The Expendables 2

If The Dirty Dozen and Cocoon had ever had a drunken one-night stand, this is what the baby would have looked like.

The Expendables 2 (2012) is such a bizarre mash-up of styles and demographics – oh-my-aching-sides oldie gags and uber-violence – that it frequently leaves the viewer perplexed: “Aw, look at all the old people, still so sprightly and full of zest. Wait no, what’s he doing? Oh god no, he just shot somebody in the face!”

Following the respectable box office of The Expendables (which proved the adage: it’s never too late to put old dogs through exactly the same tricks), old stroke-features Stallone here rounds up the boys again.

Eschewing a state pension, the 66-year-old has gathered Schwarzeneger (65), Willis (57), Lundgren (55), Van Damme (52) and junior partner the Stath for another medley of tongue-in-cheek heroics and stomach-churning blood spillage.

(To fully appreciate just how downright weird all this is, just consider that cameo assassin Chuck Norris, at a coffin-brushing 72-years-old, is a full 20 years older than Cocoon actor Wilford Brimley was when he starred as a pensioner in that film.)

The ‘plot’, in which the team rescues some plutonium, blasts the baddies and saves the obligatory village, is so by-the-numbers we need not go into detail here. What really impresses is the gusto with which the screenplay (co-written by Sly) embraces every possible action movie cliché.

What, the team has to do an impossible mission or GO TO JAIL? You mean, the young buck who’s doing ‘one last job’ to raise enough money to marry his sweetheart ACTUALLY DIES? You’re kidding me: the glamorous female who’s foisted on the reluctant team turns out to be so kick ass and gutsy she eventually WINS THEIR RESPECT?

It sounds awful, but it actually works. The whole movie is essentially one gigantic wink to the audience, a cinematic karaoke of old action movie favourites. This can become wearing when the action pensioners repeatedly blurt out self-reverential soundbites (‘I’m back’, ‘Yippee-ki-yay’ etc) but it’s mostly cartoonish good fun.

In fact, the film only really falters when it tries to up the drama and get serious. Chief villain Jean Claude Van Damme’s opening soliloquy – a rambling, four-minute homily to ‘respect’ – is literally incomprehensible, and there’s a palpable sense of relief when he finally shuts up and kung-fu kicks a dagger into someone’s chest. (Yes, he really does.)

Despite all the guns, bombs and crashing planes, the most fascinating view on display – especially on the big screen – is the cast themselves. Stallone, arrested several years ago for smuggling his personal supply of human growth hormone into Australia, scarcely even looks human anymore.

He alternately wears a thick, black woollen beret and his own hair, but you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference. The bulging veins on his forearms are just terrifying, and those HGH injections haven’t quite reached down to his legs, which are now comically old man skinny. It’s like there’s two different bodies waddling across the screen – Tom Hardy on top and Steptoe at the bottom.

Arnie, meanwhile, looks like a semi-melted waxwork of his younger self, his face tight and surgical-shiny in places, but hanging off his jowls at the sides. Van Damme wears sunglasses for 95 per cent of the time – even while underground – presumably because there are bags under his eyes you could carry your shopping in.

Of the others, Bruce Willis merely looks even more like a smug testicle, while septuagenarian Chuck Norris – with his magnificently white teeth and lustrous brown beard/hairdo combo looks like a human beaver. It’s like he’s accidentally strayed into the action from an Island of Dr Moreau set next door.

At a sprightly 45-years-old, it’s left exclusively to the Stath to provide all the actual action in this action movie. Director Simon West shows a good sense of the ridiculous for the most part with this movie (he made Con Air, after all), but his choreography of the fight scenes is lamentable. The clunky edits make abundantly clear that the baddies are obediently queuing to get biffed one at a time; I’ve seen queues in Lidl’s with more sense of danger.

Still, that’s a minor gripe about a largely entertaining yarn which, in its eagerness to please, throws us an exploding helicopter in the very first scene. Our crew, armed with all kinds of armoured vehicles, bust into a walled compound to rescue Arnie.

Before you can say human growth hormone injections, Sly’s somehow on a low rooftop with his tanky vehicle, which has a motorbike strapped to the back. A chopper swings low, ready to fire, so Sly revs up the bike and sends it blasting into the helicopter cockpit, causing an inevitable crash and, yes, explosion.

Exploding helicopter innovation

The driving-a-moving-automobile-into-a-chopper gambit has been used before (Willis in Die Hard 4 provides a worthy demonstration of the form) but the good thing about this example is that it doesn’t make a meal out of things. There’s no Michael Bay multiple-cut, slo-mo, shite CGI business going on: it just happens. One minute Sly’s shooting someone repeatedly in the chest, then he throws a motorbike at a helicopter, then he punches someone else to death. Simple.

