The Expendables

The Expendables | Action | rated R (L,V) | starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Eric Roberts, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, David Zayas, Charisma Carpenter, Mickey Rourke | directed by Sylvester Stallone | 1:43 mins

A group of motorcyle-riding tough-guy mercinaries called “The Expendables” are hired to take out a South American dictator.

With a plot thinner than that of a late night Skinemax movie, The Expendables blasts onto the screen to deliver some hyper-macho Spike-TV ready guy movie awesomeness. It’s a man’s man movie, for men whose biceps have biceps, chase their beer with razor blades and can stare at burgers on a grill for hours. Of course, a guy’s movie also would have a nice population of beautiful women (no offense to the stunning Charisma Carpenter – she’s barely given 5 minutes of screen time), effortless sex and plenty of other things the recent far more fun action-movie send-up Machete actually did deliver.

Like the 2008 remake/sequel Rambo before it, Expendables is again Stallone in the director’s chair trying to recapture the 80s/90s magic of the burly man action movie that he and Arnold Schwarzenegger once dominated. There will always be a market and a place in my heart for a big, dumb, fun, explosive action movie. Expendables gets all of that except the fun. It’s a shallow, weezy movie entirely reliant on star-power and not enough on applying a little creativity to the action scenes.

But Expendables isn’t just a lame action movie, it has the added quality of being obnoxiously self-aware of it’s own future marketing campaign. Like the “cool guy” who refers to himself in the third person. Stallone, Statham, Li and it’s cast padded with wrestlers don’t play characters, but versions of their action-movie personas. Almost parodies, with Stallone as the veteran, Statham as the cool guy, Li as (I kid you not) the short guy and Couture given a section of dialog explaining away his cauliflower ear with “I wrestled in high school”. The movie never for a second feels like we’re watching characters, just a bunch of action movie actors assembled in one place, exchanging cheesy one-liners and having a good time. It looks like it was more fun for them than it is for us.

The movie’s bright spot is a single, highly-publicized scene in which Stallone shares the screen with Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger in cameos. As cheesy and useless as it is, it’s still hard not to be a little awe-struck seeing these three action movie legends on screen together. It’s almost like that scene in Heat with Pacino and DeNiro together for the first time. The scene also sums up the entire movie well: lots of star-power for the sake of it that amounts to a lot of wasted potential.

The Expendables has a very simple agenda. It’s a dumb flick that wants to get in, blow stuff up and have a few laughs in the process. It’s macho porn. For crying out loud, it’s hard to expect much more from a movie with a close up of two dudes fist-bumping. The climax literally explodes in an chaotic orgy of fireballs that levels anything and everything in site. But with all these action icons and combined muscle together, pardon me for expecting something a little more epic to justify it all. Otherwise it’s just a stunt. The movie rests on the novelty of it’s star-studded cast and the result is lazy, dumb mallet of a movie, with almost no story, delivering only the bare minimum and so self-indulgent it’s hard to get behind.