1. The Runtime
The Expendables 2 runs in at merely 102 minutes; that's roughly 95-minutes minus closing credits. While I initially went in with a certain optimism that this would mean director Simon West had trimmed the fat around the edges and delivered a superbly paced avalanche of mayhem and carnage, the end result is really quite different; padded, plodding, and giving the feel that an action scene somewhere half-way had been cut, or more likely, scrapped at the planning stage as they realised they didn't have the money to film it after paying their stars. A film like this, with a huge scale and the biggest cast of action stars ever assembled, should probably have a beefy runtime reflecting this, with at least four or five set-pieces, running in at 115-120 minutes. Instead, this film feels like a hastily-assembled working print to show to studio executives mid-way through post production, choppy and inconsistently paced; absolutely, brilliantly breakneck at the start and finish, but impossibly slow and monotonous in the middle. Perhaps putting that absent 30-or-so minutes to generating a few more action scenes might've given the film the pep it needed to meet, or as many of us expected, to surpass the merits of the original film. As it stands, this mild effort isn't enough for me to be against a third Expendables film, and in fact, I still very much look forward to it, though my optimism will be a little more cautious this time.