My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Watched this because the first one wasn’t terrible, and had a lot of amusing moments in it. So, we decided to take a chance on the sequel. *sigh*
The Expendables team is hired by CIA operative Mr. Church to retrieve an item from a plane that crashed in the Soviet Union. He sends along Maggie to break into the safe containing the item. The team manages to get it, but the Slang group intercepts them and with one of the Expendables as hostage, forces them to give up the item. The Slangs kill their hostage anyway, prompting Ross and his men to go after them. When they learn that the retrieved item was the location of a secret Russian plutonium mine, the stakes get even higher, and the team must not only stop the villains from being able to construct their own nuclear weapons, but rescue the nearby villagers, who have been conscripted to work the mine.
It sounds good, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the plot is far more interesting and developed in the above paragraph than in the actual script. There is a lot of gratuitous blood, especially in the beginning, and much posturing by all the characters. I guess we were supposed to care and be rah-rah excited for the Expendables to get the bad guy when they kill Liam Hemsworth’s Billy the Kid character, but, honestly, my first thought was- well, not much reason to watch more of this now. It was cliched and predictable from the beginning, not something unusual in this type of movie, but there was no tension, no build up, no real excitement. Oh, look, more guys getting shot. Gee, another explosion. Ooh, cars overturning during a chase scene. Yeah, been there, seen that. In far better movies.
All in all, this was a nice excuse for Sly Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Arnold Schwartzenegger to get together on one screen. Nice little bloodbath reunion for the old guys. Too bad it wasn’t also a decently watchable movie.
And So On... 