The catch is that he will need to place Church's operative, Chinese tech expert Maggie (Yu Nan), on his team. Since the Expendables are an all-male crew, the addition of a woman almost immediately throws group dynamics out of kilter. Their assignment is to retrieve an undisclosed item from a high-tech electronic safe aboard a downed plane that has crashed in Albania. Although new team member and Afghanistan vet Billy (Liam Hemsworth), an expert sniper, reluctantly tells Barney that this is his last outing, the rest of the Expendables relish another mission, including second-in-command Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) and team members Gunner Jensen (Dolph Lundgren), Toll Road (Randy Couture) and Hale Caesar (Terry Crews).
As soon as Maggie has decoded the safe aboard the crashed plane and extracted the contents, the Expendables are ambushed by an Eastern European crime cartel led by the sadistic Vilain (Jean-Claude Van Damme), who forces Barney to turn over the device from the safe and then kills a key team member. Maggie later reveals that the item stolen by Vilain is a miniature computer containing the location of a five-ton cache of plutonium that the Russians stashed in an abandoned mine during the Cold War.
Motivated as much by revenge as their realigned mission to prevent Vilain from selling the weapons-grade nuclear material to a list of willing buyers, the Expendables take off in pursuit of their adversaries, with Barney's directive uppermost in their minds: "Track them, find them, kill them."
While most of the original film's action transpired in Latin America, "Expendables 2" relocates to Bulgaria, which offers appropriately expansive vistas and credible locations for the Eastern European settings. Taking over directing duties from Stallone, Simon West preserves the hard-boiled action and wisecracking cast dynamics of the original, channeling some of the B-movie tonal elements he might have picked up directing "Con Air." Managing the complexity of stunts, aircraft and vehicle pileups and frequent shootouts that comprise the majority of the running time is a major challenge that West executes with elan, even adding unexpected grace notes to some otherwise routine scenes.
Working with a fairly routine action-adventure scenario, the filmmakers can leave the cast to adequately fill out their roles. Since many of the leads have well-known personas from past films and franchises, performances are a blend of action-hero impassivity and send-ups of familiar characters.
Stallone anchors the cast with a sometimes-nuanced interpretation of Barney's mix of personal and professional demons and plays it straight as a foil to Statham's put-upon sidekick.
A late scene with Van Damme's suitably sadistic villain shows that Stallone's still got the charisma to carry an intimately staged fight sequence. Lundgren gets great comic mileage out of Gunner's lunkheaded character, while Couture and Crews hold down the stalwart combat-veterans' shtick.
And while he's every bit as creaky as the other vets his age, relying more on very large weapons and cutting humor than unarmed combat, Schwarzenegger still can steal a scene, particularly in the final set piece where he's paired with Willis, who relies more on smirking threats than decisive action until the final reel.
