The Expendables is Sylvester Stallone’s attempt to revive the action-hero franchise that he personally feels has been in limbo for many years. If you haven’t had a chance to check out John Rambo, the fourth installment into the Rambo movie franchise, then The Expendables is a great place to start; or rather restart.
An action film is hardly ever driven by the plot, it’s usually character driven; in The Expendables we have so many characters to deal with it pays knowing a thing or two about schizophrenia, which I do; but that is for another blog at another time.
Sylvester Stallone is Barney Ross, the obvious leader of a band of close-knit mercenaries. A private handler asks them to overthrow the dictator of a South American island – Vilena, but after a visit to the island with his closest merc-partner Lee Christmas (Jason Statham; Transporter, London), they both feel that the job is far too cost-heavy to pull off, but after a bout with his conscience and an eye-opening lecture from his closest confidante, AND finding out that the real fiend depriving the island of positive resources is an ex-CIA agent – James Munroe (Eric Roberts; Dark Knight, Best of the Best), Barney knows what he must do. However, it’s not easy being Barney’s friend and the rest of The Expendables decide to tag along.
Action movies are expected to be plot-simple: good guy goes after bad guy, but with the evolution of multi-media and not necessarily human intelligence, movie-goers have come to realize that most of the time the line between right and wrong is not so straight and a little blurry. That’s the picture Stallone provides with The Expendables. Christmas provides a nice secondary plot because he’s the nice guy with a great but impatient love interest, and love and kill-efficiency is what Christmas and Barney keep barking at each other about, but even after that there is a statement about brotherhood, honor, and honesty; which is tested by the rest of the crew in regards to the size of their cut come payday, like Yin Yang (Jet Li) and simply by the team’s trust in one member to do their job correctly, like the team trusts in Gunner (Dolph Lundgren; Rocky IV, Masters of the Universe) – a soldier addicted to drugs.
To me (danger, danger), The Expendables is the evolution of the action film. Just like Harold Ramis and his party crew wanted to put heart into low brow comedy with Caddy Shack which Judd Appatow and his crew modified for today’s audiences, Sylvester Stallone continues to evolve the action film genre.
When Bruce Willis’ Die Hard premiered, no one took his simple-man-physique, blue collar attitude seriously as an action hero compared to the likes of Schwarzenegger's Dillon in Predator or Stallone's Cobra, but Die Hard became a success. From then on action heroes were no longer off-limits to being evaluated as human beings. The Expendables looks at each and every mercenary as being human. Human beings have faults, they have secrets that they don’t want to share with loved ones; they have fetishes that they feel would be considered disgraceful if anyone emotionally-close knew about it. As a co-writer and director, Sylvester Stallone does an excellent job of presenting these kinks about tough guys to the public. As a director, he falls short on the actual action sequences.
Stallone chooses to go with the close-up, shaky-cam effect that annoys and nauseates most of the movie going public, which is a gigantic disappointment for me, personally. I had two dream-matches occur during this movie: Dolph Lundgren vs. Jet Li and Steve Austin vs. Randy Couture, and even a surprise dream match; Steve Austin vs. Sylvester Stallone – but during every action sequence throughout the film, Stallone went with a close-up, shaky-camera effect which deteriorated the action. I want to know who is punching whom, whom is kicking, flipping, cracking the bones of whom, and with the shaky-cam technique I couldn’t decipher the antagonist from the protagonist.
I am glad to say that this discrepancy is my only complaint against The Expendables. It brought back that feeling of the common man succeeding against uncommon odds; it brought to the silver screen some of my most respected fighters, and most of all it made these modern day barbarians relatable.
The Expendables doesn’t pretend to be anything it was advertised to be. There’s action, there’s A LOT of blood (sadly, it’s mostly CGI blood), there’s plenty of carnage, tons of explosions, but you’re never left without the feeling that these men are not human beings; that they don’t have feelings, families, or something just worth fighting for, and during these internet-spawned, self-righteous, ignorant, foolish, selfish times – I’m glad to know that there are people who still believe in respect and honor. I know it’s only a movie, but that goes to show the power of cinema; it can give you hope.
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