Totally Expendable!

Grade: C-

The Expendables

Indian Release Date: 13/08/10
CBFC Classification: A
Running Length: 1 Hour 43 Minutes

Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, David Zayas, Giselle Itie, Terry Crews, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger
Director: Sylvester Stallone
Screenplay: David Callaham and Sylvester Stallone
Cinematography: Jeffrey L. Kimball
Music: Brian Tyler

I remember with much affection the testosterone-loaded, adrenaline-pumping, action flicks of the 70s and the 80s. They were full of beefy guys with funny accents, immensely quotable one-liners, bulging biceps and even bigger guns. These men could fight the mafia over breakfast, overthrow an evil dictator over lunch, hunt an alien in the Amazon jungle during dinnertime and even help out a damsel in distress for dessert. As all good things must come to pass, so did the genre and the icons of the era like Stallone, Steven Seagal, Schwarzenegger and others moved onto other things or into obscurity. Then a few years back Stallone made a minor comeback of sorts with the competently made final part of the ‘Rocky’ series and a respectable return to the ‘Rambo’ franchise. Suddenly the man thought the good old days were here again and he set about planning the great return of the 80s style action flick with a wide ensemble cast that had at one point been offered to guys like Wesley Snipes, Kurt Russell, Steven Seagal & Jean Claude Van Damme (What! No Chuck Norris?). Any action fan worth his salt began salivating at the mouth seeing this starcast come together and when news leaked that ‘The Governator’ and ‘Mr. Die Hard’ themselves had landed roles, the excitement couldn’t be held back. At the end of the day Sly finally had to settle on a starcast that combined old and new action stars though honestly the titles in the trailer & the poster make the stars looks bigger than they actually are.

The Expendables are a crew of mercenaries led by the hardened Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone). The crew consists of Barney’s second-in-command and an expert in blades, Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), the martial-arts master, Yin (Jet Li), the heavy-weapons expert, Hale Caesar (Terry Crews), demolitions specialist Toll Road (Randy Couture) & the slightly unhinged sniper, Gunner Jensen (Dolph Lundgren). They are offered an assignment by the enigmatic, Mr. Church (Bruce Willis), to assassinate the dictator, General Garza (David Zayas), of the South American country, Vilena. However Garza is only a puppet to James Munroe (Eric Roberts), a former C.I.A. operative who’s using Vilena as a base to run his drug operations. While on a reconnaissance mission to assess their target, Barney & Lee come across Sandra (Gisele Itie) a local from Vilena, who shows courage in the face of death to help her people inspite of having the opportunity to run away from it all. This sparks the revival of a long dead idealism in Barney and he decides to go help her; the rest of the team follows suit thus setting up a climax overflowing with explosions, chases and gun-battles.

Movies like this never needed a great story, not even a good one, just something that made sense getting from point A to point B while they “blew shit up”. Unfortunately with so many characters, the movie gets far too convoluted for its own good. The bad guys and good guys are clearly separated but you never know clearly why the bad guys are doing their dirty deeds? I mean the first hour or so is heavy with exposition and setups but you learn little of value through this time. Funnily mid-way through the movie there is a conversation between Barney, Lee & Yin where they discuss the elements of the mission and the modus-oprandi of the characters involved. This is the first clear explanation you get and looks like it was put solely for that purpose, almost like someone went, “Damn! It’s been an hour and we still do not make sense. Enough of talking we need to bring on the action so explain the past one hour quickly to the audience.”  

The mention of action brings me to the much promised feature of the movie; the raw and edgy action fight sequences. Sadly this too is a major letdown, though sporadically there is something of interest, most of the promised fights fizzle out as soon as they begin, thanks largely to fast-cut edits which make the action incoherent and unexciting. Plus in the new age of action the old school guns-blazing style is seriously passé though Stallone keeps the violence down and dirty unlike the clean, sanitized versions of today. A few scenes like the one in which Lee & Barney blow up a port from their plane or Hale Caesar’s massive gun going berserk are pure old-school guilty pleasures. Particularly disappointing is Yin’s fight with Gunner which doesn’t showcase any of the star’s moves and the near comatose car-chase that precedes the fight. The climax turns into one loud noisy affair that had me begging for it to get over quickly since it was only a bombardment on my visceral senses without any sort of excitement.

None of the characters are immensely likable not any of the villains utterly despicable which creates a problem of association. Everyone involved is a dead-beat dancer to a familiar tune they have danced to, a thousand times before. Sly Stallone is in his usual action avatar and anyone expecting quality acting beyond the occasional brooding and grunts should looks elsewhere. Statham is in ‘Transporter’ mode again, Li struggles with his dialogues again and seems to play second-fiddle all the time, while Terry Crews & Randy Couture barely get fifteen minutes of screen time. Though having seen Crews in so many comedies lampoon the tough guy image, it’s a little difficult to take him seriously here. Eric Roberts plays yet another greasy slime-ball character which I’m sure he must be applying for a patent soon enough. Dolph Lundgren oddly portrays quite a sympathetic character inspite of being slightly demented. With so much testosterone flowing around the female roles are typecast mostly as damsels-in-distress, be it former-‘Buffy’ regular Charisma Carpenter or Gisele Ities. The one wild-card of the bunch is Mickey Rourke, who has a nice little monologue about “saving one’s soul” mid-way through the movie, though by his looks you’d think it was ‘The Wrestler’ meets Ivan Dvanko (Iron Man 2).

The much hyped cameo scene between the owners of ‘Planet Hollywood’; Stallone, Willis & Schwarzenegger is definitely one of the very few highlights of the film. Some good one-liners especially between Arnold & Sly setup the scene as a breezy walk back into the 80s; though this scene is defiantly not enough to satiate the hunger of most fans.   

Well if the story and action are below-par, are there any other redeemable qualities in the movie? Not really; not a single quotable one-liner, none of the characters are memorable, plus the pacing of the movie is so lethargic that it seems everything including 90% of the budget was saved for the final overblown fifteen minutes. The movie is a colossal waste of an opportunity; It could have been the perfect swansong to the 80s action genre but instead it’s just shy of having gone direct-to-DVD & that’s where I suggest you watch it if your curiosity gets the better of you.  

Final Verdict: The final product like its stars, is a pale shadow of a glorious era gone by.

Grade: C-

 

- Movie Review by Danish Bagdadi

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