Common sense might just have prevailed, as Sylvester Stallone appears to reverse the decision to go for a PG-13 cut of The Expendables 2...
Earlier this year, we reported the really rather miserable news that The Expendables 2 was targeting a PG-13 rating. We went through this process on the first film, where a broader rating was floated, before we were assured that an R was being sought. And it seems that we’ve gone through it again.
The original story surfaced when Stallone confirmed the PG-13 intention to AICN. The reason? That Chuck Norris, so runs the story, had insisted on it, as part of his deal to appear in the film.
One interesting by-product of this is that many who had blindly followed Chuck Norris for years suddenly found out some of the other things he stood for, as his assorted political stances bubbled to the surface. We’re not taking a political position on this, it was just bemusing that the thing it took for his views to be discovered was Norris wanting a tamer action movie.
But he might not be getting one anyway. StalloneZone has, it says, got word direct from Sylvester Stallone on the matter, and he says that “after taking in all the odd rumours and hearsay, Expendables 2 is an R”.
Notwithstanding that the “odd rumours and hearsay” appeared to stem from Stallone himself directly telling that AICN that “the PG-13 rumour is true”, this is good news. It was almost part of the mission statement that the original Expendables be an antidote to the softer, PG-13 focussed action movies we usually get, and it would, surely, have been a misstep for the sequel not to follow that path, too.
Unless anyone tells us different, then, an R-rated Expendables 2 is it. This is good. Next, can we have an R-rated Die Hard sequel again?
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