The Expendables (Review)

The Expendables is the Valentine’s Day of macho action movies: a veritable who’s who of old-school steroid-addled stars populate the cast, and the cast is the sole reason the film was released. The premise is something incredibly familiar to anyone who has perused the $5 direct-to-DVD section at Wal-Mart, where this film surely would have ended up were it not for the likes of Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li and the like. Instead The Expendables gets a theatrical release, and the finished product is exactly what you’d expect. There are moments of genuine fun, but it never reaches the level of classic trash it so aims for.

The basic plot (heh) is that there are a group of mercenaries for hire. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire… The Expendables. After a very James Bond-esque prologue (with more gore), our heroes are hired by a Bruce Willis cameo to assassinate the dictator of a fictional South American island. Stallone’s crew decides to take the job instead of a rival group led by... Arnold Schwarzenegger. You'd think this is a cameo they would've kept secret, but instead they advertise him the ads. Stallone even makes a remark about the fact that our dear Governator’s character “wants to be President”. Ah, subtlety. The dialogue as a whole in this film is never particularly creative. This is a film that includes a line to the effect of: “Getting something for something is not a gift. Getting nothing for something is a gift.” Strange, all these years after giving gifts I’ve been asking for money. Never occurred to me that it was wrong.

After this meeting scene we are essentially treated to scene after scene of stuff blowing up real good and people getting shot to pieces. Some sequences work effectively, some do not. The Expendables is anything but a boring movie, and there is some cheap fun to be had. The action is often joyously over-the-top, but it never goes as high as it can go for one reason: Sylvester Stallone should not have directed this movie.

The direction ranges from average to frustrating, my largest complaint being Stallone is far too in love with close-ups. Shot after shot all we see is faces, faces, faces, and we often don’t get a good feel of the surroundings. Every scene where the guys just sit around and talk works as a series of headshots. Some of the editing strays into the amateurish, but his work with action seems to mostly fit the style. Stallone is normally not terrible in a creative capacity (he wrote Rocky, after all), but The Expendables would have benefitted from a different, more experienced action director. I’d still take what Stallone does here over the distracting camerawork of Michael Bay, but I feel that if Stallone was willing to hand the material over to someone else this could have been some kind of 80's-flashback masterpiece.

The one thing I did love was the cast, each one of them, including Stallone, is absolutely having a blast here and the smiles can be infectious. Besides Stallone, Statham and Li, we also get Mickey Rourke as a wise tattoo artist whose shop works as a sort of Expendables Batcave. We also get tough-guy roles for MMA star Randy Couture and ex-wrester Steve Austin, and Eric Roberts (Julia’s brother, for those who don’t know) is the American ex-CIA agent who is truly in charge of this tyrannical state. They all do the relatively simple jobs they set out to do, and those jobs include kicking some serious hiney. Terry Crews spends most of the final sequences walking around with some kind of super-shotgun that only Zeus himself could have created. Improbably, my favorite character ended up being Gunnar, as played by Dolph Lundgren with a short Kurt Cobain haircut. He is a mentally unstable Expendable who ends up being let go, only to go the bad guys, and then comes back to fight Stallone. I don’t want to spoil too much, but let’s say Rasputin would be proud of how he comes out of this fight, and his final scene is reminiscent of the Robbie character in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.

When you go to see a movie like The Expendables, what do you expect? If I had to sum it up in three words, they’d be: guns, muscles, boom. On that level, The Expendables essentially succeeds. However, at the end of the day the opportunity seems ever so slightly wasted. On top of the sometimes shaky direction by Stallone, the special effects seem cheap, and the characters are sweating in every shot as if the air has the consistency of butter. It’s a dumb movie, even on a regular scale quite bad, but everyone involved is so devoted to what they’re doing that it can be dumb fun. It’s far from perfect, but if you’re walking through a video store or scrolling through the on-demand section in a couple months it very well might be worth it. Just remember, if you’re paying it’s not a gift.

Rating: (out of 4)