The Expendables 2 (15) 102 mins ***
If you
think about it – which wasn’t strictly necessary – 2010’s The Expendables was the bloke equivalent of New Year’s Eve or Valentine’s
Day: one of those multi-star packages Hollywood now thinks is offering VFM,
it dispatched three decades’ worth of action beefcake on a mission familiar
from countless straight-to-video titles. This marginally improved sequel sees a
personnel shuffle: with Mickey Rourke deemed truly expendable, and Jet Li doing
the minimum required for his paycheque, in come feisty female Yu Nan and Famous
Belgian Jean-Claude van Damme, rescued from beer-ad hell as the lizardy
Eurovillain hindering Sly’s heroes in their attempts to retrieve
something-or-other from the wreckage of a downed plane.
The
script remains a liability, lurching between plot strands and locations –
airport hangars! Balkan plutonium mines! – pulled from the same mothballs as
the leading men. Yet Con Air’s Simon
West has upped the action, directing with a straightfacedness you’ll either
warm to or giggle over, and likely enjoy some way: the high-slash-lowpoint may
be Liam Hemsworth’s mid-air lost dog monologue, though Stallone’s moving elegy
to a fallen comrade (“TRACK ‘UM, FIND ‘UM, KILL ‘UM”) runs it close. By no
conventional definition a good movie, it’s nevertheless weirdly robust: however
inclined one might be to point and laugh, E2
soldiers on regardless.
The Expendables 2 is in cinemas nationwide.
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