Jet Li made a short appearance in The Expendables 2 before literally parachuting out of the story, but here’s why he left the sequel so early.
Here’s why Jet Li quite literally drops out of The Expendables 2 so quickly. Sylvester Stallone had already portrayed a group of battle-hardened mercenaries in his 2008 sequel Rambo, and for The Expendables he focused on a similiar group of nomadic soldiers. The movie started life with a more serious tone, but as the cast started to swell with action icons like Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren and Jason Statham, it became more of an homage to 1980s action cinema.
The movie was a solid success and was followed by a more action-packed sequel in 2012, which added the likes of Jean Claude Van-Damme, Scott Adkins and gave expanded roles to Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Expendables 2 was another hit and is arguably the most enjoyable entry, though it suffers from some forced,
corny humor, especially in the introduction to Chuck Norris’ character. The Expendables 3 from 2014 was the most recent outing, but despite adding the likes of Harrison Ford and a scene-stealing Antonio Bandaras, its watered down PG-13 rating and focus on a younger team led to weak reviews and box-office.
While the original Expendables was first sold on the trio of Stallone, Statham and Jet Li, the latter performer has been sidelined for much of the series. He had an entertaining – if choppily edited – fight with Dolph Lundgren in the original in addition to some salty one-liners, but he felt underused. While Li’s Yin Yang is part of Sly Stallone’s team for The Expendables 2’s intro setpiece, where they rescue a hostage from a stronghold in Nepal, the actor parachutes out of their plane over China in the next scene and never reappears; this wasn’t the original plan, however.
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It was actually Sly’s idea to have him just jump out of the plane over China. Those are the kind of things that you’re flying by the seat of your pants and you’re like ‘What do we now?… Cause the rest of the script Jet Li’s not in it’. There was a whole subplot they brought these Chinese businessmen home and he decided he wanted to stay home with his family, that was all in the script. It was Sly’s idea to just open the bottom of the plane and have him leap out.
The abruptness of Jet Li’s exit from The Expendables 2 is played for laughs during the sequel, though many viewers were still expecting the character to reappear during the story. It now makes sense that Yin Yang was supposed to have a bigger role in the original version. Sadly, the character had even less to do in The Expendables 3, where he only turns up for the finale and fires machine guns instead of doing any fighting. The movie does strongly imply he and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Trench are in a romantic relationship, however, so it will be interesting to see if the inevitable fourth entry expands on this idea.