MOVIE REVIEW: EXPENDABLES 2

"The Expendables 2" is what happens when Sylvester Stallone decides, after having tried his hand on the first, that he's capable of writing a script for a major motion picture. Some of these guys are still compelling screen presences (including Stallone) yet the obvious limits of their physical capacity require someone who knows how to write original dialogue and create a compelling narrative for them to inhabit. The 66years old Stallone is not that guy. Though he had Richard Wenk to help him out with the screenplay but anyone who thinks Stallone deferred to Wenk is smoking some of that Afghan weed the guys from "Savages" are selling. Therefore, plot-wise, don’t expect anything terrific when you visit the cinemas.

The story begins with Stallone and Jason Statham leading a charge into a criminal encampment in Nepal in order to rescue an unidentified colleague. Setting aside the fact that Nepal has apparently become infested with palm trees and that many of the evil foot soldiers are speaking Thai. This Bond-wannabe setup turns out to be completely pointless. Its only purpose seems to be to provide Arnold Schwarzenegger with the first of several extended cameos.

After this we're introduced to the rest of the crew, including Liam Hemsworth, a fairly obvious marketing ploy intended to get the youngsters into the theaters. He's given the lamest, most cliche-riddled excuse for a backstory imaginable and then set firmly onto a red-shirt trajectory that the blind guy who lives across the hall could have seen coming a mile away.

So after the big non-setup Stallone meets with Bruce Willis' "Church" who informs him that he's got one last chance to apparently square things up between the two of them (manly men being eternally obsessed by squaring things between them you see). To do this, he must retrieve some important data from a safe being held by some more baddies. Stallone isn't told exactly what the information is and he's saddled with another marketing ploy, Nan Yu, playing "Maggie" a semi-attractive covert operative who's going to extract the info Willis is after once Stallone and Co have secured the safe.

And that's about it. Once the info is secured we're introduced to the super-evil "Villain" (wink-wink) played by Jean Claude Van Damme and his super-evil cohort, Scott Atkins, who take it from the boys by force and the rest of the film is a plodding, enervating revenge tale littered with more pointless, nonsensical cameos and recycled one-liners than a late 70s Las Vegas rat-pack review.

Randy Couture, Terry Crews and Dolph Lundgren amount to little more than talking extras, while Bruce Willis, Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris don't do anything except stand in front of the camera a few times and fire big guns at groups of the most bumbling, inept Keystone-Cop bad guys that ever disgraced the silver screen. The film's only actual action sequences are limited to a couple of first rate ass kicking sequences given to Jet Li at the opening of the movie and Jason Statham later in the movie. Also the 'big smackdown' at the film's climax that pits Stallone against Van Damme. Other than that, "Expendables 2" is just that; expendable.

The guys here deserve a better swan song than this. To those who might say Sly's hands were tied by the advancing age of his cast, I'd direct them to check out Robert Rodriguez's breathtaking "Sin City". While it’s true that Rodriguez had Frank Miller's incredible series of graphic novels to draw from, the fact is that Miller is not the only talented writer working today and if Stallone cared enough, and wasn't so driven by the needs of his own ego, he could have found someone with the requisite skill and patience to craft an interesting, engaging tale that utilized the advancing age of the stars here as fodder for something other than lame self-effacement.