The Expendables 2

                   

The Eighties brought us a lot of things we love to remember and some things we wish we could forget. Being a fan of the movies, one of the things I remember most about the Eighties was the birth of the Action Star. These guys you all knew by one name, names like Arnold, Sly, Chuck, Bruce, and Jean-Claude (ok not one name there, but close). I always wished we could see them all in one movie; well my dream came close to being true with “The Expendables”. Now my dream has come true, even if it is thirty years later then I would have liked to have seen it, with “The Expendables 2”.

       Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) leads a team of mercenaries who take care of jobs other people don’t want to do. Ross’s team is handed a mission from a guy named Church (Bruce Willis) to retrieve something from a safe on a plane that has crashed. The mission starts off well, with Ross and his team retrieving the item in the safe, but soon goes south when they are ambushed and one of their members is caught and killed. When Ross loses one of his team, he vows to find and kill the guy who is responsible and retrieve the item back that they were sent to get in the first place.

       This is an action fan’s dream. The film has no story, bad acting, but lots of explosions and mayhem. The big complaint on the first “ The Expendables” was the lack of blood. Well they make up for the first film in the first twenty minutes of the second one, with more than enough destruction. This is the kind of film that requires no thinking, just a love for lots of explosions and bad one- liners. There is one scene in the film that seems too good to be true; it has Arnold, Bruce, Sly, and Chuck Norris all fighting side by side. This is not a good movie by any means, but what it is, is an entertaining film. There are plenty of parts that will make you laugh at the absurdity of some of the things you will see, but that is all part of the fun in watching this movie. This is not a great date movie, but it is a bad movie that is fun and one that knows exactly what it is and never tries to be anything else. My only wish now is that the film had been made twenty years ago, but you know what they say, better late than never.

 Brian Taylor