By Tom Winspear
The Expendables 2 is one of the latest big budget action movie sequels to appear from the great land of hollywood. It's also an action movie that just happens to star: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Liam Hemsworth, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yes that's right, just about every single action hero from the 1980's that you can think of (plus a couple of newbies) have been called together for one simple purpose; to create one ridiculously overblown and extremely amusing movie.
The plot is about as original as you can get, the bad guy (Van Damme) threatens to uncover a deadly supply of plutonium in order to *gasp* take over the world (or some such nonsense.) And it's up to the Expendables team (lead by steel-faced Stallone) to save the day, and dish out some much deserved punishment to those bad fellows. Ensuing throughout the entire film is excessive amounts of blood, bullets, explosions, and best of all, super cheesy one liners. One of the film's great strengths is that it does not take itself too seriously and its constantly self referencing of action classics such as the Terminator and Die Hard (to name just a few) add a lot of cheap thrills for long-time fans of these ageing stars.
Basically, you are going to go and see a film like this for pure entertainment, so if you don't go in expecting anything deep and meaningful then you'll have a blast. That said though, Stallone has some (unintentionally?) hilarious monologues about life, death and war that are sure to provoke some hearty chuckles from the audience indeed.
The line-up alone is what got me and many others to go and check out his explosion riddled action fest, and I'd recommend you do the same. It's very loud and quite dumb, but ultimately a damn lot of fun.
7 big explosions out of 10.
By Tom Winspear