Review:
The Expendables

When Sylvester Stallone set out to make the ultimate action movie, he didn’t muck about with the casting. If you know anything about the movie, it’s because someone has excitedly rattled off the film’s pitch-perfect cast list to you. Hell, even the promotional material seizes the fact that this movie is a list of the greatest action stars of all time (minus, you know, Van Damme, Segal and Kurt Russell) and while the result isn’t quite as epic as its actors, it’s still an enjoyably silly ride.

Barney Ross (Stallone) is the leader of a group of mercenaries known as The Expendables (Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews and Randy Couture), a clandestine unit that specialises completing the toughest missions. Ross is put onto a new mission by retired Expendable Tool (Mickey Rourke), a job arranged by the mysterious Mr Church (Bruce Willis). It seems simple – travel to the South American island of Vilena and overthrow the ruthless military dictatorship of General Garza (David Zayas).

However, nothing is ever that clear-cut and before you can say ‘puppet president’, the team discover a shadowy figure in the guise of James Monroe (Eric Roberts), a man who has an even larger shadow behind him (Steve Austin). Not only that, but Gunnar (Lundgren) is an unreliable junkie and before long The Expendables find themselves going to war.

The best way to describe the film is to ignore the previous paragraphs and replace them with white noise. There is a plot, but it’s merely window dressing for the action. There are characters, but it’s just a bunch of action stars with dialogue stapled to them. It’s a true, hardcore, old-school action flick – guns fire, bad guys die and shit blows up. The funny thing is that it’s totally okay.

The action is well-staged and reasonably well-directed, although there are maybe too many crash cuts in the more intense scenes. The sound effects are ten times louder than in any other film, ensuring that each single punch lands with a thump that rattles the eardrums. The guns are big and ridiculous and the dialogue is so absurdly macho that repeating a single line of it is almost guaranteed to increase the speaker’s muscle mass. In short, it’s the kind of film that cinema has been missing for over ten years.