Your Expendables 2 Power Rankings [Grierson & Leitch]

Aug 17, 2012 5:35 PM  

The Expendables 2 has 11 names on its poster only because there is not room, either in poster space or running time, for 47. It is New Years Eve with testicles. It is the turducken of action movies. Rather than review the film, I thought I'd just rank those 11 names, in ascending order of Expendables 2 badassery. Let's go to it.

11. Jet Li. The martial arts star was mostly used for comedic effect in the first film—he's smaller than everyone else, you see, and also Asian—and, considering he retired from action films a few years ago, he sorta just hangs around these movies to helpfully boost up the overseas market. He has one fight scene and then disappears from the movie by jumping out of a plane. I had forgotten he was in it until I looked at the poster to write this piece.

10. Randy Couture. The former UFC champion has the least charisma of anyone in The Expendables 2, and boy, that's saying something. He's the most inexperienced actor in the cast and shows it, and his only real character trait is "has mangled ear." The other actors in the movie all make fun of him for this affliction, which totally makes sense. After all, they don't have cauliflower ears, considering they've spent their lives loafing around movie sets pretending to get punched, while mocking guys who actually have been.

9. Terry Crews. The bodybuilder/Tim & Eric co-collaborator is young enough to have a believably ripped body, unlike most everyone else hanging around, and clearly he's the cutup most days at the gym, which makes him "funny Expendable" in these parts. Does win extra credit points for being the only black guy in the cast but not having to endure "Hey, you're a black guy!" references every time on screen. That's no small feat for an action movie.

8. Bruce Willis. Without question the most talented actor in this cast—he's always seemed miscategorized as a Tough Guy Action Star; sure, he can do it, but he can do lots else too—he doesn't quite fit in. He's always glowering and pretending this is all real, for some reason, and, sorry, he'll never handle a machine gun as well as Sly or Arnold and definitely shouldn't do it next to them.

7. Liam Hemsworth. The token "person whose balls are neither terrifyingly small thanks to years of repeated steroid injections nor scraping against his inner knee," Hemsworth is here under the amusing illusion that teenage girls will see the guy from The Hunger Games and decide they'd like to stare at Sylvester Stallone's veins for two hours. Not to spoil anything here, but the first time you see Hemsworth's character, "Billy," he's putting a note for his girlfriend in his pocket and talking about how he can't wait to get out of this business so they can go get married in Paris and live a fruitful, happy, longer-than-this-movie's-running-time life together. Good luck with that, kid.

6. Dolph Lundgren. The best way I can describe The Expendables 2 is that the movie's comedic relief character is Dolph Lundgren. He does win points for his character being a secret mathematical genius and Fulbright scholar, considering the actor himself happens to be the exact same thing.

5. Chuck Norris. My favorite thing about Chuck Norris is that he tries so, so hard to be in on the Chuck Norris Facts joke ... but somehow still isn't. He plays a lone-wolf character who shows up every 20 minutes and blows everything away from offscreen, likely because at this point in his life, Chuck Norris is incapable of picking up an assault rifle unless he plans on writing a column about it. Here's a fun thought experiment: Imagine what Chuck Norris would look like if he shaved his beard.

4. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The years of running the government of California seem to have both honed Arnold's comic timing and transformed his forehead into Clint Eastwood's. (Seriously, right?) Arnold's barely in the film, but he's in it more than he was in the first one, and he even gets to fire off a few machine-gun rounds. He's also responsible for the film's funniest moment, when he escapes a gunfight in a Mini Cooper. Though his line, "My shoe is bigger than this car" would have been a lot funnier if it had been "I've taken shits bigger than this car." I bet it would have been true too.

3. Jason Statham. The only cast member who is still in his action-star prime, Statham is generally underrated as both an actor and a screen presence. He's his usual Statham self in The Expendables 2, kicking people and stabbing people and kick-stabbing people like it's the most natural thing in the world. He also pretty much won my heart forever by introducing a terrific catchphrase to the action-hero lexicon: "I now pronounce you man and knife!" I'm gonna be saying that at every wedding I go to for the rest of my life.

2. Jean-Claude Van Damme. If you haven't seen the hilarious, sad, absolutely gripping French art film JCVD, which came out in 2008 and features an aging, decrepit, pathetic Van Damme, playing himself, stumbling across a bank heist and ... you know, you sorta just have to see it. After that movie, honestly, I was just so happy to see Van Damme so taut and menacing and doing well for himself again that I found myself cheering every time he was on screen. Seriously, see JCVD. You'll never think of Street Fighter the same way again.

