The Expendables 2

I enjoyed The Expendables.  It was a movie where past-their-prime action stars punched the faces off of some bad guys.  Sure, it wasted almost a third of the movie with inept attempts at character development, but it was gloriously dumb fun.  The success of that film made a sequel inevitable, and the debut trailer made it look like they were going to pack in more stars, which virtually guaranteed less plot, less development, and more boomsplosions, which is what The Expendables 2 should be about.

Aside from the returning cast (everybody but Stone Cold Steve Austin and Mickey Rourke), we get Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and...Liam Hemsworth?  Not even the Hemsworth that was in Thor?  The one they choose for the biggest, dumbest action movie ever is the guy who doesn't do anything in The Hunger Games?!?  He's obviously the least famous actor billed in this movie, but that was still an odd casting choice.  It makes you wonder what other odd decisions went into The Expendables 2... 

...like a dance scene, perhaps?

Barney's (Sylvester Stallone) crew of good-guy mercenaries is back to work.  This time,they find themselves in a tight spot.  Instead of picking their own missions, as is the norm, they are forced into doing the dirty work for Mr. Church (Bruce Willis), or else risk being thrown into double-secret probation CIA jail for the rest of their natural lives.  That means trying to recover a mysterious something from a plane wreckage site in Albania.  Correction: scenic Albania.  The team (Jason Statham, Terry Crews, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture and the new guy, Liam Hemsworth) accomplishes their mission, thanks to their chaperone, Maggie (Nan Yu), and is ready to extract, when they are ambushed by a bunch of villains.  The villains, led by the appropriately named Vilain (Jean-Claude Van Damme), murder poor, innocent, three-days-away-from-retirement Liam Hemsworth, and get away with their "Get Out of Jail Free" card.  That shit's personal.  Enter extreme violence and minimal plot.

Look, it's the one expendable member of The Expendables!

The Expendables 2 was directed by Simon West, which should be an improvement over Sylvester Stallone's direction in the first Expendables film.  The key words there are "should be."  West isn't bad, exactly, but his work here is uninspired.  West is no stranger to dumb action movies, but he doesn't quite make a successful transition from dumb to enjoyably stupid action films with this entry.  What's the difference?  An enjoyably stupid action movie keeps up a rapid pace and varies up the gratuitous violence enough to keep the audience entertained.  The Expendables 2 has some solid action in it, but there is also a hefty amount of downtime, where we are forced to watch Stallone emote; at this point in his career, the only emotion Stallone's face can convincingly portray is "lumpy."

"L" is for "Lumpy"

Overall, though, West makes sure there is action, and he makes sure the biggest names in the cast receive a few moments in the spotlight (for better or worse); in other words, his direction is less than I had hoped, but certainly within expectations.

So, how's the acting?

"Heh-heh.  The blogger made a funny."

Honestly, that just depends on your standards.  I went in with pretty low expectations, acting-wise, but I was still a little underwhelmed.  Stallone does his best to add some depth to his character --- and I think he does a decent job --- but the attempt is misguided in this movie and this role.  If he was just a little more gleefully destructive instead of angsty, The Expendables 2 would have been a hell of a lot more fun.  Liam Hemsworth probably did the best job acting, although his role was clearly designed to justify the extreme violence in the rest of the movie.

...which is, admittedly, a tall order

It felt like Jason Statham had a lot less screen time in this sequel, but I guess his character just didn't have much to contribute; Statham is present in every major action scene, but I thought his role was far less important this time around.  As for his acting, he did a pretty good Jason Statham impression.  Jet Li was barely in the movie, so we didn't have to suffer through the unintelligible banter between him and Dolph Lundgren.  Lundgren was particularly mush-mouthed, and I found it hard to believe he was ever an action star.  But then I re-discovered this little gem on the interwebs and my faith in Dolph was restored:

As for the other Expendables, Randy Couture and Terry Crews weren't given a whole lot to do, which I think was a poor choice, since they both seem to have a decent sense of action movie humor.  I wouldn't mind seeing Crews in a buddy action movie in the near future.  The big news in The Expendables 2 was not the main cast, though --- it was the featured cameos.  Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Chuck Norris all had scenes focused exclusively on them.  Norris' scenes were the funniest, if only because they lived up to his internet reputation; he actually came across fairly awkward, like he didn't get why his part was supposed to be funny.

