Dad Spends a Night in the Mancave: The Expendables 2 review

We reviewed The Expendable when it came out and it was serviceable, but not really entertaining.  I remember that The A-Team came out about the same time and we loved that movie.   At the time I even said that the wrong movie received the green light for a sequel.  Fast forward two years, The Expendables 2 is out on video and is entertaining, fun, brisk and worth your mancave time.

I didn’t expect The Expendables 2 to be entertaining.   It was a spur of the moment rental and I figured it couldn’t be worse than the first one.

The difference between The Expendables 1 & 2 is that Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme are in the 2^nd one.  There is also a strong female character, Maggie, played by Nan Yu whose job it is to go with the team to find the plutonium.    In any bad guy, throwback movie there is always some plutonium on the loose, isn’t there?

JCVD’s character wants the stuff to make money and do evil while Mr. Church, CIA guy (Bruce Willis) just wants to secure it from him.  The action sequences are large, loud and better than the first movie.  And (brace yourselves) the dialogue in the movie was funny, appropriate and just enough to pay homage to all of the stars in the movie.

Norris, Schwarzenneger, Willis, JCVD, Lundgren and Crews all had really good one-liners that fans of 80’s cinema will remember.   With all of the internet jokes about Chuck Norris the man looks amazing, when I’m 72 I hope I look as good as he does.

Even while I was watching the movie I remember saying to myself, “I should not be enjoying it this much”.  The Expendables 2 was great fun from start to finish.  I stopped the movie only twice and that was to get another beverage and to use the bathroom.  Thankfully after each time I got up my movie watching cats re-joined me.

After watching an entertaining almost 2 hours of testosterone, I turned on regular television to see what was on.  I was greeted with the antithesis of what I had just seen, Spice World.  Its complete awfulness made me get another beverage and be even more thankful for Sylvester Stallone.