The Expendables 2 (Blu-ray) Official AVSForum Review - Page 2

Gah.

Poor Auhnuld was there for the child support paycheck. His acting chops were never stellar, but he's sure rusty these days.

Those catchphrase shootouts were shameless.

Thanks Ralph. Happy Thanksgiving to you as well.

So is the RedBox rental. It sucked just having Dolby Digital 5.1 sound on a Bluray disc.....

:-(

I finally managed to watch this one in my 11.1 DTS:NeoX setup and must say, I am impressed (sound, not the movie).  While NeoX is supposedly not discrete 11 channels on Blu-ray, I was surprised at how "discrete" it actually was.  In fact, one of the Extras on the disc is an explanation and demonstration of the Neo X technology.  When you run this, it shows a graphic of the 11.1 speakers and plays an audio clip from the movie and the corresponding speaker that the sound should come from.  It successfully played audio from all 11 speakers and the sub discretely.  Watching the actual movie, the sound was very immersive and it was also obvious that they went to great lengths to incorporate a large soundfield of both music and ambient sound.  Right from the start, the soundtrack smoothly panned and played various effects from all the speakers.  The film seemed to rely heavily on a track of 60's classics that it kept in the side and rear surrounds for ambiance and which remained out of the front sound stage as if to heighten the sense of space the listener occupied.  Sound effects like bullets flying and explosions realistically whizzed around and there was a good dose of LFE, both in the threatening music tracks and the effects.  At first, I thought maybe they were going overboard in simply displaying the tech, but after a while, I forgot about looking for it and they simply melted into the movie and kept me surrounded at all times.  It was very impressive to say the least and will definitely cause me to look for this feature in the future.

 

My HT is large (20' wide X 32' long with a 10.5' wide 2.35 screen and large speakers), so that probably played a role as well.  The movie, as I expected, was very cartoonish with real bloody violence.  But, it wasn't terrible and the sound effects were worthwhile to me.  It was the best use of my system for pure 11.1 audio to date.  Running the soundcheck program and getting discrete sounds from each speaker was unexpected and while I can't say that the actual film did that, it was immersive enough to make me think it did.  Nothing was steered incorrectly and once I got past listening for the effects and their placement, it became natural sounding and put me center stage for the action.  Happily, dialogue always instantly snapped back to center and never bled over except to pan the screen with the movement of the actors.  Overall, a good first effort from Lionsgate in their DTS:Neo X 11.1 experiment.

just wondering i rented this movie last night at redbox, but the audio is only Doldby digital comes out on my avr, i guess redbox blu rays movies are not like the real bluray movies?

i rented this by blockbuster,

it say's (dolby digital) i hope it's wrong!. lol :/

Nah its Lionsgate, they did the same thing for the Hunger Games and Cabin in the Woods. Apparently in in thier infinite wisdom they think that only putting in lossy audio in their rental discs will dissuade people from ripping them and make them want to buy it instead. Expect every Lionsgate rental disc to have this from now on.

I think the picture quality on ths was way below par, it was actually so bad that I think it affected the movie it self in a bad way. And I did not think this was a good movie in the first place. Picture 1,5/5 stars, Sound 3,5/5 stars, Movie 2/5 stars.
Edited by Andreas21 - 12/3/12 at 12:05pm

VQ-D-...for blu-ray one of the worst i've seen. on top of that Lionsgate limiting DD only for rentals only worsens things.

I could not agree more, video quality was really way below acceptable for a BD. Surround sound was immersive, but I felt like it was a low res track even if I was listening to the 7.1 DTS HD-MA... Bass was thin most of the time. I expected a lot more from this one!

Finally get a chance to watch this tonight.

I really enjoyed this found it very entertaining to the end. I hope they make a third.

You'd think that offering more than one version of a disc would cost the studio more money. Anyway, on my Blu of "EX2" there were at least five or six previews, including a preview for the Video Game! I began to wonder if the movie was ever going to begin, but what I noticed was that these previews played back (at least on my system ...Oppo BDP83SE/Pioneer SC35) in plain old 2-channel stereo. Did anyone else notice this? The beginning Lionsgate (grinding gears) logo played back in multi-channel, but then my receiver switched back to stereo for the previews and then back to 7.1 for the feature. I couldn't believe these previews were playing in stereo, unless my player didn't recognize a "flag" in the data stream. Any comments?

Just watched this today - and I really liked it. Of course I love movies that don't take themselves seriously.

I was REALLY disappointed to find out the rental version didn't have the DTS track since I had heard such good things about the soundtrack. I also was wondering if maybe try had downgraded the picture quality for the rental disc too - so I'm kind of glad to read that it was supposed to be that bad.
Edited by PTAaron - 1/8/13 at 8:31pm

I like this movie. I thought the action was pretty good.

Hope to see Bruce Lee in part 3.