If they had CGI-ed a fist under his beard, I would have given it a pass

Bruce Willis was okay at first, but as soon as he stumbled into catchphrase territory, he was pretty damn hammy.  Arnold was the worst, though; he looked awful and made his Conan-era acting look like Daniel Day-Lewis by comparison.  Perhaps the biggest surprise in this film was how fun it was to watch Jean-Claude Van Damme as a villain.  Van Damme has never been a very good actor (understatement!), but his accent and lack of charm plays surprisingly well as a bad guy.  This is easily his best work since he lost his mullet.

Without having to smile and be likable, Van Damme actually looks cool here

His number two man, Scott Adkins, wasn't as entertaining, but his physical stunts helped make up for the fact that the rest of this cast is too old for stunts.  Nan Yu wasn't bad as the resident damsel in varying degrees of distress, but she wasn't terribly important and basically gave Stallone opportunities to brood.  Charisma Carpenter returned as Statham's girlfriend, but she didn't really do much except look age-appropriately attractive for a few minutes --- bonus points to the movie for giving Statham a love interest that is roughly his own age, a rarity in action movies.

Seriously, though, does anyone care about the acting in The Expendables 2?  Of course not.  This movie exists only for the action scenes, of which there are several. 

Not this one.  This is an exposition scene.

If you're fan of explosions and lots and lots of CGI blood, this is the movie for you.  Especially if you like the middle third of the film being filled with plot and poor attempts at drama.  That's really the problem I have with this movie --- it has action bookends, but the movie slows to a crawl when they try to make the audience actually care about the characters.  Of course, the attempt was hilariously inept, but the mere fact that it was attempted shows how misguided the filmmakers were.  There are eight action movie headliners in this movie, with a healthy supply of supporting action movie veterans, and yet the pace would have to speed up to earn being called "plodding."  There is no excuse for that.  Who the fuck wants a movie with all these action stars that spends any time whatsoever on Stallone's feelings?  Can I see a show of hands?

Exactly.

Here's the thing with The Expendables 2: it was meant to be a ridiculously stupid action movie, but the filmmakers misunderstood how to make that happen.  Instead of stuffing this movie with action heroes doing action stunts that couldn't be believed, like some sort of action movie turducken, they gave into Stallone's ego and let him try to emote.  And then they made the ill-advised decision to let Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Willis trade catch phrases, which made for possibly the most painful ten minutes I spent watching movies this year.  Even with those problems, it's still got enough action to satisfy most viewers.  Too bad it's kind of boring.

Demolition Man

I love science fiction movies that can teach me about my nation's past.  Remember the epidemic-level gang wars in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s that resulted in the notorious Simon Phoenix annexing a large portion of the city as his own fiefdom?  Good times, man.  What about the time we cryogenically froze Jeffrey Dahmer instead of sticking him in prison to get beaten to death by a broom handle?  Or the massive earthquake of 2010 that devastated Los Angeles and somehow lead to the remains of the city melding with San Diego to create San Angeles?  You don't remember that?  Me neither.  You would think the merging of two cities that are 120 miles apart would have been newsworthy, but it must have flown under the radar; I definitely recall the awful attempt to merge Chicago and cheese heads into Chicaukee.  Lake Michigan was green, yellow, and red that summer.

Of course, I have all this knowledge of our past thanks to the historical document Demolition Man.  Back in 1996, LA police bad-ass John "This Is" Spartan (Sylvester Stallone) performs a one-man raid on the headquarters of Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes), a homicidal sociopath that was holding a busload of civilians hostage.  Because sending in a one-man SWAT team is standard protocol for the LAPD.  Well, Spartan manages to kill off Phoenix's evil henchmen and capture Phoenix, but he blew up the entire building complex in the process.  Spartan performed a body heat scan on the complex before entering and found only a handful of people; the handful accounted for Phoenix and his men, so the hostages must have been kept somewhere else.  Or were they?  In the wreckage of the building, dozens of bodies were recovered; Phoenix attested that Spartan blew up the building knowing that the innocents would die.  And because the 1996 LAPD put their trust in known terrorists, Spartan was arrested, tried and convicted of a few dozen counts of manslaughter.  His sentence is to be cryogenically frozen for seventy years (that sounds like an inexpensive solution); Phoenix is to be frozen forever, which seems rather silly to me.

