If you’ve seen Sylvester Stallone’s first go-around with assembling an all-star group of action stars, The Expendables, then you already know what to expect from The Expendables 2... to a depressing degree. All of the faults and disappointments of that first film are still present here, with only a couple new wrinkles to keep things fresh. The biggest of those three wrinkles are the inclusion of Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Liam Hemsworth to the cast. Norris shows up for a brief cameo in a scene that’s ill-explained and embarrassing in its clumsy conception, and Hemsworth brings unwanted melodrama with him in his role as the new guy, but JCVD, he gives an effectively infuriating performance as the film’s primary villain. That makes the new additions come down 2-1 on the side of being negative, so we’ll go ahead and call this a sequel that didn’t need to be made.
The biggest problem with The Expendables 2, like the first film, is that it’s working from a script that’s just terrible in every way. The dialogue is atrocious. With lines like “Your ass is terminated,” thrown at Schwarzenegger as soon as he appears on screen and “I hate to break up the bromance,” spat when two talking characters are interrupted, you know you’re dealing with a script that’s just aggressively stupid. The worst bits are the scenes where the guys are palling around and goofing on each other, because nobody is saying anything legitimately funny, but every comment is followed by endless reaction shots of fake laughter. So awkward. The dialogue isn’t the only place where the script falters either. All of the drama surrounding the new kid’s conflicted future, or Stallone’s inability to let anybody get close to him, it’s all so half-baked it wasn’t worth including. And the plot is full of so many holes and relies on so many dumb coincidences that it will make your head dizzy if you give it any consideration. A movie should start off with a script, not a cast list, and no Expendables film is ever going to be good until Stallone and company figure that out.
Of course, as with any action movie, all this would have been forgivable if the action sequences were engrossing and thrilling. But the action here, like in the first film, is a formless hail of machine gun fire and lame CG blood that fails to truly captivate. In order for an action sequence to be really effective, it needs a contain some inventiveness and well-planned choreography. It needs to firmly establish the protagonists’ goals and then subvert them in creative ways. It needs to give you the stakes, and then continuously raise them as things play out. The Expendables franchise thinks having the most firepower is enough to impress, both literally as far as its action sequences go and figuratively as far as its filmmaking philosophy goes, and consequently its films exist as impressively loud bores.
