Expendables 2 trailer shows some faces that I’m happy to see return to the screen.

But let me explain my inclination not to bother spending eleven bucks + parking + gas + meal to go see this. Expendables 1 was hyped up as our generation’s Commando, or supposedly a return to the 80s action film. So I went and saw it, and I’m not sure which broken translation software was used to come up with that comparison but basically the movie sucked from beginning to finish. The finale was bad enough, with laughable undercranking (in-camera speed-ups) and frame-cutting. When you have an all-star cast of 10 people and shove them all in a narrow hallway for 4 minutes and try to wrap things up, you end up with this:

Film a bunch of fights, shoot tons of coverage, and let the editor go to town…? This method is a far cry from “80s” or “Commando”. But far worse is what they did with Jet Li and Dolph, two competent fighters in their own right. I can’t really understand what happened. Here’s the video: http://youtu.be/CDAoKx5FH9U. Careful, it hurts.

Junk, and arguably the worst Jet Li fight of all time. My patience is so strained with films like this now that it costs me more than the lost time and cash: it costs me faith. I’m angry that a team of action scientists like Stallone, Daniels, Li, and Lundgren, who made all our childhoods happy and full, could not come together and make something as simple as a coherent fist fight. It boggles my mind, and I have no recourse but to turn to religion since obviously Satan was at work here.

I think people like Expendables because they like seeing their childhood action heroes return. That’s cool. But nobody can look at these fight scenes and say they were remotely as good as anything any of them had done before. I hope E2 is better, but I won’t see it until the DVD or Blu Ray can come to my house where I have an exorcist on stand-by.