The Expendables (2010)
Directed by Sylvester Stallone
Written by David Callaham, Sylvester Stallone
Starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Stone Cold Steve Austin
Release Date August 13th, 2010
Published August 12th, 2010
Take your hands and press them against the sides of your head. Now, hold them there and press as hard as you can. Stay that way for the next 103 minutes and you will have an equivalent experience to having seen “The Expendables,” Sylvester Stallone's latest desperate attempt to remain relevant.
”The Expendables” stars Stallone alongside a rogue’s gallery of has-beens, wannabes, never-wears and Oscar nominee Mickey Rourke lending his rediscovered cool to the proceedings. The has beens include Jason Statham and Jet Li as Christmas and Yang, two of Stallone's, aka Barney, fellow mercenaries for hire, former military specialists now available to the highest bidder.
Also on the team UFC champion Randy Couture, former NFL player Terry Crews and sad, pathetic former B-movie star Dolph Lundgren. Together this ragtag band is off to some unknown isle to battle today's bad guy du jour, the rogue CIA agent. This time he's played by Eric Roberts in fine high camp form.
Stallone wrote, directed and stars in “The Expendables'' and much like his previous auteurist efforts like “Rocky ..2”.. through infinity and the recent “Rambo'' reboot, “The Expendables'' has flashes of inspiration but is mostly amateurish, off key and gut punching loud and violent. Clearly, this won't be an issue for the core of Stallone's audience, those already punch-drunk from months of UFC pay per views and neck vein popping work outs. For those seeking coherence or a story The Expendables is torturous. Call it water-boarding for the soul.
There are times when “The Expendables” feels as if it is pummeling the audience's visual and auditory fists. Stallone and his editing team cut “The Expendables” in a fashion that will spin the heads of even the most cut friendly music video directors. Fight scenes are placed in a blender with images so randomly thrust forward it's impossible to tell whose head is being busted.
This likely helped the aging cast look a little sprayer; Mr. Statham is the only member of the male cast under the age of 40. I say male cast rather unnecessarily as Charisma Carpenter and Giselle Itie are the only female cast members but neither is nothing more than a minor damsel in distress subplot.
When “The Expendables” slows down for moments of dialogue the editing remains front and center thanks to Sly's bizarre angles; he really thinks angling off of mirrors is clever direction. If you manage to not be distracted by the editing be prepared for nonsense dialogue meant to make the characters seem quirky, instead it just makes the whole movie flaky and cheese ridden.
I would love to say that you could enjoy “The Expendables” on a camp level, especially the scene featuring Stallone hanging off the side of a sea plane on take off in fine physics defying fashion, but sadly the whole of “The Expendables” is too harsh for any enjoyment to escape.
Even “The Expendables” centerpiece bit of camp, Stallone uniting his old Planet Hollywood pals Bruce Willis and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, falls flat because of Stallone's bizarre direction. Through odd camera angles and strange cuts it's impossible to tell if Schwarzenegger, Willis and Stallone were ever actually on screen at the same time. Willis and Stallone are in frame together briefly and Stallone and Schwarzenegger are as well but never all three unless Stallone's editing team was truly so horrible that they cut the three shots, that's possible.
What's more likely is that this meeting of the action hero minds never happened and was faked in the editing. To be fair, it was a cheap ploy anyway, hard to criticize it for that. Still, it's disappointing, especially when seeing Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Willis together on screen, even for 2 or 3 minutes of mindless exposition, was the one minor pleasure that might have escaped the dreariness that is “The Expendables.”
