The Expendables
The Expendables is to men what Sex and the City is to women: full of ugly machismo and an insult.
After the glossy, sexy Losers, and the charming, good-natured A-Team, comes an absolute cesspool of an action flick.
On their own terms, Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham and Jet Li may be jolly super leads, but sling them together in this dingy and depressing gung-ho film, and each of them is stripped of their appeal. The much-lauded bringing together of two generations of muscular stars is a let-down, as Bruce Willis remains the suited orchestrator, Dolph Lundgren is an unintelligible brute, and Li is given nothing to do until his obligatory fight. Mickey Rourke isn't an active member of the team, but an embittered tattoo artist and ex-Expendable. He is the only man charged with invoking some empathy amongst the aggressive soldiers, but such scenes feel tacked on.
For this is not strictly a team affair, as much as the poster would have you believe, with Stallone and Statham the clear leading men. I'm personally at a loss as to why Statham has any sort of acting career, so his gruff knife-wielding Lee Christmas isn't likeable. Despite this, he's second in command to Stallone's leader in some mission to overthrow a South American dictator (an distinctly unmenacing David Zayas). Eric Roberts does his smarmy suited bad guy schtick, while the general's daughter (Gisele Itié) gets Stallone in a protective tizzy.
The Expendables is to men what Sex and the City is to women: full of ugly machismo, and an insult. Women are portrayed as either throwaway commodities or helpless beings waiting for their butch men to rescue them from abuse, re: Statham's girlfriend Charisma Carpenter getting what she blatantly "deserves" after shacking up with some new thug.
A po-faced bloodfest, there is none of the honour and camaraderie you'd expect to get you rooting for the team, and their lack of ingenuity results in mind-numbingly dull action. The "humour" is painfully contrived, including the brief cameo from Arnold Schwarzenegger, and most of the laughs I heard came from the various deaths - nice. There isn't a scrap of chemistry between the men, who look like they only met on the first day of filming.
As writer and director, Stallone wanted this to be a love-letter to the action genre, but it's a vile, bloodthirsty dishonourment. The violence is relentless, and it's staggering how this has achieved a 15 certificate when horrors are automatically slapped with an 18. And the noise, oh the noise. I never think cinemas are loud enough, but my ears were almost bleeding from the endless explosions and gunfire. If I come across as someone who loathes action, it couldn't be further from the truth, but The Expendables is nothing more than a witless, hideous, aimless parody, without an ounce of charm. MacGruber wasn't even this bad.
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