BEFORE: One week until Comic-Con, which means today is my shipping day - I had to get three heavy boxes of merchandise over to the UPS Store, so they'll arrive in San Diego next Tuesday, in advance of the convention starting on Wednesday. So I had my special breakfast sandwich, which I call "The Comic-Con", since I first saw it offered from a food truck there. This is a great high-protein breakfast if you know you're going to be doing a lot of physical work that day (I guess some call it "exercise", but I try to avoid both that word and the activity...). I get a PB&J on toast from the deli, and also an order of fried eggs and bacon, with a side of plain cream cheese. Once I'm back at the office, I open the PB&J sandwich and add the bacon, close it and spread the cream cheese on the top of the toast, then place a fried egg (over easy, but you can go sunny-side up if you dare) on top of each half of the sandwich. It sounds crazy, it shouldn't work, but it's delicious. Eggs go with bacon, peanut butter goes with bacon, cream cheese goes with jelly, and so on. Then you can skip lunch.
Bruce Willis carries over from "A Good Day to Die Hard" - I suppose I could have slotted in "Red 2" here, but I need that film later in the schedule (next year sometime) as a very particular bridge linking two other films, since it stars both Catherine Zeta-Jones and Helen Mirren. Perhaps I'll regret it, because stylistically it seems to fit here, so I guess we'll see.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Expendables" (Movie #1,581)
AFTER: It really hasn't been that long since I saw the first "Expendables" film - for some reason there was a big delay in getting that first film onto premium cable channels. Maybe it was doing really well on PPV? Or maybe they rushed the 2nd film into production as a follow-up? I'm not sure. I think the first film made a gazillion dollars, somehow the box office was bigger than the combined age of all of its stars, which is saying something.
Here's where a big, dumb piece of action movie like this is really going to shine - it's got the good fortune of following the nonsensical "A Good Day to Die Hard" on my list. So by comparison, this plot seems to make a lot more sense, it sure was easier to follow. And that's despite the fact that I could barely understand a word that Stallone was saying. The motto of the team seems to be "Shoot first and mumble questions later".
I think mindless action films have their place in the world. As long as action stars want to get together and create what is essentially a "jam session" film, hey, more power to them. In some ways, this is like my big breakfast sandwich - Stallone's the toast and Statham's the peanut butter and Dolph Lundgren is the jelly, Bruce Willis is the good ol' fried egg on top, you get the idea. And a big slice of bacon (or ham) for Schwarzenegger - There are little pairings within the group, where the actors play off of each other or reference other pairings from other films, so as long as everything's in harmony with everything else and everything's in balance, and no one actor gets too much screen time, this will fill you up. I won't say it's the most nutritious thing you could eat, but at least you won't be hungry again for a while. Don't watch a rom-com the next day, or you'll get the bends.
Does everything here make sense? Of course not - sending 7 people to Albania in a plane on a "stealth"mission is pretty ridiculous, especially when they're 7 big, loud agressive types. Do you think they won't see your plane landing on the river? Plus, like the film "The Heat" they play that "I've got the drop on you"/"No wait, I've got the drop on YOU" game a bit too much. Plus the usual, there are hundreds of bullets fired by the enemy and the heroes never get shot, but a hero can fire 5 rounds and take out 20 bad guys. It's like a cartoon or something.
NITPICK POINT: As with "A Good Day to Die Hard", the macguffin that they're sent to retrieve doesn't make a lot of sense. It had something to do with finding the location of weaponized plutonium in a huge mine. Can't you just do that with a geiger counter? OK, I may not know much about radioactivity, but it still seems like there would be a simpler way.
Why fight it? Making this sort of film is like having a license to print money.
Also starring Sylvester Stallone (last seen in "Get Carter"), Arnold Schwarzenegger (last seen in "Conan the Destroyer"), Jason Statham (last seen in "The Expendables"), Dolph Lundgren (ditto), Terry Crews (ditto), Randy Couture (and again), Jet Li (yep, ditto), Liam Hemsworth (last seen in "Knowing"), Jean-Claude Van Damme (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 2"), Chuck Norris, Nan Yu, Scott Adkins, with cameo from Charisma Carpenter,
RATING: 5 out of 10 override codes
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