..and the award for "Least Amount of Effort in an Album Cover" goes to...Sting!!!

Fast-forward to 2032.  The city of San Angeles has been devoid of crime and violence for so long that nobody can even remember such things.  Except for the people who are old enough to remember.  Because, seriously, it was less than 36 years ago, at the absolute longest.  This utopia is run by Dr. Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne), who has decided what is good for society (unthinking, unquestioning compliance) and what is bad (spicy and other unhealthy foods, curse words, sexual intercourse, etc.).  However, Cocteau's San Angeles has its disgruntled citizens, too.  Edgar Friendly (Denis Leary) is the leader of a literally underground society that lives in the sewers and cherishes personal freedom, although at the risk of starving to death.  For some reason, Simon Phoenix was thawed out for a parole hearing, despite his eternal sentence; even stranger is the fact that he knew voice commands to free himself from his restraints.  Phoenix proceeds on a murder spree, something that the SAPD are not equipped to handle.  So, how do they catch Phoenix?  By thawing out the man who did it last time, John Spartan.  Explosions and fish-out-of-water jokes ensue.

I make fun of Demolition Man, but it's because I care.  Most movies like this are shallow, boring, and predictable.  At the very least, this film is not boring.  As far as action movies go, there is a lot to like here.  Things go boom, there are some pretty sweet fires, and they even manage to incorporate freezing as an action device --- and not in a way that directly rips off Terminator 2.

In this dystopian future, the "Yo Quiero Taco Bell" dog never went away.

The movie is actually kind of cute, too.  I won't say that it's terribly funny, but there are a lot of clever ideas in the script --- Taco Bell being the only restaurant in the future, high fives not requiring physical contact, and toilet paper giving way to three seashells, for starters --- and you rarely hear "clever" being used to describe a Stallone movie.  I also liked that Sandra Bullcock's character takes her name from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.  The film is by no means perfect, but it's funnier and smarter than most action movies, even if the ultimate point of the story is simple enough to insult a child.

Now, as far as the acting goes...well, it goes.  Sylvester Stallone does his typical thing; he's barely monosyllabic, but he looks pretty good when he's shooting and punching stuff, so I'm not going to judge the man too harshly.  I thought he handled the humor in the script pretty well, even if he never spat out the marbles in his mouth.  Wesley Snipes was extremely entertaining as the supervillain of the film; he out-overacted most comic book villains, but I'll be damned if he didn't do it just right.  If absolutely nothing else, his fashion sense should be applauded.  Not just anyone can pull off pirate pants, you know.

"Eyes to see you." - not actually a quote from this film.

Sandra Bullock is surprisingly likable as the clueless but friendly sidekick to Stallone.  It wasn't a hard part to play, granted, and she doesn't really bring anything special to the part, but this is a nice, simple, and uncomplicated performance of low-key comedy.  Pre-nose job Benjamin Bratt has a small supporting role as a typically wimpy SAPD officer; he's kind of wooden, but being the straight man is a thankless role, so I'll let him off the hook.  If you're familiar with Denis Leary from his work on Rescue Me or his frequent interviews on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, his performance here might be a little on the raw side; on the other hand, if you remember his work circa-No Cure For Cancer, then you should know what's in store for you --- rants, namely.  I actually don't mind him here, but his rants are only "edgy" if you're still stuck back in 1993.  Despite having a few lines and a pretty visible character, Rob Schneider is not credited in this film at all, which is especially strange since he was on Saturday Night Live at the time and this is probably my favorite film role for the guy.  You might recognize a number of other minor characters in the movie, as well.  Jesse Ventura, Toshiro Obata (Shredder's sidekick in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies), and Billy D. Lucas (famous for being Schwarzenegger's stunt double) all play Cryo-convicts, like Simon Phoenix.  Jack Black has about two seconds of screen time as one of Leary's henchmen.  MTV alum Dan Cortese and Lara Harris (not the one from Mulholland Drive) are both background characters in the Taco Bell scene.  Bill Cobbs (the guy who takes all the "wise black man" roles that Morgan Freeman turns down) and Grand L. Bush (one of the Agent Johnsons from Die Hard) play the same character, thirty-six years apart.  You will definitely recognize Glenn "Otho" Sadix as an effeminate assistant.  And last, but not least, Bob Gunton does his typical thing as a jerk authority figure.  Are any of these supporting performances particularly revelatory?  Not at all.  Everyone plays their part (sometimes, they even over-play it) pretty well, making this a surprisingly well-rounded movie, acting-wise.

