The Expendables 2: A Sequel That Overstays Its Welcome
The action continues with the seasoned veterans.
Barney Ross (Stallone) and his crew receive a new mission from Mr. Church (Willis). They are tasked with finding and securing a map to a mine containing tons of plutonium. However, a flamboyant European in dark glasses (Van Damme) is also after the map.
They’re back together, this time with an even larger lineup. Once again, they’re mowing down hordes of armed bad guys, throwing in some locker-room banter between the action. Despite the talk about toning down the rating, there are still plenty of severed heads and dismembered limbs on screen. It seems like the real fun is about to begin, but unfortunately, nothing much happens.
Stallone and company increasingly resemble a theater troupe that’s taking too many encores after a successful performance. The hour is late, the audience is feeling awkward and wants to go home, but they reluctantly give a standing ovation to avoid offending the actors. It seems our veterans have misunderstood what exactly earned them the applause.
The Magic of the First Film
The first film’s appeal lay in the almost religious anticipation of a miracle. The idea of all these legendary figures appearing in the same frame was unbelievable until you saw it with your own eyes. We saw it, we believed it, and we laughed heartily. But as practice shows, only Woody Allen’s jokes get funnier with repeated use.
Van Damme delivers a flying kick, Schwarzenegger repeatedly says he’ll be back, and Stallone, barely running, evades fifty gunmen and a tank. “The Expendables” was a touching, clumsy, but awe-inspiring final stand for a collective Rocky against modernity. A farewell performance, as we know, only happens once, and any attempt to repeat it inevitably descends into parody.
Where the Sequel Falters
It’s understandable that after the resounding success, the veterans regained a long-lost belief in themselves (okay, Stallone, but Van Damme and Lundgren hadn’t been on anyone’s radar for a decade). However, even if they decided to make a modern action film, they shouldn’t have diluted the gratuitous shooting with drama that’s utterly detrimental to the genre. We get love, revenge, youthful tragedy, and concern for the people of Eastern Europe, who are inexplicably dressed in rags and drinking “Old Miller” beer. The tattooed musclemen endlessly talk, suffer, yearn for home, and curse their fate. It’s as if they’ve forgotten that even at their peak, our heroes often lost out to props in conversational scenes (remember Conan’s argument with the camel?).
In this environment, the only sane senior citizen is Chuck Norris, who has long embraced his fate as a living internet meme. He’s called Walker here (some used to call him Lone Wolf), and he only appears for about five minutes. But in that time, Chuck manages to comically mow down an entire army, tell Sly a well-known joke about himself with visible pleasure, and then start pushing himself to the forefront in scenes that clearly aren’t his, taking his cameo to the point of absurdity. It turns out that even among tough mercenaries, there’s no democracy, but a true “Chucktatorship.”