The Expendables 2 (2012) - A Review

I love action movies. I've got the Missing in Action trilogy on DVD, I've seen all of the Rambo movies multiple times, and I'll continue to swear up and down that Last Action Hero unfairly gets a bad rep.

So when we first heard about The Expendables, my brother and I were excited. Stallone, Statham, Li, Schwarzenegger, Rourke, Lundgren, and Willis all in one movie? Any fan of action cannot say no. The movie  was pretty brainless, but we were watching this movie because of the actors and the homage they were paying to days gone by when action movies could just be action movies.

So when we heard about The Expendables 2 we decided we would see it in the theaters and yesterday we did just that.

Is the movie more of the same? Well, yes. But in the world of action movies this is not a bad thing. In fact, it's a great thing. This ain't Shakespeare, after all.

Rourke is gone from the cast in this movie, but this time Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme are brought into the fold. Schwarzenegger and Willis are also given slightly bigger roles in this one while Jet Li's role is essentially reduced to an extended cameo, but it is a bad-ass cameo.

In fact, the first fifteen minutes of the movies is one long bad-ass action scene full of enough explosions to make you wonder how the hell the movie could possibly last another hour without all of the main characters being killed.

Is the movie cheesy? You bet! The first scene in which Chuck Norris appears is brilliant. Tanks explode, people get slaughtered, and then Norris comes walking out of the smoke looking completely unharmed and bad-ass. You don't even care what his character's name is. (Hell, I don't remember half of the character names from this movie.) You just know that Chuck Norris is on the scene and that's all you need. Norris even makes a Chuck Norris joke. Talk about awesome.

In the movie when Schwarzenegger and Willis are being pinned down by a bunch of gunmen and their exchange goes something like this:

Arnold: "I'll be back."

Bruce: "You've been back enough. I'll be back."

Then Bruce Willis runs across the field of fire and Arnold whispers: "Yippee Ki Yay..."

Lay on the cheese because this is exactly what we came to see.

So I loved the movie. I think I liked it even more than the first one and I am eagerly waiting for a third. I'd love to see Steven Seagal, Kurt Russell, Wesley Snipes, Michael Biehn, and Nicholas Cage involved. Jackie Chan, too. And what about Eastwood and Ford? Let everyone in, by God.

Come Sly, let's see The Expendables 3.