The Expendables is the evil spawn of Call of Duty and a Miller commercial.
Before this movie is fifteen minutes old, we’ve seen our heroes on choppers in a tattoo shop after hours drinking and listening to classic rock. It’s just that manly. I literally grew unexpected tufts of hair during this film.
There is a plot, but it doesn’t bear much discussion. Our gang of aging and anachronistic action heroes are mercenaries. They miss having souls. One of them needs more money. They don’t take a job killing the dictator general of an island in “The Gulf”, but then they go back and kill the hell out of him. They kill him, and everyone who works for him. In the face. Seriously. People lose heads in this movie – in slow motion.
Sylvester Stallone is in his early sixties, and all the Human Growth Hormone in the world can’t stop him from looking kind of like a grandpa. When he runs, which he does Bionic Man style more than once, he makes a seriously geriatric face that made me want to feed him soup. His body is still ripped, but his famous physique betrays him, after decades of good service. He looks like a leathery sack three-quarters full of gristle and knucklebones. I really hope he hangs it up, because this is definitely the last action film he can make without invoking actual pity from the audience.
The previews make it seem like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis are in this movie. While technically true, it is also technically true to say that Arnold and Bruce are only in this movie about three more minutes than I am. They have one scene, with maybe 20 lines of dialog between them, and they are never seen again. Everyone expecting to see the Big Three getting their action on should stay home. What you get is Sly and Jason Statham. The supporting goons, Terry Crews, Jet Li, and Randy Couture are not emphatically not eighties megastars. Neither is Stone Cold Steve Austin or the strangely misused Dolph Lundgren. You are not getting the movie the trailers promised, and I’m surprised that the box office take doesn’t reflect the very cynical bait-and-switch.
A lot of stuff gets blown up. A lot of brown people with no lines of dialog get dispatched in deeply unpleasant ways. Many, many shiny knives are thrown into torsos. A pretty, virtuous girl is endangered and then saved. Eric Roberts delivers those steely, straight-to-cable line readings that have made him so much less famous than his toothy sister.
If all you want is a poorly thought-out, testosterone soaked (only two women even speak in the whole 90 minutes) 80s slow-mo fireball fest, you are in luck. If you imagined that this would be special in any way, however, you will likely be disappointed. Sly puts the genre to bed, but with a whimper.
