Review: The Expendables

Millennium  Films

Great face Sylvester Stallone, really looking good. This whole movie is basically how Stallone is gross. Seriously, the guy is 64 years old. Almost old enough to be your grandpa. So basically this is an action movie starring all your grandpas (minus Jason Statham and Jet Li) who used to be cool back in '80's. I mean, look at the man's veins in this picture! So gross.

But enough about how ridiculous these guys are (for now), what about the actual movie? Thanks to the wonders of the interwebs and a friend I family got to see Stallone's action-baby. It was clear from the marketing campaign that Stallone wanted all guys out there to know that this movie was going to be pure MAN. Stallone, Statham, Li, Mickey Rourke, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Terry Crews, Steve Austin, all a bunch of really buff guys doing nothing but killing people. And that's true, but is that it? This movie seriously had one of the most under-develop plot-lines I have seen for a long time. 

Bruce Willis' character hires Stallone and his men to go take out a dictator-general on the small island of Valena (somewhere in the gulf?). But they soon find out some "Americans" are really controlling the general so they can do awful things like....grow cocoa? No joke, in a scene not too far into the movie we see the head of these Americans in a dirt complaining about how his 'cocoa' trees haven't been planted yet, or whatever. Seriously? Cocoa? I had no idea that all the terrible, brutal dictatorships in the world controlled by greedy Americans were in fact doing something so harmless. Can we at least get fields full of heroine or WMD's? "Sorry, cocoa is all we got" - American guy.

Millennium Films

Obviously this mission is too dangerous so Stallone is going to call it off. But then he remembers this "beautiful" woman on the island (I use quotes here because she's not actually that good-looking) who needs to be rescued along with her people. So Stallone decides to be a real man sometimes you just gotta blow stuff up (especially when the ending of the movie is on the line). 

Then all hell breaks loose on the general's palace and bloody carnage ensues. There's definitely some pretty cool action all around, especially on the part of Statham and Li. But there's a really distracting theme in this movie and that is the idea that this is what real, tough men are like. A bunch of grossly buff, tattooed guys who spend the end of the movie sitting around in Mickey Rourke's Tattoo garage with their motorcycles throwing knives and laughing even though none of them have any visible wives or girl friends. Sounds great, sign me up for some steroids!

It really is a sad state of affairs. With this movie Stallone promised action liked we'd never seen before, and I definitely have seen it all before. It would've been much better if he went for even more ridiculousness maybe even on the level of "Con-Air". Anything but the mish-mash of lame attempt at characters and plot we get here with some blood on the side.