I never played it, but I assume that the lack of physical contact made this a waste of quarters.

One of the mysteries of Demolition Man (and there are several) is exactly what happened to director Marco Brambilla after making this film.  He has only three more credits on IMDb, and none of them are what I would call career-killers, even with an Alicia Silverstone movie under his belt.  Whatever the reason for his retirement (forceful or otherwise), I think Brambilla made a perfectly acceptable action flick, designed to entertain and make you crave popcorn.  Was his direction subtle?  Hell, no.  But who is looking for subtle in a Stallone action movie?  The action looked good, the plot made a decent amount of sense, and none of the jokes were wasted (even the lame ones).  That's not a bad job for a big budget action movie.

Do tough guys wear berets just so they can punch anyone who smirks?

All in all, Demolition Man is darn near perfect for what it is meant to be.  It could be more intentionally funny, sure, and it could certainly be more unintentionally funny, but those are two flaws I think most eighteen-year old action movies would be willing to live with.  As a legitimate movie, I think the balance of solid action with remedial satire deserves

 ...and yet, I enjoy this movie on so much more than a legitimate level.  I encourage you to watch this movie again (perhaps with some booze?  Side note --- don't do drugs, kids!) and laugh at the more ridiculous moments.  Demolition Man more than earns the Lefty Gold rating of

For some reason, when I did a Google Image Search for "Demolition Man," I came across this screenshot from Pulp's "Common People" music video.  I have no idea why, but I love Pulp and felt obligated to include it here.

The Expendables

What you get out of The Expendables depends entirely on what you expect to get out of it.  If you watch this, expecting it to be drenched in testosterone and blood (ugh), to have awful dialogue with worse delivery, then you're absolutely right.  On the other hand, if you're expecting it to be drenched in testosterone and blood (woo!), to have awesome action and ridiculous amounts of violence, you're still absolutely right.  As long as you're not expecting an Academy Award-winning period piece romantic comedy, you pretty much know how much you'll like this movie before the opening credits.

The Expendables are a group of mercenaries that handle the dirtiest jobs.  Barney (Sylvester Stallone) is the group leader, with Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) and Ying Yang (Jet Li) as his trusted confidantes; the other members of the group include Gunner (Dolph Lungren), Hale Caesar (Terry Crews) and Toll Bridge (Randy Couture).  While those names aren't quite descriptive enough to be GI Joe names, they're amusing nonetheless.  The film opens with the Expendables on a mission to save hostages from pirates.  Obviously, that doesn't end well for the pirates.  In fact, Gunner blows the torso off a guy --- he doesn't cut the guy in half, he blows the torso off the rest of his body.  Gunner later decides to hang a pirate for fun, but that is crossing the line for the rest of the group, so Gunner is stopped and kicked off the team.  So, keep that in mind: blowing people to bits is a job well done, but hanging pirates is taboo.

Barney is later approached by a mysterious Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) for a dangerous mission; actually, Barney's group isn't the only group being considered, but the other group, led by Trench (Arnold Schwarzenegger), is allegedly too busy.  The mission is to kill a drug despot, General Garza (David Zayas, of Dexter fame), on the Gulf island of Vilena.  Barney and Christmas go to the island to do some reconnaissance and discover that General Garza is obviously a puppet dictator, with former CIA operative James Munroe (Eric Roberts) pulling the strings and Paine (Steve Austin) providing the muscle.

