Old definitely is not gold; the violence is preposterous

Rating: 3/10 (18 August 2012)

OLD is certainly not gold in the second film about the exploits of a bunch of mostly white geriatrics.
Stallone, Willis, Lundgren, Norris, Statham and Schwarzenegger collaborate with Jet Li and Chinese actress Nan Yu to show that they are at their best knocking off villains.
Van Damme appears as a baddie. I had the opportunity to interview him over the phone, when he was in the US, about his flick, Legionnaire, in 1998.
The exertions really show on the faces of Stallone, Willis, Lundgren, Schwarzenegger and Van Damme. While they have kept up their pumping, it's hard to believe that they actually ran, jumped, kung-feud, jumped and whacked dozens of baddies, with nary a scratch on them.
Stallone, as we all know, got caught carrying 48 vials of human growth hormone in Australia in 2007. So we know that his musculature isn't natural.
The opening scene signals the level of preposterousness that the film will go to show how "bad" these mercenaries are. They storm a Nepali rebel hangout and blow off the heads of practically all the guards.
Then it gets mushy by talking about a mercenary (Hemsworth) wanting to leave the killing business to be with his French girlfriend. How sweet.
The mercenaries illegally enter hostile territory in Albania to recover a radiation-detecting device (huh!!??), which leads them into the hands of mon ami Van Damme.
Van Damme grabs the device from them and stabs the young mercenary in the heart with a vicious and startling kung-fu move.
This gives the mercenaries permission to track down the baddies, wipe them out and save a town devoid of its men and male teens.
When Van Dame's character kills the mercenary, viewers know that he will get his just desserts, and in a similar fashion, at the end of the flick.
The baddie's right-hand man also gets into a war of words with Stallone's right-hand man, Statham, so you know what will happen to the baddie's aide.
There's some mild, fake excitement caused by the mercenaries attempting to remove the device from a plane wreckage. The device warns about an explosion, but this trick is so common in movies that viewers will know that it will all come to naught.
It's quite incredible for the baddies to detain the men and teens without the European Union knowing anything about it. How is this possible? If the EU had known about it, it would have been its forces storming this peaceful enclave.
But the flick can't have that. This is a common theme in US movies; it's the modern-day variation of the cavalry coming to the rescue.
Also, why would Russia have left the nuclear capsules in a cave? Wouldn't they have put them in a secure, high-tech installation? And how is it possible for the baddies to transport the capsules without wearing protective clothing?
The actors may have gotten older, but they have not gotten wiser.