The Expendables 2

First off, we all know that it ain't about the storyline, character development, cinematography, great humor, the underlying meaning, good writing or any of those other stellar qualities that make real good movies.  We knew it before even the first Expendables came to the show.  We naturally wanted to see progress and maturation in those areas, but hey "What are you gonna do?"  Now everyone knows, including the filmmakers who seem to know it a bit better this time around and have seemed to capitalize on it.  So I don't have much to complain about in all fairness, because....  Well,  you know.  It's an action movie with mostly  rather shallow and aging action stars. But you've got eight of those heavyweights from back in the day, with 4-5 current minor stars.  We've all seen their movies back in the day, whether you loved them or hated them.  So what they've managed to do for the second time around rather simply and brilliantly better, is just take all our favorites and put them in a film together.  Who needs much marketing with all those names crammed together?  Americans like to supersize everything.  Bigger is better in our minds and so at the very least, The Expendables movies will get audiences to the show.  If not that, then go see how seriously ripped a 66 year old Stallone is next to the  flabby Gubernator who's only a year younger.  The real obvious treat is in watching all these guys together running around, shooting and blowing up shit, and then making those crazy one-liners in one movie.  However, this time around, there are more in-house jokes that poke fun at themselves in their other various roles on and off the screen.  The addition of Chuck Norris playing mercenary Booker and Jean Claude Van Damme playing villain Jean Vilain (yes, you read it correctly) gives it a bit of a healthy boost, as well.  So what I can't help but think to be the secret , at least to me, in being entertained by these movies is in not even treating them like action movies.  I swear I kind of look at them like scenes from Tropic Thunder, which was hilarious fun.  Stallone should have the Expendables meet Robert Downey and Jack Black! Lol.   Spoiler alerts are not needed for this calibre of genre, so one point I can say that I didn't like, though was probably smart on his point, was how Jet Li's character literally dropped out of the film early on.  It leaves us left with the next best on-screen fighter in Jason Statham, who has his trademarked Transporter-choreographed fight of the film, garbed in priest outfit wielding his knives and daggers.  This brings me to the final  minor point of criticism of the rather anti-climactic  showdown between Stallone and Van Damme, which while decent for the old-school heavyweights,  paled next to previous action buildup of the film.  Nonethlelesss and despite that, The Expendables 2 does deliver rather well of what we can reasonably expect.  What it may lack, it supersizes with a dozen action stars together who are having fun .  Not too many films can capitalize on that much star power.