Back for another rollicking installment, the E-Boys did well enough with the first one to get funding to make another. Like the original, this movie starts out with a subplot to get the juices flowing, and by juices i mean bullets, knives, and in Jet Li’s case a couple deadly iron skillets. The first movie’s opener had the guys saving a ship infested with Somali pirates, and this time they’re busting up a private army’s compound in Asia. The highlight, of course, is crashing their spare motorcycle. You’ll love where they park it.
Still no Steven Seagal, but this one has Jean Claude Van Damme as our boss badguy, Chuck Norris dips in for a while, and we get larger cameos from Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Unfortunately, Jet Li bows out after the prelude, and Liam Hemsworth is the new kid in the clique, but leaves the E-Boys before the main battle too. The newbie who sticks around is Yu Nan as Maggie, not a bad fighter in her own right. Also missing is Randy Quaid, who was the group’s guru in the first movie.
You know the formula: our squad of mercs taking care of business until some bad guy makes it personal, and then it’s a mini war between the Expendables and a medium-sized army. Gluing it all together are emotive montages of tired (or tense) soldiers in the back of a cargo plane, and one-liners peppering the fighting sequences. There’s a feint at a love story, a small amount more backstory on the squadmembers, and some emotional hostage reunions.
But that’s not why we came here. No, we’re here to see a greedy brigade of well-armed Satanists get all blowed up. True to form, this episode has a wooden bridge which turns out to be actually made of kerosene. Statham still prefers knives, big ones, but without Jet Li this one is lighter on the quality chopsocky. Plenty of gun battles, though, including one at an airport in a poor corner of Europe, notable for the Satanists only arriving in two 25-foot trucks, and yet losing about 200 fully-armed men. Must have been clown trucks.
The classic rock soundtrack is back, and better than in the first movie, though a Little Richard tune gets tragically drowned by constant gunfire. But i understand. If this was Tarantino, the foley effects would have been muted (or absent) and the song would have been upfront. But that’s Tarantino, and that’s not what this movie is trying to be. The Expendables movies are throwbacks. Shiny new throwbacks, yes, but not only in plot but in style these movies are trying to recreate the whole feel of a legitimate 1982 summer blockbuster.
It’s the whole idea, get the band back together. The Expendables franchise wants to make the movies these guys loved to watch, not just the ones they acted in. Everyone wants that. What ever kind of movies you like, there’s always a few which stick with you, movies where you watch them and say “I wish there were more movies like that.” These guys are just like you, only they had the fame and connections to actually make more movies like they like. In this case, movies where the bad guys are well defined (here they all have the same tattoo), and where badass buddies team up to take ’em out.
On the whole, this one delivers, but on a smaller plate than the original movie. Not a crime, most sequels do this exact thing. Where this one succeeds on its own is Van Damme’s great final battle mano-a-mano, and a string of silly things the cameo players do with each other’s catchphrases. It is a chopsocky shoot-em-up, and not taking itself too seriously is important for this mega ensemble cast to appear together without stretching the bands of believability beyond repair.
If you like this kind of movie, you’ll like this one. If you don’t, then there are about 70,000 other movies out there so you can certainly find what you’re looking for somewhere else.