The Expendables

Expendables

This is one we testosterone factories have been waiting for a for a while now. It is a who’s who of action heroes. It stars Sylvester Stallone, Jason (The Transporter) Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Steve “Stone Cold” Austin, Terry Crews, and Mickey Rourke. Oh, and Eric Roberts, Julia’s less-gifted brother, plays the bad guy, as usual. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis make cameo’s as honorary members of the club. Plus of bunch of other people.
I wish they’d have been able to get a few other guys in it—like Claude Van Dam, and Steven Segal, and Mel Gibson, and Tony Jaa and Bruce Lee, and Steve McQueen and Gary Cooper, and Roy Rogers, but some of those guys don’t like each other very much, and a few of them are dead, so . . .
Besides, with that many, it would have been an army, not a team, and they would have out-numbered the bad guys. Where’s the fun in that?
Stallone shares the writing credit—we hate to admit it, but he’s a good writer—and he directed it. Bam! Home run!
Nothing about the plot is new. A crack mercenary team—rude, crude, and the best in the world, a suicide mission to rescue a girl and atone for past sins. An island kingdom being ruled by a thug with his own army, and an ex-CIA guy who is growing coca for a profit.
But then, when you least expect it . . . there’s a twist. It actually has a story. It has actual characters disguised as real people, with real problems. And the mercs are aging! They’re past their prime. (by a Nano-second.) That’s clever writing because Stallone is in his fifties, and I’d guess all the other guys are fast approaching.
Not only that, but as they age, these bulging brutes are learning to act. Who knew?
The writing is above average for the genre. Okay, anything more sophisticated than drawings with a crayon is above average for the genre, but the screenplay works pretty well. I laughed several times (as usual, I was alone in that endeavor) and really appreciated the very subtle nod to Kermit The Frog in a man’s man shoot-em-up.
And yes, there is a girl. Three actually. Jason Statham is in a rocky relationship—a pretty good side story. Mickey Rourke brings one home on his hog—for exactly one scene. And Stallone falls for an island girl (the General’s daughter. Pronounce that Hen-er-al, please.) But this girl is different. She is not twenty years old, and didn’t step off the bus from central casting under the “eye candy” sign. Oh, she’s attractive enough, but no beauty. And she can act. But Stallone writes in someone a little more age-appropriate for his character. Sure, she’s 35 and he’s like, 80, but it’s a start, right?
Forget about the story. If you are overly concerned with plot, this is not your kind of movie. Even though there is one. Sort of.
There is a lot of action, and it is sometimes brutal, if quick. It does not linger, as so many directors like to do ever since Sam Peckinpah hit the scene. If anything, Stallone gives the film a ragged edge, and increases the tension, by cutting the thing as close to the bone as possible when it comes to fights, explosions, knife-throws—lot’s of knife throws—and bloody casualties.
This is some of the best violent, military-action mayhem I have ever seen. The melee’s are awesome. The martial arts are awesome. The big-badda-boom parts are awesome. And they go on and on. Truly a minor masterpiece for the genre. In fact, I am giving it an A as a genre piece, and a B- as a general grade.
Now let’s be clear. It is not a great movie. But it’s probably as great as these guys are ever going to get, and it is way better than most of the fare we’ve seen over the years.
It is rated R, for violence, mayhem, and gore. Heads roll. Arms are severed. But each of those scenes is so brief, so . . . almost beside the point, that you wonder if you really even saw it. Great stuff. And Terry Crews makes the hat-box magazine, full-automatic shot gun my new favorite weapon. Boo-ya!
There’s some cussing in this one. There is no sex, and no skin, so the R comes from an over-abundance of violence. If I had drugged Nita unconscious and taken her in to see it on a gurney, she still would have walked out. Plus, I earned another small popcorn with my points card. How great is that?