The film takes a slight detour to add emotional depth and (probably) earn its weight in Academy Award nominations.  Apparently, mercenaries don't have rich family lives.  **PSSST!!!**  Pick your jaw up off the floor!  Christmas stops by his girlfriend's (Charisma Carpenter) house, only to find that, after being gone for an entire month without warning or communication, she has gotten a new boyfriend.  What a tramp!  The boyfriend is a prick and beats her up, so we get to see Statham beat the jerk up and then tell his ex-girlfriend that he was worth waiting for.  That, Charisma Carpenter, is the sound of you being served!  Tool (Mickey Rourke), the group's resident tattoo artist/bar owner/pretty boy is a former member of the team who now spends his time surrounded by slutty young women; he actually is required to cry while giving a monologue about being alone.  For his part, Barney has become obsessed with his contact on Vilena (Giselle Itie), a woman who opted to risk her life on that island hell hole instead of coming to the US with him.  Barney's is not a romantic obsession, but and idealistic one.  He hasn't cared about anything in so long that the notion is incomprehensible to him.  To be fair, the word "incomprehensible" is probably also incomprehensible to him, so it might just be a vocabulary issue.

After the recon mission, Barney and friends (Why didn't they call the movie that?) were going to pass on the offer, but Barney's obsession drives him to take out Munroe, General Vargas, and anyone else that might threaten his idealistic contact.  The rest of the team agrees to go with, because the bond of brotherhood that is formed when bathing in the blood of a common enemy is stronger than any other.  Or, you could just say that they all have a major bromance going on.  After a brief battle against the angry Gunner, the team decides to topple an island dictatorship by blowing the whole island to hell and shooting whatever is still breathing.  Whoops, did that need a spoiler alert?

This film was directed and co-written by Sylvester Stallone, with all the subtlety you would expect from him.  As in any of his action movies, Stallone's direction is hard to gauge.  The action sequences are awesome, particularly the hand-to-hand stuff.  The acting...well, what do you expect?  The top three billed actors are Stallone, Statham and Li; only Statham can speak English fluently.  Actually, Statham's acting was much better than it needed to be in such a dumb movie, and Stallone was correct to give him one of the more emotionally complex roles.  Judging from the rest of the movie, though, it is clear that Stallone can't direct (or write) witty dialogue to save his life.  The plot is (mostly) perfect for a big, dumb action movie, but the dialogue is often awkward.  Do we really need to put up with Stallone, Couture, and Jet Li trying to deliver funny lines?  They couldn't get the timing right for a joke if they had a DeLorean.  That is forgivable, since action movies require poorly executed one-liners, but there is a glaring flaw with the plot.  Why does Stallone bother with the attempt at depth?  Look, I don't give a flaming crap about how these guys feel.   Aww...the elite murderers for hire are lonely when they go home!  >:-[  Did we ever need to understand Schwarzenegger's backstory in Predator?  No!  That is just 40 minutes that could have been better spent shooting people's faces off.  Or they could have had Arnold's team try the mission and die!  That would have been awesome!  Or they could have added a Predator on the island!  Or...well, pretty much anything would have made more sense in this movie than talking about feelings.

The acting is a lot like the writing and directing: not too surprising.  Bruce Willis is good in his cameo, Arnold gives us a reminder that English is not his first language, and Mickey Rourke cries to remind us that he has a Best Actor Oscar.  Randy Couture shouldn't have been given the "smart guy" role, but everyone else is as good as you expect them to be.  Statham is obviously the best actor out of the bunch, Terry Crews is amusing, and Stallone and Li are both pretty bad.  Fulbright scholar Dolph Lungren, while not a good actor, was much better than I remember him from the 90s, so that was a pleasant surprise.

I feel the same way about The Expendables that I feel about Transformers: I paid to see giant robots fighting, and I got my money's worth.  I wanted to see a bunch of action heroes kill the faces off of some bad guys, and The Expendables delivered.  As usual, Stallone tries to give his characters emotional layers, but does it in his typically inept way.  The violence was great, even though the blood was clearly CGI at times.  If Stallone had cut the emotional crap and just blown stuff up and garroted butts off, this movie would be perfect for what it is.  Since he tries to reach for something more than a stupid action movie --- nay, the stupid action movie --- it ends up falling a little short of perfection.  Still, this is a great example of the brainless fun that action and explosions can provide.  I would like to offer one more bit of criticism, though: in a movie called The Expendables, how many team members should die?

Rambo

Wow.  This is a violent movie.  If there is one lesson to take from this film, it is this: don't vacation in Burma.  Not that it's called Burma anymore, it's called Myanmar, but you know what I mean.  Unless you wrote this movie, in which case you clearly don't know what I mean because the state is only called Burma in this movie.  Stallone, I'm looking at you.

