As you might expect, THE EXPENDABLES is the most entertaining bad movie of the year. Yes, Sylvester Stallone’s cheesy ode to 1980s action films is bad, almost embarrassingly so at times. But there is a certain amount of charm to it that transcends most of its ridiculousness. And it has the long-awaited and famed meeting of action’s past trifecta—Schwarzenegger, Willis, and Sly all together in one place!
Following a rough team of mercenaries as they fight their inner demons and bad guys, THE EXPENDABLES opens with a bang—literally. Aboard an oil tanker hijacked by a group of Somali pirates, Stallone’s motley crew draws down on the terrorists offering to let them go if they only take the ransom. What happens next might be the best action sequence in the film and gives tough guy and still physical giant Dolph Lundgren his best lines in the movie. It is a crowd pleaser for sure and telling of the movie’s objective—to give b-movie action fans what they want.
Soon the action moves back Stateside where Stallone holes up in his lair that he appears to share with fellow tattooed tough guy Mickey Rourke. The comeback “kid” Rourke probably has the best written role in the movie, especially in one tear filled exchange with Stallone. And such an exchange points up why the often down-right foolish EXPENDABLES works—Stallone’s script is really an inside joke trading heavily on the years the all-star cast have given us snarling on the trigger end of a machine gun.
The story isn’t worth thinking about too deeply. Other than the opening sequence where the pirates resemble something out of real life, the rest of the characters are complete parodies. And the setting and positioning of the villains won’t run afoul of any political correctness. It won’t spoil anything to reveal that Eric Roberts plays the real bad guy and pulls off the role with a kind of twisted lip zeal.
While I have problems with the staging and frenetic capturing of some of the fight sequences, the action will leave the viewers laughing and cheering. Of course, that audience has to be up for it and accept an orgy of bone breaking and bone crunching, with exploding and mutilation of herds of soldiers and henchman. It is comic violence to be sure, especially when former NFL player and always solid actor Terry Crews unveils his character’s very loud and extremely deadly machine gun. Like most things in the movie, Crews’ character’s weapon lays waste in the most over-the-top fashion to anything in its path. Viewers I watched the movie with clapped and expressed perverse glee as bodies fell like wheat in a freshly cut hayfield. That audience reaction might offer more insight into human nature than any four-star dramatic Oscar winner.
But the worst thing about THE EXPENDABLES is that it could have been a good and entertaining movie, not one that is so bad at times that it is entertaining. Had Stallone’s script attempted to give us a story that we could actually believe, the tension generated would have made the action more meaningful. At no time do you buy anything that is transpiring. And it seems that Stallone’s tiny army is capable of defeating even a thousand Zulu warriors. In one scene Jason Statham takes on a group of yuppie ball-players on a basketball court. Of course, Statham easy dispatches the middle-class flunkies, but sadly this scene would have worked better if just one of the balers could have put up some kind of fight. Or better yet, had they all laughed at him walking away and lecturing Statham that fighting things out is just so 1980s.
While entertaining, THE EXPENDABLES isn’t a movie that works hard enough to convince us that our heroes are anything but supermen from the by-gone days of cheesy action b-movies. Compare INCEPTION a smart film that suggests to the viewer a sophisticated movie can be made within the familiar and thrilling action framework. But Stallone’s nostalgic romp is all about giving the viewer a dose of what they expect–expectations that are met but hardly exceeded.
