Directed by Simon West
Starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and a handful of other dudes
My first wildly successful experience with movie boozing was The Expendables. Drinking a half-dozen
cans of Pabst felt appropriate in a theatre full of folk shouting and
applauding at the movie screen as if they were watching a hockey match at their
local bar. During a raucous, howling ovation at Jason Statham igniting a
gasoline-doused pier with a flare gun, killing dozen of villains with a mammoth
fireball, I remember thinking to myself: “Hot shit, everyone in this movie
theatre must be as drunk as I am.” And to this day I hold firm the belief that
everyone was.
Flash-forward two years and Sly & the boys are back in town. The
original cast is looking even more pumped up than in the first instalment and
they’ve corrected past mistakes by including Chuck Norris, Scott Adkins, and
the incomparable Jean-Claude Van Damme.
The plot is there is no plot. Seriously. They even forgo creating
backstories for some of the characters (i.e. Dolph Lundgren) and instead just
drop in factoids about their own personal history (e.g. he was a chemical
engineer and Fullbright scholar at MIT). The movie is essentially a $100
million excuse to get the biggest juice-monkeys in Hollywood together (and Liam
Hemsworth) and have them kill a bunch of stuff with their testicles.
Vis-à-vis the first movie they’ve seriously cut back on the
pontificating and the social commentary. Let me say that again: this movie is less profound than The Expendables. The few scenes where they make even the slightest
effort are comically contracted.
--
Sly: Why is it the ones who deserve to die keep
on living? What’s the message in that?
[whole audience erupts into
laughter]
Randy Couture: I don’t know but I’m hungry. Can we go
kill some guys?
Sly: Yes. That.
--
True to form a little drink will help the entire audience get into it.
If intelligent alien life were to spy in on a screening of Expendables 2 and draw conclusions about our species from it they
would haul ass out of our solar system and label it as a no-fly zone.
The first 10 minutes of this movie has Sly & the boys raiding a
military-run village in Tibet in order to free a wealthy civilian hostage. A
singular display of carnage ensues, with a body count to rival the whole of
action movie history to this point. It had the audience in a giddy state.
Rather than think too hard about how disturbing it was for all these people
(myself included) to be laughing out loud at the brutalisation of one of the
most systematically persecuted nations in the last century, I cracked a second
Sagres and said to fellow movieboozer Callum: “Jet Li, man. Still got it.”
There’s a movie somewhere in there with JCVD as the villain (and get
this: his character’s name is “Villain” because during scriptwriting Sly got
tired of flexing his brain) and some nuclear warheads threatening to hit the
black market and blah blah blah, here are some ideas for drinking games to play
along with the movie:
- This game is called All Hale Caesar! Drink a Bloody Caesar shot (half Bloodshot Vodka, half Clamato juice) every time Terry Crews’ pumped-up biceps show up in the frame. As you do the shot you must yell: “All Hale Caesar!” (This is the name of his character because this is the greatest movie ever made) You may replace “biceps showing up” with “shouts,” or “kills someone,” or “does something manly.”
 |
| Such as bazookaing a bunch of Tibetan monks. |
- This game is called I versus Sly. Drink until your speech becomes slurred and less comprehensible than Sly’s and then keep it there. You have to repeat one of his lines immediately after him every five minutes as confirmation.
- Bring along a bottle of the Swedish vodka seriously (seriously, it’s called seriously) and drink a shot of it every time Dolph Lundgren does something stupid.
- This game is called I’m Out! Every time a character complains about not having enough ammo you have to empty (read chug) your beer, bellow “I’m out!”, and crack a fresh one. (Trust me, you will ruin yourself with this game)
- This game is called Don’t Lose Your Head. Do a shot of Jägermeister (or whatever) every time someone’s head is severed or explodes. (This will result in moments of intense drunkenness followed by a few lulls followed by intense drunkenness. You will probably kill off a bottle this way)
- This game is called Van Damn That's Good Coke! In honour of JCVD's legendary cocaine habit, every time the actor removes his glasses to reveal his hangdog, bloodshot eyes you do a bump of cocaine (90% purity or higher) and a shot of liquid cocaine (equal parts Jägermeister and Goldschläger). You must, of course, yell out "Van DAMN that's good coke!" in a Belgian accent while you're doing this. (Haven't you learned anything by now?)
Damage: 5/10 (pre-movie: 110 ml Babicka wormwood
vodka; during: 4 x 330 ml Sagres beer)
Boozy rating: 14/10 (The
Expendables was 10 and this was not as good as the original, so it becomes
a 9. However, any movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme automatically gets a +5
rating so here we are)
--
NEXT WEEK: Either Ted
or Bored Legacy
