The Expendables 2

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Year:	2012
Country of origin:	USA
Director:	Simon West
Genre:	OTT actioner
Starring:	Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Jet Li
Rating:	2/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1764651/
Tagline:	Back for War.
Favourite line:	"This is the symbol of the goat….."

The mother of all action movies is back for more.
More war.

The plot:
Assigned a mission that should be a breeze, Stallone, Statham, Lundgren and Li head off to recover a secret item from a safe, stored on board a plane that has crashed somewhere in the former Soviet Union.
Arriving on scene, the bunch run into trouble – big surprise – and the newest member of their gang, Billy The Kid, is killed for no good reason, by new nemesis on the block, Jean Villain.
Swearing revenge, the team head behind enemy lines, to exact their revenge.

Look here, you know walking into a movie of this nature that it is going to be a right load of old cobblers, and by Christ it is.
Groan-inducing one-liners, characters riffing on the others’ most famous catchphrases and characters – Arnie saying Yippee-kay-yay, Terry Crews telling Arnie he’ll be terminated - and a script that seems as if it was written by someone yet to grow hair on their tiny, tiny balls, all would seem to indicate something absolutely without redemption.
But there is something, here. Some slight glint of entertainment, buried deep in the mire of turgidity.
And it’s the lunacy that does it.
When Chuck Norris first pops up to save the day, with the theme music to The Good The Bad and The Ugly as accompaniment, the heart does unexpectedly thaw.
When Statham dresses as a priest, cowl and all, then unleashes all manner of hell with his vicious knife-skills, there is joy to be had.
Yes, it’s weighed down by the millstone of the clunky script and even clunkier performances, especially from Stallone, but it is there.
Then there is the preposterousness of having this cast assembled in the first place.
We’ve got Stallone.
We’ve got The Stath.
We’ve got Darn old SchwarzeGeezer.
Then there’s Jet Li.
Lundgren
Long Cord Man Slamme.
Chuck Norris.
Bruce Willis.
It is utterly fucking bonkers, and each is given a decent amount of screen time, too, with Man Slamme playing against type as chief bad guy Jean Villain (get it?).
With an unforgivably saggy middle, the film limps through the second act, but this is book-ended by some spectacular violence and mayhem at the start and for the final twenty minutes or so.
Absolute rubbish, in reality, still action movie aficionados will find something to titillate.
Everyone else, avoid like Nick Griffin on canvassing day.