It's absolutely no contradiction to deem Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables both the year's most entertaining and ridiculous action film. With Stallone not only at the helm but starring and participating in the writing, you're assured of a high body count, rudimentary technique, clumsy characterization, decisively uttered monosyllables and tons of unintentional laughs.
Add a testosterone Hall-of-Fame cast that includes Jason Statham, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, Randy Couture, Terry Crews, the always awful Dolph Lundgren (in peak form) and "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, and the result is something close to Velveeta Valhalla: an incoherent yet high-powered homage to '80s action flicks, combat movies and cheeseball buddy pictures, with bits and pieces borrowed wholesale from Roger Moore's worst 007 films and A-Team outtakes. The plot —which amounts to a joint synopsis of Seven Samurai, The Wild Bunch and the last Rambo movie — has Stallone and his band of aging mercenaries strapping on their shooting irons (and knives, and machine guns, and grenades) to aid an island beset by an army of thugs.
With a mandate to deliver explosions, car chases and fisticuffs, Stallone and crew didn't bother trying to make any of this remotely believable. Who needs believability when you've got former NFL star Crews nailing a Hail Mary pass with an artillery shell? The movie condenses parts of two missions, takes side entries into the worlds of domestic violence, comrade betrayal and parental neglect, and trots out as principal bad guys the twin cartoon figures of a puppet generalissimo (David Zayas) and a renegade former CIA officer (Eric Roberts). For unfunny relief from all the accidental hilarity, there's a spectacularly bad encounter between Stallone and guest Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger, with international man of mystery Bruce Willis smirking in the background. For one brief shining moment, it's just like being at a Planet Hollywood shareholders' meeting.
Along the way, Statham gets to demolish a gang of toughs and the basketball they're using; Li (playing someone named Yin Yang) has a few moments in the sun, and shoulders his short jokes manfully; Lundgren stammers and stomps around; and Crews tries to inject some actual comic acting into the mix. Meanwhile, as the brawny commander, Stallone alternates being barely awake and barely audible: He's harder to understand with a cigar out of his mouth. In trying to squeeze so much beefcake onto the screen, the movie shortchanges a few people — most notably Steve Austin, whose role as a secondary villain proves among the film's more memorable despite its relative brevity. Too bad his climactic title match with UFC upstart Couture is as hard to make out as fish in a shaken aquarium.
Yet unless you've got no sense of humor or simply abhor any and all on-screen depictions of action and violence, it's hard not to root for Stallone's semi-dream team of action heroes — especially for those of us whose familiarity with these actors goes back three decades or more. Stallone the director can't hide their leathery skin or advancing age, and the movie's most entertaining when he doesn't try. Granted, things don't so much end as lurch to a conclusion after 103 minutes, and Rourke's grizzled former comrade (appropriately named "Tool") seems forcibly inserted to provide at least one figure on screen able to do something besides glower, perforate skulls and yell, "Watch out on your left!"
But the movie's slam-bang succession of superhuman deeds performed by actors whose mortal humanity is glaringly apparent makes The Expendables somewhat more than expendable. Amazingly, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal reportedly turned down a chance to be in the cast. Since the movie's box-office blitzkrieg last weekend has already spawned talk of a sequel, here's hoping they come on board for The Expendables Strike Back or Triumph Of The Expendables. When the herd's thinning, the old lions need to stick together.
