Expendables 2 Review
Monday, August 20. 2012
Much as I liked The Expendables, it was definitely a modern take on the classic '80s action movie. The stunts were outstanding, the cast was nearly perfect, and the story was suitably useless. In short, it was great...but it wasn't awesome. Not quite. It lacked a certain insanity that was a hallmark of '80s action. A lunatic edge that made it OK for Chuck Norris to drive his truck straight up out of the ground. That made tearing the seats out of a sports car a reasonable choice for Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was an over-the-top, no-holds-barred attitude that—with the exception of Tropic Thunder—no big-budget movie made in the last 20 years dared. Until now.
The Expendables 2 starts out with one of the greatest pre-title sequences I have seen. It has all the familiars: good guys coming to rescue a hostage behind enemy lines, bad guys with machine guns, armored vehicles etc. Then it spray paints "coming soon" on an armored snow plow and rams backwards through reality at full throttle. Jet Li makes the most of his limited screen time in this sequence, and Schwarzenegger makes his first of several appearances throughout the film. Statham, Stallone, Couture, Crews, and Ludngren all make return appearances, and we're introduced to the new character Dead Meat Billy the Kid (played by Liam Helmsworth). Billy is optimistic, likeable, has a girl back home, and is going to serve with the crew on this one last mission before he retires. Yeah.
Bruce Willis returns as Church, Chuck Norris makes a few cameos as Booker (the "Lone Wolf" who seems to have several tall tales to his name), Yu Nan as Maggie joins the team as a tech expert, and Jean-Claude Van Damme is Vilain, the movie's villain. It's about as subtle as Crews' automatic shotgun, and just as much fun (at one point Willis tells Schwarzenegger "I'll be back," to which Schwarzenegger sarcastically replies "yippie-ki-yay"). Told you it was awesome.
Collector/Modeler Interest:
The heavily modified armored trucks used at the beginning of the movie would be great projects for someone willing to do some scratchbuilding.
Bruce Willis returns as Church, Chuck Norris makes a few cameos as Booker (the "Lone Wolf" who seems to have several tall tales to his name), Yu Nan as Maggie joins the team as a tech expert, and Jean-Claude Van Damme is Vilain, the movie's villain. It's about as subtle as Crews' automatic shotgun, and just as much fun (at one point Willis tells Schwarzenegger "I'll be back," to which Schwarzenegger sarcastically replies "yippie-ki-yay"). Told you it was awesome.
Collector/Modeler Interest:
The heavily modified armored trucks used at the beginning of the movie would be great projects for someone willing to do some scratchbuilding.
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