By Dustin Rowles | Film | August 17, 2012 |
By Dustin Rowles | Film | August 17, 2012 |
Yes, thank you, The Expendables 2! Fuck Yeah! I’m so tired of all these action-movie franchises from those metrosexual vaginas like Christopher Nolan and Joss Whedon full of characters with “motivations,” so-called “clever” lines, complexities, and feelings. Screw those pretty boys jumping around and “selectively” killing morally questionable people, as well as these stuck-up feminists with their bows and arrows and their conflicted feelings thinking they can pick and choose their victims. Real men shoot first, asks questions later, and say things like, “Real men shoot firsts and ask questions later.” If there’s a village full of faceless Asians standing in the way of a big payout and a real man, that real man will drop a bomb on that village and show his dick to all the headless corpses strewn in his pathway so they will know he’s a real man with a real dick who definitely loves women. Because Fuck Yeah! ‘Nuff said.
They say that tragedy plus time equals comedy, but I have no idea what that has to do with a bunch of ’80s action stars in a 2012 movie showing off their huge, gorgeous biceps, which they definitely need to shoot those big guns indiscriminately. Expendables 2 has got everything you need: It’s got Stallone, and Arnie, and Bruce, and Statham, and Lundgren, and that wrestler guy whose name I don’t know, and also Fuck Yeah! Chuck Norris, who plays like, the Lone Wolf, because real men are loners who definitely have big dicks and cool beards.
What’s Expendables 2 about? It’s about Fuck Yeah! That’s what’s it’s about. ‘Nuff said. But it’s also about big strapping men shooting things, sometimes with machine guns, sometimes with pistols, and sometimes with missiles, and they say cool things like “Rock and Roll,” and “Yippee-Ki-Yay,” and “Let’s roll,” and “Rest in pieces.” Then Arnie says, “I’ll be back!” not once, but twice, which is awesome because that’s what he used to say at the end of every speech when he was the governor of California and getting his maid pregnant, because that’s what real men do. Fuck Yeah!
See, what happens is this. All these guys, they shoot some things, and then they get paid, and then Bruce Willis is like, “You have to do this job or else,” and they’re like, “OK!” And so they do it, and they steal this computer from a safe, and then Jean Claude Van Damme shows up and takes the computer away from them, which has a map to an abandoned Russian mine with a bunch of plutonium in it. Then Van Damme kills the young guy, which nobody cares about because he wasn’t in Rambo, and he probably wasn’t even born before Planet Hollywood filed for bankruptcy. Then all those guys deliver some puns written by Donald Trump’s reality-show screenwriter, and then kill some more things because Fuck Yeah! Then they play that awesome song that isn’t Foghat because they have to hold something back for the sequel and then the credits roll and my boner goes away.
True story, I swear to God: I was listening to talk radio after the movie, like you do, and this woman was on, and she said something that really spoke to me. First, she agreed with the host that Barack Obama is neither black nor an intellectual, which Fuck Yeah! right? (Don’t let his skin color or his fancy degrees fool you; Barack Obama is definitely a white guy. And also a Muslim). Then she said, “I really like this Republican ticket, because we’re finally getting some real men in office, instead of an angry, black metrosexual.” THEN she said, “I’m just tired of all these liberal feminists taking over our country,” and I was like, YES. I need to find that woman so she can come to my house and make me dinner and fold my clothes. But it was also, like, so on point, because that’s exactly what I was thinking vis-à-vis The Expendables 2. This is a real man’s movie. Real men don’t think. They just point and shoot and then say something cool like, “Fuck Yeah!” That’s what the 80s were about, you know? Hair bands and mullets and sex and drugs and rock n’ roll and killing Commies and also family values! And chicks servicing me while I watch dudes shoot guns. Expendables 2 reminded me of just how good we used to have it in the 80s before women started taking our jobs and worshipping waif-y British men with small guns who spoke in complete sentences instead of cool catch phrases. Why do all the gay guys get all the poon? I can’t compete with that. That’s what’s so great about the Expendables franchise: They don’t even try to compete; they stubbornly persist in making the same movies they made 25 years ago, and I’m just sad and pathetic enough to buy into it because I ache to return to the simpler days when bad guys got got and bullets magically missed the good guys. Fuck Yeah!