BETRAYED: By ‘The Expendables’ [Review]

In theaters everywhere Millennium Films Directed by Sylvester Stallone Starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, David Zayas Rating: Sucks out of 5

This review contains massive spoilers.

Don’t piss on my back and tell me it’s raining. The Expendables is an inexcusable mess. This movie that I had been looking forward to (with a mind that knew it could be a train wreck) has to be one of the biggest filmmaking turds that I have seen in a long time (The Phantom Menace level here).

You know the build up: our loved action stars of yesteryear coming together for one huge, manly, testosterone driven bloodbath. What I watched, however, was not that, not rain nor piss, but rather the steady drip from a Botox strained cheek that exploded. Sly, Lundren, and Rouke are so hyped up on Botox that it’s a wonder they could talk. But really, I wouldn’t care about that if the goods were delivered and they were not.

This is not the dream team of beloved action stars of yesteryear. The only real star of yesteryear with any time on screen is Stallone. It’s widely known that Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger* have cameos only – and that’s fine. Willis’ star has faded but he is still more relevant that Sly, Lundgren, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Terry Crews, Eric Roberts, and Randy Couture. Schwarzenegger is a Governor and at least a decade past his ability to play a believable badass. Small roles for those two are appropriate.

*Let’s take a moment to discuss that scene. It is so forced, contrived, and awkward that it removed itself from the movie’s continuity. The constant “comedic” dialog between rivals Sly and Schwarzenegger is ridiculous and a little unnecessarily vulgar. I don’t care about vulgarity or cussing for the most part – I’m never offended by just words – but the exchange went something like:

Stallone quip…

Arnold quip…

Stallone quip…

Arnold quip…

Willis: “Are you two gonna sucks each other’s dicks next?”

Me: Where did that come from?

The Expendables has a by-the-numbers plot that can be described easily. Barney Ross (Stallone) is the leader of a mercenary group made up of a mixture of geriatric badasses along with Jason Statham, Jet Li, Randy Couture, and Terry Crews. The movie opens on a cargo ship with a few scenes of some Very Bad Men, presumably those Somalia pirates we’ve heard so much about, preparing to saw the heads off of some poor sods they are holding hostage if they do not get their ransom money. The hostages are apparently employees of a big corporation somewhere.

The Expendables, employed by the corporation, show up and have the money, but the pirates are greedy and demand more cash on the spot. The Expendables are just some good ol’ boys who are good at shooting guns. They turn out their pockets and only come up with lent. Dolph Lundgren then takes matters in his own hands. Ivan Drago is hardly recognizable as a long-banged hipseter; he rears up, screams something incomprehensible, and suddenly one of the pirates is blown in half with a red-pixilated spray of something that may or may not have supposed to been blood.

Buckets of pixels are soon spilled as the Expendables tear through the pirates with thousands of bullets, rockets, knives, and probably a few rocks all dispensed from the high ground into the throng of pirates and hostages. When the smoke clears most of the pirates are dead and, miraculously, not a single hostage injured.

A problem creeps up when Ivan Drago loses his grip on how to be a Good Mercenary and decides to hang himself a pirate (why not keelhaul? They’re on a boat). Jet Li stops him (because that’s not the way The Expendables roll) in a truly uninspired fight. Drago is chastised and also handcuffed with zip chords when the merc group boards their good ol’ private retro military airplane. Some cute and completely fucking imbecilic dialog follows with multitude of shots of Stallone displaying a wry smile and shaking his head at the antics of his boys. THIS IS AN IMPORTANT PLOT POINT as Tom would say in his Top Chef recaps.

Once back stateside, Drago is fired from the team and twenty good minutes are wasted on a ridiculous love interest side-plot for Statham. Rourke shows up looking strangely like Whiplash and mugs his way through a few decent scenes. He manages to talk even with a face that looks like it was exposed to an angry hive of mutant bees. If you look closely at Rourke’s exposed lower abdomen, it appears he is about to give birth to a traffic cone.

Stallone then goes to meet Willis who wants to hire the Expendables for a job. That scene is described above.

Stallone and Statham go to recon their new job. The action is to take place on a little Latin island with a made up name in the best tradition of MacGuyver and Iron Eagle. They meet their contact who also happens to be the island’s resident dictator’s daughter. The Latin dictator is General Lt. Angel Batista (David Zayas – Dexter).  He is a puppet for an ex CIA man who wants to up the drug trade ante in the made-up Latin American Islands market. The ex CIA man is played by the always average Eric Roberts. He is one of the best actors in the film. But we’re not here for acting, right? We’re here to see people get bloody and watch shit explode. How many words have I typed since anything like that happened?

Well, it happens here in one of the only truly excellent sequences of action in the film. The foray into Batista’s fiefdom ends with Sly and Statham having to escape with tons of shit blowing up, more shit catching fire, and swimming pools of red pixels.

Sly and Statham return home and decide to call off the whole mission. Some pieces of the puzzle fell into place while they were on the made up Latin American Island (and maybe while I was in the bathroom), the most important of those pieces being that Bruce Willis is obviously a representative of the CIA and is hiring Sly’s team to do their dirty work. Contrary to what we have learned in every other mercenary exploitation film, the CIA hiring mercenaries is considered strange. So they back off.

But they don’t. Sly has a several minute heart-to-heart with Whiplash who tells him some muddled and senseless story similar to one that I heard from a drunken homeless man earlier today. It was all really very sad and it convinces Stallone to go back to the made up Latin American Island because General Lt. Batista’s daughter is Good People and she is certainly in trouble with daddy and Eric Roberts by now (her cover being blown during the two Expendables earlier escape).

