The Expendables 2

(Movie Review)

It was dinner and a movie night with a group of friends the other night. The movie playing was Expendables 2.

I had never seen the first Expendables, but my friends assured me that it didn’t really matter. There was no complicated plot I had to worry about.

It’s pretty pointless to review a movie like this. If I were in a bad mood, I could complain that this movie was a loud, stupid, mindless action flick, with lots of dumb one-liners, that was reminiscent of the worst excesses of the big dumb action movies from the 1980s.
But this movie is deliberately designed to be a tribute to the big dumb action movies from the 1980s. So you get exactly what you pay for I suppose.
If the movie seems at times like it’s parodying itself—well that’s because it is.

As a mindless action flick, it’s entertaining enough. As much as possible, try and turn off your brain before the movie starts. And make sure you bring in lots of salty snacks, candy, and coca-cola to shovel into your face while you watch this movie.

And yes, it was pretty cool to see Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme all together in the same scene. (And yes, also the other assorted action stars in this movie—Jet Li, Dolph Lundgrem, Jason Stathom).

My only complaint, if I had to make a complaint, is that none of the action scenes were all that spectacular. But what can you expect? Many of the stars are getting very old. (Chuck Norris is 71.) And so the movie requires them to do little more than hold guns and press the trigger and yell out dumb catch phrases.

Notes:
* There has got to be a lot of really easy money to be made as a Hollywood screenwriter. How hard can it be to write a story like this? Or come up with this kind of dialogue?

* I was never allowed to watch these dumb 80s action flicks when I was a kid. In fact, the conservative religious community that I grew up in blamed these ultra-violent Hollywood movies for just about everything that was going wrong in the world.
So how ironic is it that all so many of these movie stars are right wing Republicans now? Both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris are active Republicans. (Adding in John Wayne, Charlton Heston, and Clint Eastwood, and for some reason it looks like we have a fine tradition of Hollywood action movie stars as active Republicans.)
Chuck Norris is famous for both his right wing views and his born-again Christianity.
It's hard not to wonder how he reconciles his day job with his Christian activism. When watching him machine gun several bad guys, you wonder, "Really, is this what Jesus would do?"
But I'm guessing he draws a clear line between escapist entertainment, and the real world. And come to that, so do I. Which is how I justify going to these violent movies.

Link of the Day
Why America and Israel Are the Greatest Threats to Peace

The Expendables 2: Movie Review (Scripted)