A Thomas Bess review of:
Directed By: Sylvester Stallone
Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Eric Roberts, Steve Austin, Randy Couture, Terry Crews
Run Time: 103 minutes, 90 of them are explosions.
During my time in service to the Atomik Brain Canisters, I’ve gone on record as saying that I don’t expect anything too cerebral from my action films. Gimme cheesy one-liners, a memorable villain, copious amounts of violence all topped off with plenty of explosions and I’ll leave the theater a happy dude. Well, The Expendables, an over the top, silly love letter to and from the action stars of the eighties and early nineties doesn’t have all these things, so to make up for it, the folks behind the camera packed it with an extra helping of explosions. Hoo-boy did they ever. I mean, we’re talking lots of explosions. Like, the last forty minutes or so is one long explosion accompanied by massive gunfire and a suitably epic score. Like, Michael Bay watched this flick and said they might wanna dial back the explosions (Not much, but just a little). By this point, you may be thinking to yourself, “C’mon dude, hyperbole is the most obnoxious crutch of the internet movie reviewer” and ya know what, I agree with you. But even hyperbole does not begin to cover the massive amount of shit that gets blown up in this movie.
The Plot
Please don’t take this as me being a snarky asshole, but I’m not sure the word “plot” really applies with this movie. There are events that happen in sequence and there’s some cause and effect to everything, but really, the stuff holding together all the firefights and bare knuckle brawls is narrative tissue of the skimpiest sort. What we’ve got is the titular Expendables, a group of rough and tumble mercenary types led by Barney (Stallone) doing dirty deeds, (relatively) dirt cheap. After they’ve proved their mettle to the audience by dispatching a bunch of Somali pirates, our heroes are approached by a mysterious spook type (Bruce Willis in a cameo) to take out a tin-pot dictator and his skuzzy ex-CIA bankroller (Roberts) on the vaguely South American island of Vilena. (Vilena, really? Why not just go all the way and call it Evildonia?) Anyhoo, there’s five million dollars in it for them and after a bit of reconnaissance results in massive death, the team comes back full force and even more massive death ensues. Along the way Jet Li will fight Dolph Lundgren, Jason Statham will defend the honor of Charisma Carpenter and Stallone will exchange fists and verbal barbs with Steve Austin. There’s a little more to it than that, but any real nuances are lost in the brain rattling string of earth shattering KA-BOOMS that make up the last third of the story.
The Good
So what’s good? Ya know, this’ll probably make me sound like a season pass holder at the Coliseum, but there’s some darned good violence on display in The Expendables. Just how much is extremely difficult to quantify, but I will say that if Joe Bob Briggs tried to post the Drive In Totals, he’d have to go through frame by frame with one of those handheld clicky things to get a rough estimate and even then you could add a zero and still be on the conservative side. Yes indeed, bullets enter the human body from every conceivable angle, knives hit necks and heads at roughly the speed of light and the property damage alone could bankrupt a good-sized Midwestern state. And that’s just the weapons. The hand to hand carnage is something to behold too, especially the aforementioned battles between Lundgren and Li and Stallone and Austin, the latter of which plays much better than Sly’s final confrontation with Eric Roberts not too long thereafter. Casting wise, Statham is the standout; though one gets the feeling Lundgren might’ve stolen the show if he’d had more screen time. Everyone else does just fine when they’re busting skulls and range from tolerable to good when they aren’t. Thankfully, the amount of time devoted to non skull-busting endeavors is so little that the less developed characterizations never really get a chance to annoy.
The Not So Good
What’s not so good? Well, when you’ve got a collection of uber-badasses dealing out death in droves, it stands to reason that they’d need a suitable legion of evil counterparts to really make things interesting. Instead, we get Eric Roberts. Don’t get me wrong, no one does slimy and obnoxious like Roberts, but you damn well know that as soon as he doesn’t have any guns or henchmen left, Sly’s gonna snap him like a twig. And while that’s not precisely what happens, it’s close enough to be disappointing. Austin does the best he can in the menacing second-in-command role, but even the might of Stone Cold himself can’t stand against the assembled forces of light. What this flick really needed was someone like a Segal or a Van Damme as head of the bad guys, either one of them would’ve made for a much more high stakes finale. As it is, most of the action sequences play out like a highlight reel of our heroes just pounding the stuffing out of wave after wave of red-shirt level henchmen and while that’s fun for a while, eventually you wanna see ‘em get scuffed up before regaining control and saving the day. On a completely different note, there’s a scene with Mickey Rourke trying to explain…well, I’m not quite sure. I did my best, but for the life of me I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Probably doesn’t bear too much on anything that came before or after, but those among you who like to know every detail may be left scratching your head after trying to decipher the mumbling.
Should You See It?
Should you see it? Now that’s a silly question and you know it. Anyone, and I mean anyone (ok, mostly male anyones) with a soft spot for action flicks should, and probably will, hit The Expendables as soon as they can. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel and it doesn’t even offer anything new, save for the thrill of watching a veritable A-Team do what they do best. And in this case, that’s all ya really need.
The Verdict
On a scale of zero to five exploding heads, zero being awful and five being perfect, I’d give this particular slice of celluloid three.
Til next time, always remember that the calls are coming from inside the house.
Tom Bess recently shaved his legendary sideburns at a cost of two hours and five pounds. The end result is a slightly puffier, but much more aerodynamic movie-reviewing machine who is still patiently waiting for Allison Mack to return his calls. While he’s waiting, he’ll read copious amounts of Lovecraft and eat too many Peach Gummy Bears.
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