the guiltiest pleasure? I lost some brain cells...

Rating: 6/10 (25 August 2012)

The Expendables 2 is loud, violent, messy, and yet, mostly, pretty enjoyable. At its best it embraces its stupid-macho outlook and aesthetic, and if you don't go with it after the first big set-piece (well, let's just say didn't go with it in the first one), then just leave the theater and don't try to come back. It has a premise - men go into a mission to bring a girl to get some map for a mine with plutonium (sadly, no Doc Brown available), and then a villain (no, his name is Jean Villain, which is French for John Villain), and then they have to get back at him when he kills one of the Expendables (a "Red Shirt", don't get worried).
Aside from that... who needs plot anyway, stupid f***ers? Let's KILL! And let's have not just walk-ons this time but extended cameos - not just with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis either, but Chuck Norris (ok, ease those erections fan-boys)! And Hey, who needs really firm grasps on how bullets or physics or an airplane crashing through a mountain works, it's an Expendables flick! The movie takes once again off of the mood of 80's/90's B/C/D action movies. Notice I mention C and D. There is such a dearth of intelligence here that if you go in trying to analyze anything, then, again, you're up blank. All that's here with context is male 'we're gonna get im' mentality and, yeah, if you want that, you got it.
For the benefit of the filmmakers, they do a better job engaging with the characters than in the first one, and Simon West, not an 'auteur' with any personality, can manage action scenes and the usual 'shoot fire shoot' cinematography with more competency than Stallone did himself as director with the first movie. The problem, as was (also moreso) with the first movie, is that along with being a 'tribute' to the 80's action fare, it's also the same generic dialog and character relationships. Where it does help is some scenes, not all, have funny camaraderie with the group, with Terry Crews, Dolph Lundgren, and Jason Statham. When they can all interact, like going over what their ideal final meal would be (and lines like 'Cereal, how about Earrios?'), it's genuinely fun.
Other times, when the action ramps up like in the opening, and especially the last twenty minutes of the movie, it just ramps up being totally senseless except for LOTS AND LOTS OF DEAD BODIES! And one- liners ("I now pronounce you men and knife" "(Insert old-catch phrase here)"). It's still not technically *good* filmmaking or storytelling, per-say, but I could enjoy its dumbness when I left my more critical faculties. That is, except when Stallone himself would try to seriously act, even in small instances, which made me most embarrassed of all as he has lost most of the charisma that used to be with him as a star in his hey-day. In reality, the Expendables 2 works best with anyone *not* Stallone, be it Van Damme's cardboard villain, the other Expendables interacting, and even by Willis/Ah-nuld/Norris. Yes, Norris, the most overrated action star of the past thirty years has his moment in the sun.
The movie made me alternately bored, ashamed, entertained, amused, thrilled, and dulled by the action and chaotic violence, to the point where I lost track of the body count and wanted the chaotic- unintentional-comedy to be ramped up further. While Expendables 2 is a Bad-Good improvement (if that makes sense, which it probably doesn't), I hope if they make a third one to get someone more ingrained in over-the- top B-movie-dom like Robert Rodriguez. The movie at times goes over the edge into the absurd, but then it goes back to being the same sort of just-OKAY tribute to the older action flicks and star vehicles. I say, make it MORE meta and MORE gonzo. Then you'll have something different and truly exciting.