110) The Expendables

The Expendables (2010)

Director: Sylvester Stallone

Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts, Giselle Itie, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, Mickey Rourke, Terry Crews, David Zayas, Charisma Carpenter, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger

As soon as I heard the line up that Sylvester Stallone was putting together, I knew The Expendables was going to be one of the must see movies of the year. However, I also knew that it was going to be one of the most average movies of the year. Call it a hunch.

A team of mercenaries led by Barney Ross (Stallone) is commissioned by a mysterious Mr. Church (Willis) to assassinate the merciless dictator of a small South American nation. Barney and his right hand man Lee Christmas (Statham) head down on a reconnaissance mission, meeting up with local rebel Sandra (Itie), who reveals to them the true nature of what is occurring on the island nation. After their cover is blown Ross and Christmas escape the island, while Sandra insists on staying behind. Ross is then inspired to return to the island to rescue her, with a little help from his friends.

Sylvester Stallone has done an amazing job in recent years of making himself relevant again. After rivalling Arnold Schwarzenegger as king of the 1980s, the 1990s saw Sly's career start to slide. By the early 2000s it's is fair to say he was no longer a box office commodity. But in 2006 he managed to get Rocky Balboa up and it was a surprising success both with critics and at the box office. From there he returned to his other staple character, John Rambo, and made the slightly less successful Rambo. Between the two though he must have managed to convince a few studio financiers that there was still some gas left in the tank and when he assembled the action hero super cast for The Expendables he got the green light. It has since topped the box office all over the world. It will be interesting to see if he can go anywhere from here or if this was just a last hurrah.

There are no surprises in The Expendables. It is pretty much exactly what you would expect a film with this cast to be like. There are plenty of explosions, big guns, bone shattering hand-to-hand fights, a body count that is in the hundreds and a handsome smattering of ow grade witticisms with not much attention given to insignificant details like narrative, characterisation or scripting. There's probably slightly less shirts-off, look at my muscles gear than you'd expect, but given a lot of these guys are on the wrong side of fifty you can understand it might be better to just leave some things to the imagination. Thankfully the film has the right tongue-in-cheek feel, not taking itself too seriously (as Stallone was accused of doing in the recent Rambo) which makes it easier to go along for the ride.

The thing which most stood out to me with this film is that as a viewer you just have zero investment in the characters. The only character whose name I could remember was Lundgren's Gunner. You have an investment in the actors who are playing them, but not the characters they are playing. Rather than providing some character development and background, we are encouraged to just accept that there is a camaraderie and history there between these guys. To be fair, there are a couple of scenes which deal with the relationship between Statham and Carpenter's characters, but they bring very little to the fold and in the end just feel a little out of place. To Stallone's credit though, he resisted the temptation to fabricate a romance between his character and Sandra (I think the beautiful young woman falling for the 64 year old and weathered Sly might have been a step too far to ask the audience to go). Stallone has said he wants to do a sequel, but I don't think it is required. I can't see anyone coming out of this film wondering what happened next to this group of guys.

The role played by Terry Crews was originally meant for Welsey Snipes. When tax issues forced him to decline the role it was given to Forrest Whittaker. I remember when they first started talking about this action super movie which was going to be made starring Stallone, Lundgren, Statham, Li and Forrest Whittaker I thought that last name stood out a bit. Ultimately a scheduling conflict forced him to pull out, and I think it was probably for the best.

A lot was made of the fact that for the first time in their careers Stallone and Schwarzenegger would be sharing the screen for a scene. The scene was a bit of a non-event. A few winks and nudges to the audience about the fact that Arnie was out of the game because he was in politics. It doesn't really compare to the cinemas other great meeting of the legends scene, Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny's shared scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Trivia for you, The Expendables is the first film Sylvester Stallone has directed since Staying Alive, the sequel to Saturday Night Fever, in which he has not appeared as either Rocky Balboa or John Rambo.

In it's own right, The Expendables is a pretty average film. But the value of this film is as an article of nostalgia. It successfully recreates the tone of the muscle-man action movies of the 1980s which made the likes of Stallone and Schwarzenegger household names. I'm a bit disappointed that Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Chuck Norris all turned down Stallone's approaches (seriously, what were any of these guys doing that was so pressing?), as that would have completed the collection. If you have a soft spot for movies about muscular beefcakes with big guns blowing things up, this one will be a bit of fun. If you look at the cast list and it doesn't excite you, then don't bother because those names are pretty much all it is.