The Expendables 2 (2012)

Expendables 2 is simply not fun or exciting. The first one was bad, and this one is just more of the same. The action scenes are dull - exploding military vehicles in wide open spaces and interchangeable muscle-men firing weapons - and the fight scenes are shot in dark shadow, which one would assume was done to cover up the older actors' dwindling athleticism if not for the fact that Statham's scenes get the same treatment.

I had hopes that the script might be a little sharper than last time - perhaps Stallone would have the smarts to get a Shane Black type in to polish it up - but unfortunately it's the same maudlin, mundane nonsense as the previous film, full of flat banter, repeated jokes and half-arsed nods towards the characters' old age.

There are ten minutes towards the end where the Expendables franchise grasps at its potential, where the guest behemoths all have a cool moment or two within a big shoot/punchout, but for the most part this film fails just as its predecessor did to escape its inherent problem: almost none of the many leads have any discernible talents as actors or even personas. Perhaps if this film had the balls to kill off Couture, Crews and even Li, plus the brains to get a good director and screenwriter, it could have been the super-team action film everyone was hoping for in the late-eighties with maybe even a bonus smidgen of Wild Bunch pathos. As it is, it feels like a feature-length version of one of those adverts where a long-dead movie star is unwillingly CGed from beyond the grave into a money-grabbing embarrassment made by dullard suits who don't understand the classics they are "homaging".

Rating: Poor.