5. Lack Of Action
If there's anything you would expect The Expendables 2 to deliver on, it's the action front, especially after the original film did such a good job. The expectation for a sequel to be bigger and better of course applies here, but Simon West has failed to live up to that, and though it might feel larger in scale given the sheer number of bodies cluttering up the screen, there's a depressing lack of action going on here, specifically in terms of set-pieces. After the thrilling opening scene, it's another 45 minutes or so before the next one occurs, but like much of the action in the film, it's stifled and disjointed, failing to gain momentum and compartmentalising itself, which isn't particularly satisfying. We have to take what we can get until the climactic action scene, which admittedly does deliver on a grand scale, as all of the Expendables gather to take down Vilain and his seemingly endless fleet of bad guys. Still, it's difficult to justify an action film of this scale being so limited with its set-pieces, perhaps owing to the massive cheques that were being written to secure this ridiculous number of stars under one roof in the first place. This is a worrying trend of many recent action films, whereby there are no more additional action scenes than what are glimpsed in trailers, and it is too often broken up by dialogue interludes, when something more akin to
The Raid's mixture of frenetic action and occasional downtime would be more preferable.