The action film is a staple for the male gender. It's what makes us men, what makes us realise what it is to be men and also makes us realise that our lives are nothing like an action film!
All you really need are guns, explosions, tanks, shouting, one-liners and epic music and you will pretty much have the action film in the palm of your hand.
The Expendables 2 is a film that you don't really have to have seen the first film, because the plot is so straight-forward, but I'll explain it anyway. Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) - not really a character name that inspires him to be a male role model - is called back by Church (Bruce Willis) as it seems they are still in his debt from the end of the first film. He calls them back to do a simple job; take a case from a fallen plane. They are instructed to take Maggie (Nan Yu) along with them as she knows the location and how to get it, however on their way back they are ambushed by the evil Vilain (Jean-Claude Van Damme) who steals the case and kills the new kid on the block, Bill the Kid (Liam Hemsworth). Maggie then reveals that the case was actually a blue-print to find tonnes of plutonium that was left in Russia after the Cold War. What follows is a pretty forward revenge film, where Barney and returning members, Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), Gunner Yensen (Dolph Lundgren), Hale Caeser (Terry Crews) and Toll Road (Randy Couture) travel across the continent to take down Vilain and save the day. Oh, and they also encounter more extended cameos from Trench (Arnold Schwarzenegger) this time and a new cameo from Booker (Chuck Norris).
To be honest, there's no denying that The Expendables 2 is a product of "bigger=better" as far as sequels go. There are bigger battle sequences, more bone-crunching fight scenes and a lot more characters with even bigger action stars from time-gone-by squashed into it's fairly standard running time (103 minutes). What struck me the most when watching this film was that it seemed to be taking itself far less serious than the first film. While The Expendables wasn't setting out to win any Oscars or BAFTAs, The Expendables 2 firmly sticks it's tongue in it's cheek from the offset, where the team save Schwarzenegger from the depths of Nepal, to the final battle against Van Damme in Soviet airport where every action star from the past 20 years throw each other's catch phrases around (Willis says something along the lines of "No, I'll be back" and then Schwarzenegger replies, "Yippe Ki-Yay!") It's just silly fun and it's something that really shines throughout in The Expendables 2. I can honestly say that the injection of more humour in the sequel was something that the first film was missing.
Another positive move that the sequel makes is that it doesn't feel as much of a Sylvester Stallone show as the first film did. While Stallone still plays the main protagonist in this film and he does get to have the final fight scene against the evil Vilain, Stallone steps down from the Director's chair for this one and so the film just had a general feel of being less self-indulgent than the first one. However, Stallone moves aside for a new Director, Simon West (Con Air, Tomb Raider) and sometimes his directing style felt a little off-kilter. Most of the film had a hazy soft-focus look to it, which was distracting at first, but I soon got used to it. However, most of his shot choices and scene set-ups were fairly boring. Stallone's character first meets Maggie under a suspension bridge, the mine shaft where Vilain is trying to find the plutonium is just a wide underground space and the final scene at the airport was just fairly generic. One scene that stuck out was where Stallone's character was being informed of their new mission by Church - Willis had some brilliant moody shadows going across his face and was being back-lit through the cockpit window, but the reverse shot on Stallone was just brightly lit and boring. Things just felt a bit off-balance at times.
However, bland direction is not The Expendables 2's only problem. One of the major issues was the script and the dialogue. While the film overall does a good job of keeping the plot fairly straight-forward to make way for the action set-pieces, the dialogue scenes at the beginning of the film are insanely dense and full of stupid dialogue. Bill the Kid gives some silly speech about The Expendables not being the right group for him because he wants to go home and get married to his girlfriend (if that isn't a big set-up for the rookie to die, I don't know what is!) Maggie arrives on her motorbike to meet Barney and just retell us exactly what Church has already told us (she's a girl joining a group of men and she's tough...) And then, the scene involving Vilain stealing the case repeats itself twice using the same plot device (Vilain threatens to kill Bill the Kid unless they hand over their weapons/hand over the WMD and counts down to one before a member of the group steps forward and gives him what he wants.) While you may think I'm crazy for criticising the scriptwriting of The Expendables 2, I think that just because the film relies on it's action doesn't mean that the small amounts of plot and dialogue is does attempt has to be bad.
Finally, the other major problem with The Expendables 2 is the character of Maggie and the casting of Nan Yu. As a character, Maggie adds absolutely nothing to the group or the plot. While she does help them find the case, Church could have easily given them a GPS navigator to do that. After that, Maggie cracks open the safe (again, something a machine could do) and then just provides some crap dialogue and shoots her gun. Sure, she's tough... Sure, she doesn't prove to be a burden to the group... But, she doesn't do anything. I was expecting some high-flying, ass-kicking chick to come in and show this testosterone riddled group just exactly what the female gender can do for the action flick... but, she doesn't.
Also, if the way the character was written wasn't bad enough, the casting of Nan Yu just put the final nail in the coffin. She has no charisma whatsoever and I dare say, she finds it very difficult to act. I rarely saw any glimpse of emotion from Yu, even in the final scene where she is being congratulated by Stallone for helping them out. She tries to force some remorse when she discusses the death of Bill the Kid, but she's a new character and so was Bill, so the audience are not emotionally involved with them enough to care. Basically, if I haven't made it clear enough, Yu was nearly the single reason for the downfall of The Expendables 2 - I feel that strongly about how crap her character and acting was.
So, overall The Expendables 2 really does provide a good time for lovers of the action genre and people who just like to go to the cinema to sit back, relax and switch their brain off. While the film does improve on some of the flaws of the original film - most notably provide some decent action fighting/shooting scenes and clear up that god-awful CGI blood that was used in the first film - it does make some new flaws of it's own.
*** / *****
On a side note, if you have a few spare minutes, watch this 80s style trailer for The Expendables 2. It really captures the "fun" of the film.
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