The Expendables 2 is Idiotic and Brain Dead in All the Right Ways
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
The Travolta/Cage Project and Travolta/Cage podcast have turned me into a Simon West fan. I shamefully did not appreciate the transcendently vulgar charms of West’s 1997 masterpiece Con Air when it first came out but rewatching it for the podcast and the column turned me into a believer.
I was similarly impressed by Cage and West’s next collaboration, the 2012 thriller Stolen. I had such a blast with West and Stolen, a movie with a glorious understanding and appreciation of its own stupidity and ridiculousness, that I began to wonder if West might secretly be a true vulgar auteur.
So when the opportunity to revisit West’s 2012 superstar team-up action movie extravaganza The Expendables 2, which came out just a month before Stolen, as part of a patron-funded exploration of the films of Jean-Claude Van Damme presented itself, I embraced it.
I vaguely remembered liking The Expendables 2 at the time of its release because, like its predecessor, it was an unabashed throwback that panders relentlessly to my nostalgia for 1980s action movies, 1980s action stars and the campy, more-is-more aesthetic of schlock merchants Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus and their legendary Cannon production company.
The Expendables 2 boasts more than its share of Cannon alumni, including star/co-writer Sylvester Stallone (Cobra, Over the Top), Jean-Claude Van Damme (Bloodsport, Cyborg) and Chuck Norris (Missing in Action) and Dolph Lundgren (Masters of the Universe).
If The Expendables were a Cannon franchise from the 1980s it’d undoubtedly still star Stalone, Norris, Van Damme and Lundgren but if I had to fantasy-cast the rest of the cast I’d add Mr. T, Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Jesse Ventura, Burt Reynolds, Billy Dee Williams, Jan Michael Vincent and Michael Winslow AND Bobcat Goldthwait as comic relief.
The Expendables 2 boasts a cast nearly as star-studded and campy. If you’re going to make a profoundly silly, unashamedly stupid popcorn action movie for boys with a cast chockablock with tough guy character actors and A, B and C-list action heroes, you can do a whole lot worse than hire the director of Con Air.
West accordingly brings a light, campy touch to The Expendables 2. He knows exactly what kind of a movie he was hired to direct and delivers the goods in abundance. He understands that he was not hired to direct a good movie but rather an entertaining bad one.
We open with a big set-piece that re-introduces us to the Expendables, a star-studded gang of mercenaries played by multiple generations of actions stars of wildly varying degrees of popularity and bankability.
The Expendables are a gaggle of muscle-bound badasses led by Stallone’s Barney Ross so macho they make the Fast and Furious family look like an effete society of tea-drinking fancy lads by comparison.
The film opens with the Expendables on a mission that finds them peppering the bad guys with machine gun fire in a state of orgasmic frenzy. These skilled purveyors of ultra-violence derive an almost sexual excitement out of blowing things up.
#Squadgoals
They’re overgrown boys in a movie designed to appeal to everyone’s inner ten year old, the one that fantasizes about who would win if Chuck Norris and Arnold Schwarzenegger were to fight.
Sure enough, when the hood of a man The Expendables save is ripped off it reveals the familiar visage of the former California governor and action icon.
Schwarzenegger leaves the film shortly afterwards but don’t worry: he’ll be back. In fact about half of Schwarzenegger’s dialogue represents some variation on “I’ll be back.” You know how the bodybuilder says “I’ll be back” in pretty much all his movies? That’s triply or quadruply true this time around.
Arnold says “I’ll be back” so often and so shamelessly, stopping just short of turning to the camera and winking broadly to really sell the reference, that at one point Bruce Willis gets in on the action and says “I’ll be back” as well.
Not to be outdone, Arnold responds, “Yippee Ka Yay” to Willis in what is quite possibly the most shameless bit of fan service in the history of shameless fan service. The Expendables 2 panders unabashedly to nostalgia-poisoned middle aged man-children like myself. As a nostalgia-poisoned middle aged man child the pandering worked like gangbusters. As a professional cynic and veteran movie writer, on the other hand, I regularly rolled my eyes at the film’s brazen cheesiness.