Before I continue, I have to point out how fantastically violent this film is.  Arrows through the head?  Got 'em.  Death by land mine?  Right here.  Mortar shells turning people into meat puzzles?  Yep.  Disemboweling?  Check.  High caliber bullets literally cutting people in half?  Yawn.  The best gratuitous ripping-out-of-a-throat scene since Road House?  Oh, yeah.  But wait, there's a plot to frame this violence, too.

Like Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III before it, Rambo begins by finding the titular hero in Southeast Asia.  Like the last two movies, John Rambo is surly and unwilling to go help people in need.  Why?  Well, from a story point of view, it gives him a metaphorical place to go as a character.  In practice, though, it's so we can see Sylvester Stallone mush his words and poorly enunciate Rambo's problems with war and patriotism.  This time around, a group of Christian missionaries want Rambo to boat them up a river into Burma so they can give aid to the Christian Karen people, a religious and ethnic minority in Myanmar.  The missionaries include Julie Benz, who is the only one of them that is nice to Rambo.  You would think nice missionaries would be a dime a dozen, but apparently not.  Since this is a Rambo movie and the missionaries are innocents entering a region that has been going through civil war since the late 1940s, I'll let you guess what happens.  The missionaries are successful and return home without incident?  Wow.  You've never seen a movie, have you?  No, they get captured by some vile Burmese military men.  Rambo decides to rescue them (or, at least Julie Benz) and accompanies a group of mercenaries hired by the missionaries' church on their mission.

When I started this movie, I wasn't convinced that Stallone still had what it takes to headline an action pic.  I'll give the man credit where it's due, though; he was 62 years old when this was released.  While Sly may not have the athletic physique that he once had, he's still obviously strong.  In this film, he looks like a chimney with arms.  On steroids.  You rarely notice Stallone's age, which is no small miracle.  There were only two aspects of this movie that made me realize how old he really is.  First, he never takes his shirt off.  Since his back and pecs co-headlined Rambo III, I noticed that right away.  The second was more subtle; there is a point where Rambo seizes control of an anti-aircraft gun and uses it against unarmored ground troops.  That's not so strange, admittedly, but he stops to reload.  The Rambo I'm used to would either throw the two ton gun at the bad guys when it ran out of bullets or disappeared into the jungle, only to reappear right behind a villain and garroted his foe.

This movie is written and directed by Stallone, and it's times like these that I like to point out that he has been nominated for both an acting and writing Oscar.  I assume they were both for Cobra.  Honestly, the acting isn't too bad here, aside from Stallone's own limitations.  There are a lot of stereotypical characters, but they act to the limits of their stereotypes.  The main problem here is not the acting or direction, but the writing --- although it is kind of hard to separate the writing and directing, since Stallone was responsible for both.  During the opening credits, a newsreel is played, giving an account of the Burmese civil war and showing a lot of real-life footage of people being brutally massacred.  This isn't a movie that condemns violence, so showing real people dying as partial justification for the hero's actions is reprehensible.  It would be as bad as playing documentary 9/11 victim footage during the opening credits to Die Hard 5: Al Qaeda Dies Harder.  Worse than the documentary footage is the portrayal of the Myanmar government's troops.  While I believe that slaughter, rape, and brutality happen on a regular basis there, I find it hard to swallow that every single troop is WWII-propaganda-era Yellow Journalism evil, and I doubt that the brutality is only one-sided.  Seriously, these troops love torturing, raping, and murdering the Karen, to a degree that would even show up on a Family Feud poll of "Things to Do In Burma."

There were two ideas that I really liked in this film.  The first was when one of the mercenaries gave a line about how the church was sending the devil to do the Lord's work.  That is actually a good idea for a movie.  It was just a throwaway line here, but I would totally watch a movie about that.  The other point involved the evolution of Rambo's character.  In the other movies, Rambo is reluctant to accept his badass-ness.  He couldn't identify with the rest of the world because he knew how easily he could kill anyone.  In Rambo, he finally owns up to his abilities.  He accepts that he is a weapon, built to destroy.  This effectively eliminates the need for self-pitying monologues or rants from this character, a change that I wholeheartedly approve.

Overall, he acting and plot are about what you would expect from this acting/directing/writing triple threat.  While the plot is dumb and the characters pretty shallow, the violence more than makes up for those petty nuisances.