Kick-ass craziness and cleverness

The Expendables 2 was a film I managed to fit in around my studies, though I could have caught it later at The Gulbenkian Theatre. It was a major improvement on the first instalment, which set itself up for irony and then promptly forgot it. Sylvester Stallone has heeded the critics.


It also remedies the absence of Jean-Claude van Damme and Chuck Norris that were big misses first time around if one is assembling 80s/90s lunkheads. Having disappointing cameos previously, Arnold Schwarznegger and Bruce Willis get to pump some hot lead while exchanging each other’s quips, though Arnie only says “yippee-kay-ye” without the corollary. As if to account for so much testosterone Mickey Rourke misses out here and Jet Li disappears after 20 minutes, with Nan Yu stepping up to bring some feminine guile. Charisma Carpenter returns but has a dramatically (in all senses) pared-down role.

It’s not all silliness and there are some shockingly brutal moments to indicate the baddies are seriously bad baddies. After a nifty scene set in Nepal against (presumably) Maoist holdouts who haven’t followed their brethren into parliament, thus finding a real-world place that can be shot up without too much criticism, it gets its geography horribly muddled up in Eastern Europe, hoping people won’t notice, though it was smart move to pretend to be in a former Soviet training area that mimicked New York streets – a deserted Big Apple without disaster.

Highlights were Li’s kung-fu in a kitchen; one of the heroes saying in response to heavy gunfire “we need a tank” and, on cue, their opponents bring in their tank; a henchman getting his head obliterated by a spinning helicopter tail blade, as the scene was set up for that; and Norris filling someone with bullets in an airport terminal, with them falling back into a X-ray scanning machine as he continues to fire, setting off the metal alarms. Not a great movie but a satisfying one all the same.