Review of The Expendables 2 (2012) by Mustisthecat — 06 Sep 2012

Disappointment. My first allegation to this movie is that it was too funny. During watching of it I felt as if I was watching Hot Shots. There is too much of a disparity between parody and darkness here.

And I don`t think it`s because of Chuck Norris. He actually made a good character and played well. Some of the lines are just silly and completely out of place. Also the action scenes are average at best, vastly inferior to the first Expendables.

In the first movie, every kill had its place, here it is just chaos. One would think that with such cast and setting anyone could make a great killing movie, but here they failed. The director did not manage to use the image of every gun toting hero and certainly every one of them got much less than they deserved (Schwarzenegger and Willis for example).

Also, the first sighting of the main villain (named Vilain, haha) seemed just right, but he turned out to be a total wimp in the end. For sure Van Damme also deserved to be bigger here. I must say that again, it is not the fault of all the actors who played great, but fault of the whole scenario.

If one had given theme adequate action scenes then it would have been simply epic. There was faaaar too much of Statham, and his knive scenes are much inferior to martial art scenes of Jet Li from the first Expendables.

I sincerely hope the director will take notes on EX2, improve on the downsides and bring back some of the magic from the first movie. Everything else in this film is great so if you don`t mind lots of parody then go ahead and watch it.