'Expendables 2'packs punch
LOS ANGELES — Capping off the summer box office with explosive action, “The Expendables 2” offers the send-off that adrenaline junkies are seeking before the more sedate pace of fall releases. As he proved with the original installment, Sylvester Stallone grasps the action-oriented DNA of the films’ cast of reprobate mercenaries with an intuition derived from dozens of genre roles.
Without wasting any time on setup, the sequel finds Barney Ross (Stallone) and his team on a clandestine mission to extract a kidnapped Chinese billionaire in Nepal, where they discover that someone has gotten there before them — Trench (Arnold Schwarzenegger), another operative for their contractor, Mr. Church (Bruce Willis). Freeing Trench and the billionaire from their captors, the team returns to the States, where Church confronts Barney with an unpleasant reminder: The Expendables’ leader owes Church $5 million in confiscated cash from a previous job. But he is prepared to make a deal if Barney takes on a new assignment.
The catch is that he will need to place Church’s operative on his team, Chinese tech expert Maggie (Yu Nan). Since the Expendables are an all-male crew, the addition of a woman almost immediately throws group dynamics out of kilter. Their assignment is to retrieve an undisclosed item from a high-tech electronic safe aboard a downed plane that has crashed in Albania. Although new team member and Afghanistan vet Billy (Liam Hemsworth), an expert sniper, reluctantly tells Barney this is his last outing, the rest of the Expendables relish another mission, including second-in-command Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) and team members Gunner Jensen (Dolph Lundgren), Toll Road (Randy Couture) and Hale Caesar (Terry Crews).
As soon as Maggie has decoded the safe aboard the crashed plane and extracted the contents, the Expendables are ambushed by an Eastern European crime cartel led by the sadistic Vilain (Jean-Claude Van Damme), who forces Barney to turn over the device from the safe and then kills a key team member.
Motivated as much by revenge as their realigned mission, the Expendables take off in pursuit of their adversaries, with Barney’s directive uppermost in their minds: “Track them, find them, kill them.”
With such an expansive cast, there’s a risk the quality of performances might be diluted by the quantity of recognizable actors. But co-screenwriter Richard Wenk and Stallone have generously given both major players and cameo actors their own often humorous character traits and dialogue.
Since many of the leads have well-known personas from past films and franchises, performances are a blend of action-hero impassivity and send ups of familiar characters.
Despite key roles, Hemsworth and Yu don’t add much to the ensemble, and Chuck Norris as Booker and Jet Li as Yin Yang appear too briefly to make much impact. Many might wonder about Schwarzenegger’s return to action movies and might be pleased that the brief role of Trench is a perfect fit, adorned with some of the best dialogue in the script.
FILM FACTSTITLE: “The Expendables 2”CAST: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Bruce Willis, Yu Nan, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jet Li, Liam Hemsworth, Chuck NorrisDIRECTOR: Simon WestRATED: R for strong, bloody violence throughoutGRADE: ★★★ (out of 5)
