers kick ass once more, and hearing them drop one liners on each other with the frequency of Caesar's Automatic shotgun.