The Expendables 2 is the kind of movie where Jason Statham dresses up like a priest and quips, “I now pronounce you man and KNIFE” before stabbing a bad guy. If that sounds appealing to you, then will enjoy this idiocy in spite of yourself. If that does not sound appealing this will be a bit of a chore, entirely too much of a good-bad thing.
Shadowy operative Mr. Church (Bruce Willis, famously picking up a paycheck) then informs his frenemy Barney that he and his gang must retrieve something from a safe in a downed plane in Albania.
The CIA agent has Barney work with his colleague Maggie (Yu Nan) on the assignment. The veteran super-soldier is of course reluctant because Maggie is a girl. This presents all sorts of problems. What if Maggie abandons an important mission to go shoe-shopping? Alternately, what if she thought someone they were supposed to assassinate was a total dreamboat and wanted to go on a kissing date with him instead? Finally, what if Maggie has Cooties and spreads them to the entire team?
Maggie eventually proves herself to dedicated chauvinist Barney, who spends part of the film trying to convince his loyal sidekick/knife guy Lee Christmas (Statham) not to trust a girlfriend played by Charisma Carpenter because she cheated on him in the past. So yeah, The Expendables 2 DEFINITELY does no pass the Bechdel Test.
The opening bloodbath convinces Billy the Kid (Liam Hemsworth, everyone’s second or third favorite Hemsworth brother), the youngest and most earnest member of the Expendables, that a life of murdering foreigners for blood money just isn’t for him.
He decides to leave his dangerous old life behind so that he can be there for his girlfriend Sophia. In doing so he of course signs his death certificate.
Billy the Kid is not a terribly memorable character but he gets a memorable death when big boss Vilain (Van Damme) kicks a knife into his heart, killing him instantly.
Vilain is intent on getting his hands on enough plutonium to alter the global balance of power forever in his favor. So he forces an entire town to mine for plutonium. He’s an unhinged, sociopathic heavy whose management philosophy involves pretty much murdering every one he encounters.
The ancient Chuck Norris joins the cast as essentially a film version of the Chuck Norris Facts meme. There is an absolutely agonizing yet awesome moment where Sylvester Stallone, who was sixty-four years old when the film came out, sets up the seventy-two year old Norris with, “I heard another rumor, that you were bitten by a king cobra?” leading Norris to respond, with the world’s worst comic timing and delivery, “Yeah, I was. But after five days of agonizing pain…the cobra died.”
It is at once painful and adorable. Nothing is too cheesy or too obvious for The Expendables 2. That includes extensively referencing Lundgren’s real-life background as a Fullbright Scholarship award-winning chemical engineer by making his Lurch-like mercenary fuck-up a secret scientist as well.
The Expendables brings together four of the biggest icon in action history in Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Norris and Willis in its climax then neglects to give them anything particularly interesting to do other than shoot guns while referencing their long-ago glory days.
The curious thing about The Expendables 2 is that everything about it is mildly underwhelming and slightly anti-climactic yet the film as a whole works as boldly brainless popcorn escapism. It’s not art but it is a heck of a guilty pleasure from a director with a keen feel for how to make an action blockbuster that’s stupid in all the right ways.
Buy The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Cynical Movie Cash-In Extended Edition at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop, signed, for just 10.75, shipping and handling included OR 23 dollars for FOUR signed copies AND a free pack of colored pencils, shipping and taxes included
Pre-order The Fractured Mirror, the Happy Place’s next book, a 600 page magnum opus about American films about American films illustrated by the great Felipe Sobreiro over at https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s first non-"Weird Al” Yankovic-themed book is out! And it’s only 12.00, shipping, handling and taxes included, 23 bucks for two books, domestic only at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here and The Weird Accordion to Al here
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
Alternately you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al, signed, for just 18 dollars, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here.