Movie Review, The Expendables 2

I have to start this review with a confession:  I thoroughly enjoyed The Expendables, Sylvester Stallone's 2010 tribute to action films.  I cannot defend this in a debate about cinematic virtues, I can only say that it was pretty damn cool.  At the time, I thought that any self-respecting action movie fan would think the same.  Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Willis all in the same movie?!  It's action movie fan heaven!  Quality of the film itself is almost beside the point! -- or so I thought at the time.

Then the sequel came out, and if The Expendables was a  gleefully excessively violent film that happily lacked any subtlety, The Expendables 2 makes the first film look like a Jane Austen flick.  Some fans of the original may mistake that statement as a recommendation.  It is not.

It's almost laughable to even consider discussing plot.  Here's the plot:  The Expendables (the good guys) are assigned to retrieve a safe.  Bad guys get it instead.  The Expendables want it back.  Chaos ensues.

That's the whole movie right there.  Does it matter?  The first movie didn't have much of a plot either, and it worked.  What's different is that the first movie had a constant sense of fun.  The second movie has a constant sense of hitting you over the head with the message, "this is fun, dammit!!!"  It's not the same thing.

In the first movie, even when all hell was breaking loose in the midst of a war zone, you at least got the sense that the director (Stallone) cared about what was going on, and gave us some detail.  Here, the director is Simon West, who may not be a worse director, but he seems to have less to work with, and it shows.  Almost every scene in the entire movie can be summarized as follows:  Bad guys and good guys shoot at each other.  Many anonymous bad guys die.  Things blow up.  Repeat ad nauseum.  The only variable is who's doing the shooting.  Look, it's Sylvester Stallone!  Look, it's Arnold Schwarzenegger!  Look, it's Chuck Norris!  Look, it's Bruce Willis!

At the risk of repeating myself, action fans may think this sounds like a recommendation (the combination of names alone would bring a smile to the faces of most fans of the genre), but it's worth emphasizing that I am an action fan, and I found this to be tedious.  There's something wrong when you have this much excitement on the screen, and I'm checking my watch.

Like the first movie (and most action movies), The Expendables 2 has a sense of humor, but whereas the first film might have inspired a couple of chuckles here and there, the humor here is poorly delivered and poorly written.  When Norris appears on the scene, for example, it gives the writers a chance to throw a couple of "Chuck Norris Facts" (popular Internet jokes exaggerating how tough Norris is) into the dialogue.  The scene inspired me to write a Chuck Norris Fact of my own:

Two things about Chuck Norris:  1.  Chuck Norris has a sense of humor and can laugh at himself.  2.  No one else can laugh at Chuck Norris.

Norris, it turns out, has absolutely no sense of comic delivery.  I mean none.  I mean any random guy off the street can apparently tell a joke better than Chuck Norris can.

Then there's this very minor spoiler, but I'm going to include in this review my favorite bit of dialogue, not favorite because it was good, but favorite because it so perfectly illustrates how extremely lame the comedy is here:

Schwarzenegger:  I'm out of ammo!  I'll be back!

Willis:  You always say you'll be back!  You're back already!  How 'bout this time, I'll be back!  Find something else to say!

Schwarzenegger:  Well, yippee-kay-yay.

This bit just doesn't work.  For one thing, throughout the film, Schwarzenegger has been saying either "I'll be back" or "I'm back" in every single scene he's been in.  Every single scene!  And now they expect us to laugh again?  Okay, okay, we get it, it's Arnold Schwarzenegger.  So in an effort to top its own extremely overplayed joke, the movie works Willis and his catch phrase into the act.  But the problem is that Schwarzenegger and Willis are playing it up so over-the-top that they are coming across less like characters and more like caricatures.  There simply isn't any reason for Church and Trench (the characters played by Willis and Schwarzenegger) to say these words, no reason at all -- so it becomes less a bit of dialogue and more like the filmmakers turning to the audience and saying, "get it, we're making fun of their catch phrases, ain't that hilarious?"

Self-mockery needs a sense of finesse.  If your buddy makes a joke about himself, it might or might not be funny, but the easiest way for him to kill the humor is for him to literally elbow you in the ribs and and say, "see, I'm making fun of myself, funny, right, huh, right?!?"  That's what Schwarzenegger, Willis, and their writers are doing here.

Now let me be clear:  This movie is not a good movie.  Nor is it a complete waste of your time, and if you look, there are a very few things about it that are actually every bit as fun as the movie itself tries to be.  To be specific, there are three (and only three) reasons to like this movie:

1.  Jean-Claude van Damme.  Between his Clouseau-like accent and his tendency to star in B-level action movies, Van Damme has mostly been dismissed as a talentless hack.  The otherwise over-rated comeback vehicle J.C.V.D. changed that perception a little bit, and showed audiences and critics that the guy actually can act.  Here, he plays a rare villainous role.  The character's name actually is "Villain," even if it is pronounced "Vill-ayn."  A villain named Villain, hey, I told you the movie lacked subtlety.  But at least Van Damme is effective in the role.

2.  The fight scene between Jason Statham and Scott Adkins.  Both actors are known for doing their own stunts, and so out of the many, many action scenes in the movie, the fight between Adkins's and Statham's characters is the best choreographed.  It's amazing how much that makes a difference.

3.  The fight scene between Stallone and Van Damme.  The big fight between the main hero and main villain is, of course, inevitable in a movie like this.  I've read that the original script called for Villain to run rather than fight Stallone, but that surely would have caused riots in the theaters if they'd gone with that.  After sitting through all the nonsense, the Stallone/ van Damme fight is just the pay-out.  And the movie here doesn't disappoint.  It's everything a good fight scene should be:  extended enough to allow the villain little "time out moments" to strut and gloat, fast-paced enough to be exciting, and counter-balanced enough to give first one combatant a clear upper hand, and then the other.  That's how these scenes are supposed to work.  Best of all, both actors get to incorporate their personas into the fight, as Stallone throws Rocky-like punches (complete with Rockyish grunts of "hyuh, hyuh!") while Van Damme gets in some good kickboxing kicks.

Once the above scene is finished, you might as well turn off your TV.  You know what happens next.  The good guys who once held grudges against each other suddenly realize that they're really friends, everyone has a good laugh over a bad pun, credits roll.  If you think I'm giving anything away by saying that, then you haven't watched a single action movie in your entire life.