Sylvester Stallone as Barney Ross once again leads his band of mostly over-the-hill action stars as a group of mercenaries who don’t hesitate to demolish anyone who crosses their path, with blood spurting all over the screen. The crew includes Jason Statham, Terry Crews, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture and new recruit Liam Hemsworth (Miley Cyrus’ BF), a sniper once assigned in Afghanistan. They were rounded to go on a secret mission to rescue a kidnapped Chinese billionaire in Nepal. They discover that another operative, Trench (Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has longer exposure here than in the first one where he did just a brief cameo role) from their contractor, Church (Bruce Willis), got there ahead of them. They save both Trench and the Chinese guy from their kidnappers then they go back to the States where Church gives them a new task on the condition that Ross will include his Chinese technology expert, Maggie (Yun Nan, who’s splendid), in the mission. So now, they have a woman with them.
Their assignment is to get back an electronic safe in a plane that crashed in Albania. They were ambushed by a sadistic villain named Vilain (Jean Claude Van Damme) who steals a device that will lead to a five-ton cache of plutonium stashed by Russians in an abandoned mine. It becomes the ask of The Expendables to pursue Vilain and his cohorts led by Scott Adkins with Barney ordering them to “track them, find them and kill them.”
Stallone himself directed the first movie but this time, he got Simon West (“Lara Croft: Tomb Raider”, “Con Air”) to helm the sequel. West shows he’s definitely a better director with his more spectacularly staged and tense action stunts and shootouts. The film is so fast paced, starting with the hardboiled action in the opening sequence that runs for about 15 minutes full of brawn, energy and firepower. There are also comic touches in the wisecracks of the cast and in the sequence showing big action heroes driving around in a tiny car.
Chuck Norris also appear as Booker for comic relief and Jet Li as Yin Yang but he has very limited exposure. It’s Stallone who shows that, at 66, he can still do a mean mano-mano sequence with the Muscles from Brussels Van Damme. Ditto for Statham in his showdown with Adkins. The movie will surely please its target audience of nostalgic action fans who miss the slambang action flicks of yore, what with old tunes also being played in the sound track.
