Posts Tagged ‘Jason Statham’

Hmmm, I wonder where to start, that movie-going experience has certainly been one of the best ones this year.

To begin with it was the best day of Summer. It might very well have been the Summer this year, with temperatures breaking the I-can-break-a-sweat barrier and sunlight strong enough to drag the entire population of Oslo out in the parks. There was no place to throw a one-time grill in the park without hitting someone right in the nose. The same could be said about the bars with tables out in the open. All in all, it was a good day.

Being set in a positive mood, I got my roasted self to Colonel Mustard, where I secured a much needed beer. We had almost half of the entire congregation drinking beer, which is a rare and unusual sight nowadays. Must be something with weather… Anyway, the amusing part was to watch people exchange cash for past debts and cash for the day’s film, which made us all look like some sort of drug kingpins. Or it would have, if the price of the ticket hadn’t been magically reduced to 50NOK. That is right, fifty Norwegian kroner. Premium member discount at its best! Just don’t expect that to happen way too often.

Pow! Armed with a pocket-full of fifties I fetched the tickets and found we had two more members joining, Alina + Sister, an act that brought balance to the male-to-female ratio for this action-packed film.

And action-packed it is. What can I say about The Expendables 2? A movie that stars so many action legends, that they can’t possibly fit on the poster. Well, to begin with – it’s absolutely, blazingly awesome. It is fast-action, mass-murder, blur-of-bullets feature that can probably leave Rambo 4 far behind in a body count per second race. It’s just utterly insane and features things that will stun and astound you.

At the same time, bringing so many action stars cannot possibly go well, if you attempt to be at all serious. Luckily, no one was even trying. There’s more comedy packed in this film than some of the actual comedies we’ve seen in the past two years. Arnie is back and although his role isn’t so long, it is at least not just a cameo, like in the first movie. Chuck Norris is back, in a blaze of bullets, mystery and lone-ranger action, accompanied by the necessary musical cues. Jean Claude Longname is back, being a seriously bad-ass bad ass. Everyone is back, they’re awesome and they’ve even got a chick. She’s cute, although she’s nowhere near as murderous as Hanna or Cataleya. Let’s hope they can build that up in a third edition

On top of all that, there’s a lot of amusement about the location of some of the action. Apparently it’s supposed to be in a place where people speak a mix of Bulgarian and Ukranian dialects. This could stun some people, but my history lessons rang a bell and I remembered this, which could add a drop of credibility to the idea, especially considering the events in the plot. At any rate, the movie was filmed in Bulgaria, the locals spoke clean Bulgarian, the bad guys screamed occasionally in Russian and to add further confusion to the mix, some of the locals had Serbian names. Yes, it’s Eastern-European galore! Funny facts about the production: One stunt-man lost his life and another was severely injured in an explosion scene accident; one third of the bat population in the (protected) Bulgarian cave where the action was filmed was supposedly decimated; I suspected I’ve been on the airport where some of the action is filmed and indeed I had – once for an emergency landing – Plovdiv Airport, Bulgaria; the closing scene of the film claims to be in Paris, France while I can easily map it to a backyard somewhere in Bulgaria.

All things considered, pretty spectacular! Looking forward to a new one!