The Expendables

I was sure looking forward to this one after a week of lying in bed and surprisingly, for all the talk of these great action stars coming together for the first time, it was pretty tame. Maybe my expectation for gore was high going in or maybe they pulled back so they could make a movie all their kids could enjoy.

I was always entertained but never surprised. At first they gave me just the movie I expected and nothing more. It was the exact combination of all their movies collectively cooked in my brain. I knew the flavour coming out before the icing was added and maybe that is what was needed, icing sugar. And then I found the frosting. Not on top of the cake but within.

We get all the jokes, they get all the jokes but we are not in on the same jokes they are. They relied on us to take their screen personalities from their old movies except they never tell us which Jet Li movie I should be watching him from or which Dolph Lungren is up on screen. Sure, it's a small destruction but it matter if they movie wants to succeed in giving the fans what they supposedly came to see. (and that wasn't to see these heroes square off against one another to see who is top dog - that doesn't matter to any hard core action fan - you put in the years and you've earned that acclaim by right)

We came to see them die like heroes on on last suicide mission for a worthy cause all the while giving their betrayer the screwgie for old time sakes. It's too bad that wasn't the movie they made because I would I loved to see that one. I just got lucky and saw an even better movie - a thinking man's action thriller.

We begin with a situation where Mickey Rourke runs a sorta employment industry for mercenaries and hires both Arnie's and Sylvester's team to take care of a third world dictator. Arnie passes on the job so it up to Sly to form a crack mercenary team of his own. Dolf is out because he is on the needle. Jet Li, and Statham are the core of Sly's team.


You would think that they would have a better cover story for going into a third world scouting mission especially when all travellers are treated with suspicion by their paranoid leader but there you have it.

Our boys have been paid to kill a local dictator who is financed by the CIA and that basically gives us our movie. Lots of fast action, cool fight choreography and chase scenes through narrow island streets result. Add to that man on man combat action by people basically in bad moods and you pretty much have this movie figured out.

There is a nice little side part for the most beloved Charisma Carpenter who only seems to get better and better looking as she has gotten older. And for once she is not just window dressing. Just like the dialogue are not just words. Now what I may say sounds crazy but it's really not. This movie is deeper than it has any right to be.


These guys are actually having conversations with each other about others weighty topics besides shooting and killing. They are wondering what it all means, all that shooting and killing and if they are more than just the sum of their deadly skill sets.

In that, and in may other ways, this movie reminded me of those great John Ford and Sam Peckinpah westerns from the 60s. Those movies told stories about men facing a world that was changing around them and no longer had a place in it for them - or at least that was what they thought. In many ways, death was a relief for these hard fighting and hard drinking individuals. Death meant they didn't have to find a way to live another day.

Stallone and Rourke's characters have several such conversations about death and what it all means and how one person or the life of one person can become just about the most important thing there can be. I know, crazy talk to take from an action movie, right?



So for what it was and from what it successfully tried to be, I give this one a huge 'must see'. Seems our boyhood heroes have grown up into the kind of men I can admire.