 Tagline: Back for War. The Expendables are back and this time it's personal... Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone), Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), Yin Yang (Jet Li), Gunner Jensen (Dolph Lundgren), Toll Road (Randy Couture) and Hale Caesar (Terry Crews) - with newest members Billy the Kid (Liam Hemsworth) and Maggie (Nan Yu) aboard - are reunited when Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) enlists the Expendables to take on a seemingly simple job. The task looks like an easy paycheck for Barney and his band of old-school mercenaries. But when things go wrong and one of their own is viciously killed, the Expendables are compelled to seek revenge in hostile territory where the odds are stacked against them. Hell-bent on payback, the crew cuts a swath of destruction through opposing forces, wreaking havoc and shutting down an unexpected threat in the nick of time - five tons of weapons-grade plutonium, far more than enough to change the balance of power in the world. But that's nothing compared to the justice they serve against the villainous adversary who savagely murdered their brother. That is done the Expendables way... Storyline: Barney Ross is approached by CIA man Church, who wants him and his guns for hire to go to the former Soviet Union to retrieve something that was on a plane that crashed. Church doesn't tell him what he is getting. And Church sends a woman, Maggie with him to make sure he gets it. They find the plane and get the thing but some men take one of Barney's people hostage and the leader tells him to give him what they got or he'll kill his hostage. The give it to him but he kills his hostage anyway. Barney asks Maggie what was so important about that thing. She says that it showed the location of a Russian plutonium storage mine. Barney decides to track the man down and deal with him. They track them down and discover that the man they seek is Vilain who leads a group known as The Sangs and that they have taken all the men from the surrounding villages to work the mine. Written by rcs0411@yahoo.com Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman on November 14, 2012 -- Let's face it: boys (of all ages) like their toys and are especially thrilled when those toys can cause massive destruction. Look at virtually every popular videogame out there, where melées of epic proportions are de rigeur and "success" is measured in body counts. Or Monster Truck Rallies which often have a demolition derby component. Or the popularity of some automatic weaponry whose ability to slice and dice through a five foot tree trunk in mere seconds perhaps puts the lie to the assertion that it's "just a hunting rifle". And so the nonstop mayhem that was The Expendables (in either of its versions) and, now, The Expendables 2 shouldn't really come as any big surprise. Even aging action stars need a paycheck now and then, and in a certain way, it's to Sylvester Stallone's credit that he figured out a fairly entertaining way to make that happen not just for himself but for a coterie of his one time competitors in the action genre from the seventies and eighties. And if it's a given that the sole raison d'être of films like The Expendables is to watch bulky beefy guys smash and crash their way through both objects and just as frequently people, then this film hits the bullseye from virtually the first second and never lets up. The Expendables tried to have it both ways, not very successfully, by giving us some supposed "meaningful" character beats for various tough guys while at the same time providing a number of well staged action set pieces. The Expendables 2 isn't half as pretentious, jettisoning most if not all of any attempt to divine motivation beyond a simple desire to blow stuff up, and believe it or not, it's a much more rousing entertainment than the first film for that very reason. Stallone probably wisely handed over the directorial reigns to Simon West, who stages this second outing with appropriate flash and aplomb, opening the film with a rock 'em, sock 'em mash up that basically destroys a Nepalese village (I always wonder about the collateral damage in these things, something that never seems to occur to the heroes decimating entire regions in their attempt to vanquish bad guys). And with a frequent wink and nod thereafter, West continues to mine a number of hoary action tropes without ever descending into self parody. The Expendables 2 therefore knows exactly what it is, what it wants to deliver, and makes no bones about being good, basic (mostly) mindless entertainment. For films like The Expendables 2 to work, they really need to play like live action cartoons, and that's exactly the ambience that West adopts in the opening set piece, which sees the return of Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone), Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), Yin Yang (Jet Li) and (perhaps surprisingly) Gunner Jensen (Dolph Lundgren), and they pilot a manic assemblage of mega Monster Trucks, many of them equipped with Tex Avery-esque punch lines inscribed right on their various accoutrements which can bash and smash their way through various structures. The boys are also aided by newcomer Billy the Kid (Liam Hemsworth), who acts as back up but who has a rather amazingly accurate sharpshooting skill. The guys maraud their way literally right through a wall where some hooded fool is having the you know what beaten out of him. It turns out that fool is none other than Trench (Arnold Schwarzenegger), Ross' old nemesis and competitor, who has failed spectacularly to rescue a Chinese hostage. Ross has come to the rescue, getting both Trench and the hostage out with a relative pittance of a body count, meaning in the low hundreds. In a kind of replay of one of the subplots of the first Expendables, we get one of the team, this time Billy, wanting to leave the group to settle down with his girlfriend. It probably doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that that's not going to happen, especially once Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) enters the fray yet again and basically blackmails Ross into "one last mission" (yeah, I bet) in Albania of all places. At least Church has the good graces to offer up a comely cohort named Maggie (Yu Nan), who tags along to provide some special help. Things get positively cartoon like (not a bad thing, mind you), when Ross and his team are ambushed by the main villain of the piece who is quite felicitously named Vilain (Jean-Claude Van Damme). That in turns leads to a tragedy which turns the third act of The Expendables 2 into a more or less standard (which is not to say unexciting) revenge drama. While this is an unabashed testosterone-fest, it's kind of interesting that women are much more front and center in terms of the action in this outing than in the first film. But what really elevates this second film is its self knowing sense of humor, one which readily trades on the "past their prime" dishevelment of several of the leading players. There's relatively little time spent in hand wringing or emotional explication, which is all to the good. The film catapults from one very well staged set piece to the next with nary a character beat in between. It's as if Simon West took a good look at the first Expendables, cut away all the dead meat (no pun intended), and delivered an unambitious but hugely entertaining free for all. There's only so much Blu-ray.com's star rating system can convey, and so some may look at the 3.5 stars that this film received and conclude that it's more or less at the same level as the first Expendables, which received the same score. And while in a certain way that's true, in others this second Expendables is a much more entertaining affair. We don't have the kind of useless "interior" questioning that hobbled the first film, and this second film also doesn't wallow in the sort of melancholic aspect that also colored the first film. The Expendables 2 is far from a perfect film, but it at least has the benefit of knowing what it wants to be, aiming absolutely no higher than being a good old boy romp through various places with all sorts of nifty, mayhem wreaking toys. This Blu-ray looks and sound great and comes with some good supplements. Recommended. Cast Notes: Sylvester Stallone (Barney Ross), Jason Statham (Lee Christmas), Jean-Claude Van Damme (Vilain), Jet Li (Yin Yang), Dolph Lundgren (Gunnar Jensen), Chuck Norris (Booker), Bruce Willis (Church), Arnold Schwarzenegger (Trench), Terry Crews (Hale Caesar), Randy Couture (Toll Road), Liam Hemsworth (Bill The Kid), Scott Adkins (Hector), Nan Yu (Maggie), Amanda Ooms (Pilar), Charisma Carpenter (Lacy). IMDb Rating (12/24/10): 6.8/10 from 62,465 users IMDb Rating (10/15/10): 7.0/10 from 49,165 users
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