The Expendables 2

There's only one thing to do when you make a successful movie that is the ultimate love letter to action movies: do it again!  The Expendables 2 is pretty much The Expendables all over again: Barney Ross (Stallone) and co. work for Mr. Church (Bruce Willis), and go and shoot people and blow stuff up.  The main difference this time around is the cast: Bruce Willis and Ahnold (in the role of Trench) get bigger roles, and Chuck Norris joins in on the fun (for better or for worse).  There's also newcomers Maggie (Yu Nan), a Chinese tech genius (and all-around badass) who Mr. Church sends along with Barney's team to retrieve some valuable data, and Billy the Kid (Liam Hemsworth), a crackerjack young sniper who served with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan.  Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a cold, ruthless, possibly Russian villain.  I honestly don't know why they even bothered with a plot; it's basically porn (something which Stallone should be very familiar with) for action-movie junkies.  Basically, the movie is a cacophony of blood spurts, fiery explosions, gunfire, and one-liners, with a tank thrown in for good measure.

This movie isn't high art; it's good, violent fun.  It's cliched, and it's proud of that fact.  The score tells you how to feel (although the poppy oldies music and classic rock are rather jarring, albeit awesome), the bad guys are piss-poor shots (they must have gone to the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksman Academy) and the good guys never run out of bullets when they're mowing down mooks (except when they run out for the sake of dramatic tension).  Oh, and there's a Chuck Norris fact, as well as references to many of the stars' past films (including Rambo, Terminator, Die Hard, and Good Guys Wear Black).  Still, I have a few problems with this movie:

-The profanity.  Namely, there's very, very little (even compared to the first Expendables movie, which didn't have all that much to begin with).  Nobody drops the f-bomb (supposedly because of Chuck Norris being a conservative Christian and all that crap*), even Bruce Willis (if you've seen Die Hard, you'll understand).
-Jet Li.  He only appears at the beginning of the movie before returning to China.  It's kind of a letdown.
-CGI blood.  For God's sake, use packets filled with red dye, not that fake-looking computer-generated crap.
-All the badasses who didn't appear in the film, but should have (I'll list them in a moment).

Other than that, I really liked this movie.

Rating: 78/100

And now, the list of people not appearing in this movie:
-Clint Eastwood (although I've heard that Stallone wants him for Expendables 3)
-Justin Bieber (I thought it would be cool to see him get killed in a very gruesome way)
-Jackie Chan
-Lee Marvin (he's dead)
-Bruce Lee (he's dead, but I'm pretty sure he can come back to life, sort of like Jesus)
-John Wayne (again, dead)
-William Holden (dead)
-Ernest Borgnine (dead, and just recently, to boot)
-Jim Brown
-Will Smith
-Matt Damon
-Nicolas Cage (who Stallone actually tried to get in the movie)
-Antonio Banderas (offered a role, but had to turn it down due to prior commitments)
-Taylor Lautner (a.k.a. the only actor from Twilight that I actually like/has any talent)(Stallone apparently considered him for the role that went to Hemsworth)
-Lucy Liu
-Samuel L. Jackson
-David Carradine (dead... but what a way to go!)
-Mark Hamill

*Chuck Norris DID appear in Dodgeball, which had the word (used, in fact, to describe Mr. Norris himself), so I have no idea why he was so anal about swearing in this movie.