Positives

I love how, with each movie, less and less of what Sly says is comprehensible, especially when he’s angry. There’s a whole scene where he castigates Bruce Willis down a walkie talkie that I didn’t catch a word of.

You can picture the director asking him to go through it seven times before just throwing his hands into the air. In the latest Batman film, Tom Hardy often can’t be understood because he’s wearing a big mask: Sly now achieves much the same effect with just the burden of his own slopey mouth.

Negatives

The gutsy woman character is – probably deliberately – neither that young nor that glamorous, presumably to avoid providing too sharp a contrast with her doddering co-stars. However, she is one cack actress. When you’re in a scene with Sly where he’s stutteringly growling out some half-baked ‘backstory’ and YOU’RE the one whose acting is noticeably bad, it’s time to start worrying.

Favourite quote

Van Damme’s colossally nonsensical: “Without respect, we are just people.” What?

Interesting fact

The collective age of the main cast a very high figure indeed that would have impressed you if I could have been bothered to work it out.

Review by: Chopper

Still want more? Then check out the Exploding Helicopter podcast episode on The Expendables 2. Listen via iTunes, Stitcher, Acast, Spotify or right here.

Derailed

If you ever want to understand how an action star’s lustre has dimmed, just count the number of euro thrillers on their CV.

Around the turn of the millennium, an entire generation of Eighties action heroes were deported en masse to Eastern Europe. Unable to trouble the American box office, they were first forced into direct to video exile, and then condemned to ply their trade in Europe’s far flung corners - where cheaper production costs made it possible to eke out a living while dignity quietly evaporated.

Derailed (2002) marks Jean Claude Van Damme’s first foray into this twilight existence - a title, which, with the benefit of hindsight, doubles as an eerily accurate description of his career at this point. 

Filmed in Bulgaria but set in Slovakia (naturally), Van Damme plays Jack Christoff, an intelligence agent tasked with escorting a spy (Laura Harring) carrying a biological weapon across the border.

With airports under surveillance, our heroes opt to “let the train take the strain”. Unfortunately, sharing the journey are a group of terrorists eager to steal the bio weapon, and Van Damme’s own family, who choose this exact moment - through astonishingly ill timed spontaneity - to surprise Daddy.

It’s a promising enough setup. In fact, it’s so promising that we’d already seen it done rather better in Under Siege 2. Still, originality aside, with a half decent script and cast, Derailed could have been a perfectly serviceable action film.

Instead, it displays all the defining traits of the euro thriller: poor direction, a leaden script, and a supporting cast seemingly assembled from the contents of a provincial drama school’s lost and found. Any one of these might have sunk the film. Derailed manages the impressive feat of having all three.

Another familiar irritation is the writers’ bizarre grasp of European geopolitics. In their universe, European nations appear to have abandoned national government entirely, outsourcing all decision making to international bodies.

“Get me NATO command!” someone barks, in a truly risible moment of faux urgency. Later, another character breathlessly insists, “We need to call the World Health Organisation… now!”

The writers seem blissfully unaware that Europe is made up of individual countries with their own governments - though, to be fair, Van Damme’s native Belgium once went nearly two years without one. Still, most nations don’t immediately ring NATO every time a problem arises on a train.

While the scriptwriters are happy to take wild political liberties, they’re far less adventurous when it comes to DTV action conventions - and so, dutifully, a helicopter explosion is included.

The terrorists’ escape plan involves being airlifted from the moving train by helicopter. As their leader attempts to shimmy up a rope ladder dangling from the chopper, Van Damme intervenes by securing the ladder to the train, preventing the helicopter from gaining altitude.

A tunnel looms. The pilot wrestles desperately with the controls, but it’s no use. The helicopter smashes into the rocky outcrop at tunnel height, with the inevitable fiery consequences.

Artistic merit

This report card reads: could have tried harder.

Through a bit of crafty editing, we never actually see the helicopter explode - presumably because that would have cost money. Instead, we’re treated to an underwhelming fireball, heavy on whites and yellows, and sorely lacking the oily reds and oranges we crave.

In a moment of artistic licence, the director showers Van Damme - still clinging to the train roof - with falling wreckage from the explosion. If you stop to consider the physics of this (and trust me, I have), it makes absolutely no sense.

Exploding helicopter innovation

Tying a helicopter down to prevent take off is a method we’ve seen before. Derailed plays almost like an action replay of Darkman, except this time it’s a train - rather than a lorry - dragging the chopper towards its tunnel wall demise.

