Same as the first (and what's the problem with that?)

Rating: 6/10 (17 December 2012)

To some fans "The Expendables 2" has everything that they couldn't quite find in the original, but given that I already liked the original I can't fully agree with this. Some new names were added to the cast, but apart from that it's the same old thing we got to know and love when all these guys were doing it in the 80s. The villain in this movie is called Jean Villain (it's Jean-Claude Van Damme! Yay!), that should probably give you an idea of how serious all these guys are taking it. Van Damme plays him extremely well by the way, he looks just as evil as Eric Roberts did in the first one but to top that of he can actually move. His best scene is his introduction though, where he gets to kill the most obvious cannon fodder character in the history of cinema. The good guys have some fresh faces (I use that term really loosely), the cast is actually getting so crowded now Jet Li has to parachute himself out of this movie early on. If only he had a parachute for Randy Couture, who is always around but still has about two lines in the entire movie. The action scenes (and the movie's nothing but) are pretty much what you can expect from Simon "Con Air" West, you'll be cheering in the audience right until the end or until you're ushered out. The helicopter scene is just awesome in so many ways. "Expendables 2" makes you hungry for "Expendables 3", and that seems to be what they were going for.