Listen. Carefully. On the wind. Can you hear something? A creak of bone. A distant cough. Someone complaining that they haven't taken their pills, asking if you remembered to record "NCIS," and saying how their grandkids are going to show them how to use the Google. That's right, Sylvester Stallone and his buddies are rolling back into town.
The geek crowd have "The Avengers," but for a certain kind of movie fan, the kind who remembers a time when boys were boys and men were men and women had to ask permission to read a newspaper, there's only one team-up movie in 2012, and that's "The Expendables 2," a teaser trailer for which has just premiered at Apple.
Second time around, and Ol' Sly seems to have delivered what was promised last time out with himself, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture and, for some reason no one can really make sense of, Terry Crews, being joined by a who's-who of 80s action talent. Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwazenegger return in extended, action-heavy roles, along with Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme, while brother-of-"Thor" Liam Hemsworth is also coming along, in order to bring the average age of the cast back under the 70 mark.
The teaser is just that, teasing, with a brief scene between Stallone and Willis leading into pictures of that testosterone-heavy cast in action, and we can practically hear the alpha male salivation from here. Simon West ("Con Air") is in the director's chair this time out, and hopefully he can make the film more entertaining than the original was — it does, at least, have less cheap-looking photography. We'll find out when "The Expendables 2" hits theaters on August 17th. [Apple]