1. Sylvester Stallone. Oh, Sly. Bless his heart. Stallone's desperate insistence that he can make it 1988 again by science or magic would be sad if it weren't, deep down, so charming. The guy keeps himself in terrific shape at 66—thanks to loads and loads and loads of HGH, of course—and seems to truly believe in his ridiculous character, who leads these team of men who have nothing in common other than a truly impressive ability to avoid massive numbers of bullets. Even when he was in straight-to-video mode, you could tell that Stallone considered himself the biggest movie star in the world, so now that he's "back," it's like nothing ever changed. This movie doesn't have the surrealist madness of the last Rambo sequel—which was so cartoonishly violent that I thought at the time it might be an art project—but it has Stallone in his element, in charge, believing that all is right in the world, that he can just keep on blowing shit away and snarling and shooting off one-liners and we will never age and we will all live forever. He's a lunatic, but I love him for it. How could you not?

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

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Interview With The Vampire. Cosmopolis (Starring Robert Pattinson), Reviewed. [Grierson & Leitch]

Rage is rarely cold. Whether it's the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street or Network, discontent with the state of the world usually comes to us piping hot, often satisfyingly so. That's why it's so disconcerting when a movie goes the opposite route, serving up its message with a calm, dispassionate air. Cosmopolis doesn't want to incense you—it wants to chill your blood.

For a lot of people, Cosmopolis is simply the film with that Twilight guy in it. Robert Pattinson plays Eric Packer, a twenty-something billionaire who spends most of the movie sitting in the back of his stretch limo as his driver takes him across Manhattan to get a haircut. The movie is an adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel, and while there is something of a narrative spine holding the film together, Cosmopolis largely works as an episodic portrait of an emotionally distant one-percenter doing whatever it is that the insanely wealthy do.

The casting of Pattinson may seem like a stunt to boost box office—a way to lure swooning girls to a meditative, sardonic drama they'd otherwise avoid—but writer-director David Cronenberg (Eastern Promises, A History of Violence) has smartly capitalized on his young star's persona, perverting his public image for the filmmaker's purposes. In the Twilight films, Pattinson plays a brooding, beautiful, sensitive heartthrob—a tragic, sympathetic figure—which has made the actor a beloved pinup. But with Cosmopolis, Pattinson portrays a different kind of vampire, an inhuman monster who lives off others' hard work and has to barricade himself away from the masses. (The limo he inhabits might as well be a tomb.) It's not uncommon for popular stars to play darker versions of their onscreen selves—think Tom Cruise's Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia—and so Pattinson falls into a fine tradition of Hollywood celebrities screwing with their fans' heads.

Cronenberg, too, is challenging his audience. Cosmopolis is not a film designed for glowing CinemaScore ratings—it's a chilly, distant, withholding drama that doesn't resolve itself in a tidy way. (Unlike a lot of state-of-the-world films, Cosmopolis doesn't give the audience a therapeutic "I'm as mad as hell" moment where our collective frustration is articulated by a character. And even when something like that moment seems to arrive, it doesn't play out the way we'd expect.) In addition, Cronenberg has his cast give passionless readings to the clipped, mannered dialogue, suggesting a heightened reality in which even recognizable human interaction has short-circuited. The characters in Cosmopolis aren't user-friendly and aren't meant to be. But once you get into the film's peculiar rhythms, Cosmopolis becomes hypnotic—a surreal, hyper-aware updating of our modern anxieties about the dehumanization brought on by wealth, power, and technology.

Because of the film's episodic structure, the people around Eric come and go, most of them appearing for one scene and then never being heard from again. Unfortunately, that gives Cosmopolis a hit-or-miss quality. (Juliette Binoche's scene as Eric's mistress is over far too fast; Jay Baruchel's as Eric's technology chief goes on too long.) But it also creates a reality in which everyone Eric encounters is just another data point, not unlike the endless stock numbers on the consoles he's always playing with in his limo. None of these people means anything to him—they're as remote as the rabid protesters spray-painting his limo and pounding on the windows, wanting to kill him.

If Cosmopolis leaves you feeling nothing for its main character, that's by design. Even as Eric's possible comeuppance seems imminent near the end, Pattinson doesn't try to make us care about this poor, heartless bastard. Cronenberg's claustrophobic construction of Eric's world is brilliant and monochromatic and entirely unnerving. Cronenberg and Pattinson have given us a frightening image of the modern power player as utterly soulless cipher. So often, Hollywood's Wall Streeters are arrogant young twits hellbent on screwing over everyone in sight. Cosmopolis suggests something even more frightening: They're so disconnected from the world that they no longer remember what emotions even are. Maybe Pattinson isn't playing a vampire in this movie—he's a zombie.

Grade: B+

Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch.

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