Every red-blooded male loves action films, so therefore this should be a sure success. You take “The Most Awesome Action Cast Ever Assembled” (Empire’s words, on the billboards). Add in a load of explosions. Guns. Knives. Perhaps some breasts. Just show us who the bad guys are. Point the good guys at them and set them loose. Guaranteed entertainment from start to finish. That’s what the trailers promised. And that’s what I and everyone else hoped for. Hell, Stallone shouldn’t even have to break a sweat making this great.
And then about 2 minutes in I began to develop a little nagging feeling in my gut. “Sure, it’s just the prologue, wait for the action.” and then it came. And it was confusing. Not in the TransBournemers style “Oh god it’s all in my eyes and my arse and I can’t tell who’s who” kind of way, but because that nagging feeling turned into the realisation that this film is bloody boring. Now don’t get me wrong, although I adore Citizen Kane, I still know that Commando and Die Hard are stone cold classics. Action films can be incredible, perhaps some of most entertaining films of all time have starred Arnie, Willis and their ilk. Dumb movies can be great. However, movies which treat their audience as dumb never are.
Take for example Dolph Lundgren’s oh so memorable character Swedish Blond Guy. He starts the film trying to hang a pirate, despite Stallone’s noble protestations that that’s “Not how we do things.” Fascinating. Years of violence and killing have taken their toll on poor old Blondie, he’s savage, in the wild, drunk on the blood of his enemies. Will he get over it and manage to control or even direct his anger at a worthy opponent? Will he be-oh no wait Jet Li is kicking the shit out of him.
And then a few scenes later, Sly having booted Blond out of The Expendables for being nuts talks with him, bringing up the fact that he’s on drugs. Did they miss a scene out here? Normally we see the drug addict taking drugs. Or we see them acting drugged up at the very least. But instead we are simply TOLD that he is taking drugs. Sly doesn’t let him back in the group, will Blond grow and overcome his bad habit and earn back his place in the team he loves. No wait, he’ll join the bad guys, get nearly killed by Stallone, tell Stallone the entire layout of the enemy base in a few seconds and then show up at the end all smiles with everyone. Then again, when the man who starred in Street Fighter turned down the role because he felt that there was nothing to the character, what do you expect? And it is this bottling out of anything slightly challenging in the film that is the key disappointment. It is a cynical and lazy exercise in storytelling.
“Yes sir I can get you the blondings…?”
But look! “The Most Awesome Action Cast Ever Assembled” “It’s an 80s action movie through and through man who cares about it making sense just show me good stuff.” Die Hard, Commando, Under Siege all made sense. Sometimes they were daft. But they always made sense. Characters went after what they wanted, they acted… in character. Stallone’s pointing out that “That’s not how they do things” reveals how specific an event (pirate hanging) he was referencing around the mid point of the film when he turns a plane around and kills about twenty defenceless mercenaries on the ground below him. Apparently that is how they do things. And the action was forgettable. The one scene that impressed me was the AA12 chewing through the naughty south americans and the rest was pretty quickly forgotten. I think Statham might have stabbed people a bit, but when it takes an hour and twenty minutes to get to anything resembling good, any audience could be forgiven for not caring.
The cast itself isn’t actually great either. Okay you have got the holy trinity of Willis, Arnie and Stallone all together in the same scene. But Oh! What a scene. I could feel the entire cinema shift around uncomfortably as the founders of Planet Hollywood simply stood in a circle and made nonsensical one liners to each other. Maybe it was a kind of “you had to be there” moment as I didn’t have a clue what was going on. The rest of the cast then. Action legends. If I had to pick some action legends right now, I could probably ream off about 40 or so until I got to Terry Crews (as hilarious as his Old Spice commercials are), Randy Couture or Stone Cold Steve Austin. The last two aren’t actors. They aren’t supposed to be in films and it shows. The overall level of acting in this film is atrocious. Statham and Rourke are okay. The other Expendables are abysmal and the other characters somehow manage to be worse. Except for one. God’s gift to B movies; Eric Roberts. Who hams up his performance so much that at the end of the film I was actually rooting for him to beat the “heroes”.
John Hamm (lololol)
The Expendables is a film of shocking quality. It manages to be completely derivative and yet also fails to learn anything from the films it is so obviously influenced by. Despite treating it’s audience as dumb it comes inbuilt with the almost impregnable self defence mechanism of “It’s just an action film it doesn’t need to be good.” This could have been a fantastic send off for these ageing stars, a Dirty Dozen Wild Bunch-esque last hurrah for the action movie. Instead Stallone takes the easy route and somehow manages to fluff even that. Characters spouting terrible “jokes” and playing up to every stereotype I could possibly imagine means that when the action does come, I just don’t care.
Quick things
Can anyone remember any of the one liners from the film? Why the hell was that 40 year old divorcee IT technician that Statham’s girl hooked up with playing Basketball on the streets? How terrible was Jet Li’s usage of that “Low Clearance Area”? “Hmmm, this script sure is shit? How should I end redeem it with a killer ending? Oh, I know. A shoddy limerick.”
Oh yeah and hi by the way, I’m new here.
