chris kilby
Posts: 1189
Joined: 31/3/2010
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Lock up your grandmothers! Action cinema’s answer to The Rolling Stones are back! Or is that Last of the Summer Wine? Yup, it’s The Expendables 2. It wasn’t like that in their day. Stallone re-fought the Vietnam War for the likes of you - single-handed! Mutter, mumble, moan…
After the lacklustre Expendables which was only medium-octane at best, Sly’s superannuated steroid cases have had a much-needed injection of action adrenalin. Or is that violent Viagra? HRT-tastic!
The critics have been a bit sniffy about The Expendables 2, especially the knowingly lame/smug catchphrase-heavy “humour” which was such a feature of the 80s originals. So what if the groan-inducing dumb-liners are witless? (And that Jet Li “Chinese takeaway” gag was old in the 70s.) It just adds to the retro charm. The Expendables 2 is dumb-but-fun in a shit sorta way. “This is embarrassing!” Talk about tempting fate. And yet, The Expendables 2 does grow on you. Its very lameness becomes endearing after a while.
“I now pronounce you… man and knife,” was good though. The only decent one-liner in the entire film. Probably why it was in the trailer. It really says something when Jason Statham has to do all the heavy-lifting acting-wise. Which is unfair. Statham actually can act a bit and probably has great things ahead of him which don’t involve kicking people in the head! And there’s a real sense of camaraderie between Sly and The Stath which is actually quite touching. Time was that woulda been “homoerotic.” Now it’s a “bromance.” Or in Stallone’s case, a “Yo-mance!”
The alarmingly Frankenstein-like Dolph Lundgren (aka: The Swedish Meatball) is to acting what Gielgud was to action and stunts. Hang on a sec! What’s he doing here? I know 80s action stars routinely survive otherwise fatal gunshot wounds (The Expendables’ best and subtlest gag), but didn’t he turn psycho, betray his buddies and get a lot of people killed first time around? The Expendables 2 knowingly riffs on Lundgren’s real-life background in chemical engineering too – a maniac with a brain. I just hope he was a better chemist than he is an “actor.”
Dropping by to steal the entire film, literal one-man army, Chuck Norris saves the day while spouting actual Chuck Norris-isms. It’s Chuck’s film. Sly & co just got better billing! Although I was reminded of the old observation that The Lone Wolf doesn’t so much act as point his beard at people. What age is he now? 90? Clint Eastwood should ask for his old theme tune back, though.
Jean Claude Van Damme is also unusually good as the villain, er, Jean Vilain. Subtle. Shoulda called him Pierre Le Cunte! But WTF was JCVD (or VD for short) on about? He was talking so much Ga(r)llic bollocks that I thought he was channelling Eric Cantona. “Peek eet op.” Ooh, hark at Jacques Pallance! VD is the sort of Euro-trash who forces women and children to slave away down his plutonium mine. BOO! HISS! Oh well, I hear Guildford Rep’s still looking for a panto villain this year – oh yes it is!
Old VD really shouldn’t be doing the girly splits at his age, though. Oh… He didn’t, did he? Probably wouldn’t have got back up again if he had. He also kept his shirt on. Tellingly they all did. Heck, Arnie didn’t even take his jacket off! And what was VD’s obsession with sheep all about? Or “ship” as he insisted on calling them. I thought he was Belgian not Welsh! BA-DOOM, Tschhhhh…
Randy Coutoure sounds like a French porn star while Terry Crews sounds like a gay one. (Why does Crews always look like someone just farted? Maybe it was the script. Or the reviews…) When I first heard about The Expendables I groaned at the thought of so many WWF stars being in it - presumably to make up the numbers when VD and Seagal acted all huffy and prima-donna-ish. (Allegedly.) But it turned out they were quite good. Wrestlers can act! Who’d have thunk? It has to be said that The Expendables 2 is the best thing a lot of these guys have ever done. Which isn’t saying much, but still…
And there’s more self-deprecating humour than you’d maybe expect with so many delicate male egos around. As well as the inevitable groaners about their age (“That thing belongs in a museum/We all do”), incredibly there were sly digs about Stallone’s height. Geddit? Sly? Oh, please yourself. And even a joke about “male pattern baldness.” Well what do they expect with all that testosterone floating around? It’s a wonder any of them have hair at all. Although one or two of them do look like they were put in combat gear then strategically shaved. Three or four actually…
There were so many dinosaurs on screen I thought I was watching Jurassic Park IV! Defiantly unreconstructed and unapologetically macho, if The Expendables 2 was any more 80s, Sly and the boys would all be wearing legwarmers and spangly boob tubes. Wouldn’t have looked out place with exchanges like “I’ll man you up” and “You must want to hurt me real bad.” True to its none-more-macho, homoerotic 80s action roots, The Expendables 2 was inevitably camp as, well, Christmas. Indeed, Sly’s climactic bout of VD was the campest dust-up this side of Commando: “I want my money’s worth/You got it.” Ooh, get her! Handbags at ten paces, girls. (And there was me thinking Sly missed a trick not getting Hans Zimmer to do the score. The Village People more like!)