Positives

There’s a dumbly enjoyable sequence where Van Damme rides a scramble bike along the roof of the train to evade the terrorists. It’s shoddily executed, but at least it gestures vaguely towards the kind of nonsense we’re here for.

Negatives

The entire film, which surely represents the nadir of Van Damme’s career. If he’s made a worse one, I’d genuinely like to know - if only so I can be absolutely certain to avoid it.

Favourite quote

“Terrorists, plus sickness, equals biological warfare.”

Interesting fact

Tellingly, director Bob Misiorowski never helmed another film after Derailed. However, buried within his otherwise unremarkable CV is one curious detail: a writing credit on Mrs Columbo.

This short lived and ill fated spin off committed the ultimate sacrilege of actually showing Mrs Columbo - a character famously never seen in the original series. The reaction from fans was swift and apoplectic. The show was hastily rebranded Kate Loves a Mystery, all references to Columbo were excised, and it died an unlamented death after a single series. Much like Derailed.

Review by: Jafo

Sudden Death

Ever wanted to see 'Die Hard in an ice rink'? Well, you need to watch Sudden Death (1995)/ 

Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a security guard who works at an ice hockey stadium. During an important game, terrorists led by Powers Boothe take the US Vice President hostage and threaten to blow-up the stadium unless he’s given a billion dollars.

Unfortunately for the villains Van Damme’s security guard happens to be an expert in bomb disposal, a whizz at building improvised weapons, and - even more improbably - a semi-pro hockey player.

This allows 'Van Dammage' to disarm the bombs, kill the heavily armed terrorists with an increasingly inventive arsenal of makeshift weapons, and make a game-changing save in the Stanley Cup ice hockey final. Who on Earth writes this stuff?

Exploding helicopter action

In a bid to free the Vice President, the Secret Service orders in two helicopters to sneak some special forces inside the stadium. However, Boothe - the poor man's Tommy Lee Jones - has anticipated this move, and has a comrade equipped with a rocket launcher handily stashed on the top of nearby building.

The baddie fires on the chopper. Perhaps due to budget constraints, we don’t actually see the helicopter explode. We only see some flaming wreckage on the ground and the body of a special forces soldier who had been hanging on to a rope and dangling from the helicopter.

The climax of the film involves some excellent helicopter based action. With his scheme in tatters Powers Boothe attempts to make his getaway while disguised in a comedy wig and moustache. He hoofs it up to the roof where a helicopter is waiting to fly him away.

After brawling with Van Damme, Boothe boards the chopper which begins to fly away. But with uncanny precision, the Muscles from Brussels shoots the pilot through the bottom of the helicopter. The pilot slumps back which makes the nose of the helicopter point directly upwards. As the rotor blades are no longer able to generate any lift, the helicopter plunges downward into the ice rink.

We get to see lots of close ups of Powers Boothe – still in comedy wig and moustache desperately try to regain control of the chopper. To draw out the drama of the climax the chopper’s crash to the ground takes an impossibly long time, as we see the helicopter travel the same short distance from multiple angles.

The helicopter appears to glide past Van Damme at glacial pace, allowing JCVD and Boothe to exchange some heavy looks. The gravity of this moment being undermined by Boothe’s comedy wig and moustache.

Number of exploding helicopters

2. Probably. The shonky direction makes it hard to be definitive.

Exploding helicopter innovation

I’ve never seen a helicopter fall “arse first” – for lack of a better description – out of the sky before. The descent is handled a bit like the chopper was a falling elevator allowing those moody looks between Booth and Van Damme.

Artistic merit

The first helicopter explosion is a bit of a cheat as it’s not shown on screen fully. The climatic helicopter explosion is filmed gloriously as we get to enjoy multiple angles as it makes its gravity defying slow descent towards the ice rink and it’s inevitable immolation. The explosion is somewhat conventional. The fireball looks a bit watery. It lacks those deep, luxurious, oranges and reds that the best explosions have.

Do passengers survive?

My favourite outcome, everyone dies.

Positives

Whilst it might be bordering on daft, director Peter Hyams (Outland, Timecop) wrings every last drop of dramatic tension from the sequence. The repeated extended close-ups of Powers Boothe face as he plummets to his death are great. The pain of knowing his final moments on camera in this film are are going to be whilst wearing a ridiculous wig and moustache are writ large across his face.

Negatives

There’s no getting away from the fact that the first helicopter explosion was a fluffed opportunity to show a big, bright, burning chopper fireball.

Review by: Jafo

You can also listen to the Exploding Helicopter podcast episode on Sudden Death on iTunes, Stitcher, Podomatic and YourListen.