Expendables is Big, Loud and Not a Lot of Fun
The Expendables is a waste of time. This wannabe 1980’s style action epic wants to be The Dirty Dozen or The Dogs of War or The Wild Geese for a new generation, co-writer and director Sylvester Stallone assembling a who’s-who of rock’em-sock’em cinema to bring his vision to life.
Sylvester Stallone, Jet Li, Randy Couture, Terry Crews and Jason Statham are The Expendables © Lionsgate
The problem is the resulting movie is more The Delta Farce than it is The Delta Force (which, come to think of it, wasn’t very good, either), this thing so cheap looking, juvenile, overstuffed and just plain silly watching it from start to finish was far more of a chore than I ever could have imagined it was going to be. For the majority of the 103-minute running time all I kept doing was checking my watch wondering when it was going to be over. I had no wish to keep watching this picture, and no matter how much fun a few of the individual moments could be they weren’t near enough to keep my boredom level from rising to a boiling point.
Look, I get it. Stallone doesn’t mean this to be anything close to an artistic achievement. He wanted to make a film that recalled the golden age of Commando, Code of Silence, Extreme Prejudice or his own massively successful Rambo, First Blood: Part II. But what he’s instead unleashed compares more to Cobra or to Over the Top than it does to anything even close to resembling a John Rambo adventure, no amount of pyrotechnics, fisticuffs or throat-slittings capable of disguising this misfire's utter mediocrity.
Speaking of that former Vietnam vet turned antihero, 2008’s Rambo is a wildly inventive and unabashedly über-violent cartoon that for whatever reason has managed to grow on my over the past couple of years. Made on a shoestring, that movie has adrenaline pumping through the veins of every ounce of its steroid-created muscle. For action fans who fondly remember the old school days when bloodletting wasn’t masked in a sea of CGI and explosions weren’t crafted inside a computer terminal this was the real deal in brutal, pugilistic fun, its jungle setting giving new life to an aging icon.
What’s crazy to me is that The Expendables, on a reported budget nearly triple the size of Rambo, looks like the cheaper motion picture. This movie oozes CGI enhancement. Nothing looks real. The sets look fake. The explosions look fake. Heck, even the bloodletting looks like it was constructed by the folks over at Activison for one of their Call of Duty video games. Save for a couple of winning moments nothing looks remotely believable or real, the whole thing having a computer generated sheen that’s more than a bit off-putting.
I’ve had a lot of people tell me that I’m taking this film too seriously, that the whole thing is like one of those Golan-Globus productions from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. I don’t know how that’s exactly a good thing. I mean, Invasion, U.S.A. is a legitimately terrible motion picture, as are all the studio’s Death Wish sequels and American Ninja adventures. I’m not really longing for something to come along recalling the golden age of Michael Dudikoff or of an aging Charles Bronson; I don’t need to be reminded of all those cheap-ass Missing in Action Chuck Norris monstrosities. Those were bad, borderline unwatchable movies, and to make one in their like isn’t what I’d call a welcome cup of tea.
In all fairness, Stallone’s opus is hardly that bad. With a cast that includes Jason Statham, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, Dolph Lundrgen and Eric Roberts (not too mention Terry Crews, Steve Austin and Randy Couture) there are individual moments throughout that did bring a smile to my face. There just aren't enough of them, and as neat as it can be to watch Statham kick the crap out of a basketball court full of idiots or to see Li and Lundgren go at one-on-one there’s just so little in the way of substance none of these scenes or other similar ones end up being even slightly worthwhile.
It doesn’t help that the film has been edited as if the print itself had been processed by a Cuisinart, or that the usually reliable Jeffrey L. Kimball’s (Old Dogs, Glory Road) cinematography can often look overly dark and blurry. Additionally, Stallone does no one any favors by offering up some of his worst dialogue ever (which is kind of saying something), and there was definitely a time or two I felt like Statham was doing all he could to not laugh while trying to say it.
I haven’t talked about the plot mainly because the one that’s here isn’t all that interesting to talk about. It’s the usual hodgepodge of rogue CIA agents, puppet governments and shadowy figures authorizing complete and total chaos. In short, not much happens, and even though it doesn’t exactly need to the film seems to revel so excitedly in its own overt obviousness the fact there’s not a single surprise to be found grows tiresome extremely fast.
None of what I’m saying probably matters. The Expendables offers up a cast of action icons (although marketers made a big mistake revealing the Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger cameos in the trailers) who will get genre fans undoubtedly excited. But that feeling quickly disappears thanks to the movie’s awfulness, and by the time it was over the only excitement I still felt was the supreme joy of finally being able to leave the theatre and head back home.
Film Rating: ê1/2 (out of 4)
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