Some more moronic supposedly funny banter takes place next mostly focusing on Jet Li who looks like his teeth were pulled to get him to agree to do this film. Many more cuts to Stallone doing the head-shaking-wry-smile routine. Ahh, papa just doesn’t know what to do with these boys. Sigh. Boys will be boys.

Shoot me.

Stallone and Li leave in Sly’s super sweet retro custom tweaked vintage low-rider pick-up truck. Ivan Drago shows back up with blond bangs still in his eyes. He is a bad guy now after having conferred with Batista and Roberts. He runs Sly and Li off the road and into a warehouse. Another insipid fight between Li and Drago takes place before Stallone saves Jet Li’s scrawny ass by shooting Drago “two inches above the heart.” Before Drago dies, he spills the beans on his heel turn and Stallone finds out where the bad guys are on the made up Latin American Island and that it is likely that they already have the girl.

Next the Expendables invade the stronghold of the bad guys and the action is fast, furious, and

to follow. Didn’t follow that? Me either. That spastic, fast cutting action is something else, right?! All I know is that Sly and Stone Cold Steve Austin’s fight had so many wrestling maneuvers that I expected Austin to break out the Stunner at any time. Elsewhere, the head-scissors take down (is that right, Tom?) is used about 37 times. It seems that it would be a bad maneuver in fights where guns and knives are present. I know if you wrap your legs around my head (:randy:), you’re likely to get stabbed in the ass with a knife (assuming the former is something I didn’t want and I had the latter handy). I think I spied at least one person use “the triangle defense” from the MMA ranks as well.

Terry Crews shows that he was severely underused as he actually comes off as being one of the least expendable of the Expendables.

Steve Austin dies in a blaze of what looks like CGI Magefire.

Sly shoots Roberts (who earlier betrayed and killed General Lt. Batista) as Statham stabs him and the mission is a success with the two sharing equal credit for the kill – because that’s important.

Back home at The Expendables hideout (a tattoo parlor owned by Whiplash), the gang is all together having a few drinks, including the resurrected Ivan Drago who reappears like Kenny is next week’s South Park episode (do they still do that?). He’s a good guy again and he and Li trade some truly unfunny verbal jabs. This being after he betrayed the group, tried to kill them, and died. Sly does some more wry smile-filled head shaking at these boys of his.

The movie ends.

Wait! Don’t shoot me now, the movie is over.

Some of the many things that did not work:

• Lundgren plays a tweaked out metrosexual meth-head (or something) with long blond bangs in his eyes. He likes to call people “insect” and other endearments, but it never really fits. Seeing Lundren trying to stretch his acting chops to be a giant Chris Martin is puzzling.
• One scene with Lundgren as a heel had him giving The Expendables up to Roberts and Batista. In the scene one of Robert’s guards calls Lundgren “Pretty Boy.” Then Austin starts harassing Lundgren and Lundgren responds by saying, “Bring it on Pretty Boy,” or something like that. Oooh, I’m rubber and you’re glue!
• Jet Li, at 47, looks older than everyone else in the cast. Sly is 64! Lundgren 52, Roberts 54, and Rourke 57. Look, Jet Li is freaking Asian who, to Westerners, always appear to age gracefully. He’s almost 20 years younger than Stallone and looked older. Sly, man, it is ok to get old. Look at Clint (who would have really classed this joint up).
• Jet Li, the most dynamic fighter of the bunch, is criminally underused.

More things that did not work:

• CGI blood. Like all of it. Every splatter, every cut, every bullet hit – all of it is CGI – no practical effects at all. It reminds me of the CGI fires in the also inexcusably bad Escape from LA.
• The CGI explosions and fires are terrible. It reminds me of the CGI fires in the also inexcusably bad Escape from LA.
• Jason Statham’s love interest plot sucked up valuable screen time from more shit blowing up or even some villain development. All of his mess does provide a payoff featuring one of the few fist pumping hand-to-hand fight scenes in the movie with Statham taking out his love interest’s new flame and a half dozen of his good friends. Ok, great – it was a cool scene. However, the chick should have been his little sister or something so he could beat the dude up without the need of the love angle which was out of place and not well executed. The whole reason of the fight is because the new flame is an abusive prick. It would have worked – and better – my way.
• Randy Couture is a terrible actor. Has he ever even acted before? His performance is reminiscent of Rampage Jackson’s work as B.A. in The A-Team earlier this year.

Yet more things that didn’t work:

• The fast cut camera work in the fight scenes during the finale. You seriously can’t tell what the hell is happening. None of the fights have continuity because of this. I wish it would have focused a little more time between cuts or even stagger the fights. This ending was written like it was supposed to be like The Dirty Dozen or The Seven Samurai, but coherency in the cinematography was not there.
• In an early scene with Rourke, Stallone saddles up to have his Expendables tattoo completed. It’s just missing the last couple letters. Stallone takes off his shirt, Rourke grabs a random needle that’s laying around and, without stenciling or sterilizing, finishes the last two letters in about six seconds. Come on! Barney Ross is lucky he didn’t die of Hepatitis before completing the mission. That is some fast work there too.

This is not a throwback 80s style action extravaganza. It’s ultra-modern with fake gallons of fake pixilated blood, shoddy action cinematography, too much flotsam in the plot, and an egocentric director who was unable to deliver what he promised.

The Expendables sucks.