And speaking of Christmas. I’m surprised the obvious “Christmas has come early this year” gag wasn’t in the first film. As for “Do you know how to carve a turkey?” I don’t know. Better ask Jeremy Renner!
But never mind that shit, what about the action?
Well, the action clichés fly thick and fast. Mostly thick. That opening set-piece battle sequence (complete with muscle cars, er, straight out of Mad Max) was a real belter even if it did go on way too long – shock and yawn? And didn’t The A-Team have pretty much the same opening scene two years ago? Only not as good. The Expendables 2 is more a third-person shooter than a movie. And so much for the smoking ban. There was so much unaccountable smoke in this movie (even outdoors) that I could hardly see anything half the time. Deliberate 80s MTV artiness or an attempt to mask the ravages of time on the aging cast’s faces?
The Expendables 2 also makes the most of its (cheap) Bulgarian locations and director Simon West’s Con Air stylings. A New York backlot in the middle of the former Soviet Union was eerily incongruous and all the more welcome for it. It also made a strange sort of sense – about the only part of this movie that did. And provided a similarly welcome opportunity for some genuinely amusing (if inevitably lame) male bonding. Platonic, of course.
And what’s this? Shooting up a crowded airport and sod the collateral damage? More than a decade on, Hollywood has clearly got over its post-9/11 squeamishness about this sort of thing. Good. I was waiting for a duty free gag which never came though. C’mon. They might be past it, but who didn’t get a wee 80s fanboy tingle watching Arnie, Sly and Bruce blasting away (with Stenna guns!) in the same shot? You really can’t beat a classic. You’re never too old for this shit!
Between the kick-ass/groin-straining action set pieces the plot, such as it is, limps along like Arnie at the end of The Terminator. “What’s the plan?/Track ‘em, find ‘em, kill ‘em!” You tell ‘em, Sly! Now that’s what I call a plot. At least there’s none of the tiresome emotional bollocks which hamstrung the first one, The Stath’s greetin’-faced, pain-in-the-arse girlfriend here thankfully relegated to a blink-and-you-won’t-miss-her cameo. Emotional scenes in this sort of thing are like the talky bits in porn movies – GET ON WITH IT! I ain’t got time to emote.
What few character beats there are inevitably land with a dull thud. Especially when Thor’s wee brother (who looked young enough to be Sly’s carer!) tempts fate by reminiscing about his dead dog/buddies – boo and indeed hoo. He couldn’t have marked his card better if he’d handed out photos of his loved ones. He really shouldn’t have written that letter to his girlfriend. That was like saying “I’ll be right back” in a horror movie.
Young Thor’s fate echoes The Wild Bunch. Just as our wheezing heroes’ subsequent defence of a Russian village from marauders deliberately evokes The Magnificent Seven right down to Sly’s six-shooters and The Stath’s James Coburn-on-steroids knife action.
Indeed, if I have a real criticism of The Expendables it’s they aren’t expendable enough. Like The Magnificent Seven, The Wild Bunch and all those guys-on-a-mission movies this franchise homages (their WWII-style civvies were pure Guns of Navarone), there really should only be one or two of ‘em left alive at the end of each mission. It would give these movies a much-needed, Peckinpah-like, emotional kick if our heroes were mortal and bullets took out some good guys occasionally. Cos it’s just The A-Team otherwise. I pity the fools.
(It really should be Arnie, Sly, Bruce, Chuck, Dolph, VD and Seagal re-making The Magnificent Seven, BTW, not fucking Tom Cruise. Although none of ‘em would want to die, of course!)
I’m not one for nostalgia, but there was something reassuringly familiar and oddly comforting about The Expendables 2. Like popping round to your grandad’s for tea. You might’ve heard the old boy’s stories a hundred times before, but that’s part of his charm. Sure The Expendables 2 is a bit lame (and the 80s originals weren’t?) but it’s also laugh-out-loud funny – “Rest in pieces!” And, yes, it’s predictable. But pleasingly so – you just knew that guy was going to get decapitated by that helicopter and it delivered!
It’s easy to sneer at this stuff, especially if you’re a critic following the herd. But it’s also great, undemanding, unpretentious fun; a real self-mocking crowd-pleaser which ain’t as dumb as it looks and the guiltiest of guilty pleasures this side of Sister Act 2. The packed audience I saw it with lapped this shit up. Maybe critics should try watching films with real audiences occasionally.
And I was hoping The Bourne Legacy would be the dark horse of the summer. Turns out it was this blockbuster. Or hernia-buster. It’s a steroid-aganza. Sorry, stairlift-aganza. Testosterone-tastic, The Expendables 2 isn’t so much hip as hip-replacement. Hasta La Viagra, baby! I’ll be – oo-ya! Me back!
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RE: The Expendables 2 - 
?) Read recently that Rosie has an even hotter sister - would be cool if the Stath got to have a three-way! 
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