The Expendables (2010)
Directed by Sylvester Stallone
Barney Ross leads a band of highly skilled mercenaries including knife enthusiast Lee Christmas, a martial arts expert Yin Yang, heavy weapons specialist Hale Caesar, demolitionist Toll Road, and a loose-cannon sniper Gunner Jensen. When the group is commissioned by the mysterious Mr. Church to assassinate the dictator of a small South American island, Barney and Lee visit the remote locale to scout out their opposition and discover the true nature of the conflict engulfing the city.
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Assembling a who’s who of action stars from the last four decades, cowriter and star Sylvester Stallone directs a bloodbath that borrows liberally from such male-bonding classics as Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, but offers not a whiff of the tragic fatalism and astute critique of machismo that inform those superior dramas.
VIDEO: Watch the trailer Though he's going for a brawny appeal à la The Wild Bunch or The Dirty Dozen, this boring tale of hired guns is more like Rambo With a Posse.
The film is essentially a variation on Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967), in which Stallone plays Barney Ross, the leader of a renegade unit of gun-for-hire mercenaries who journeys with his 2IC, Lee Christmas (the eternally frowning Jason Statham) into a unnamed Latin American enclave to overthrow a dictator.
In essence, “The Expendables” is John Irvin’s “The Dogs of War” (1980) meets Robert Aldrich’s “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), which is a good idea if you don’t have any ideas of your own.
It does what it has to do but it lacks the grit of something like “The Dirty Dozen.”
When he set about making "The Expendables" - his nostalgic throwback to ensemble action films like "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Wild Bunch" - he made some smart choices.
Assembling a who’s who of action stars from the last four decades, cowriter and star Sylvester Stallone directs a bloodbath that borrows liberally from such male-bonding classics as Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, but offers not a whiff of the tragic fatalism and astute critique of machismo that inform those superior dramas.
VIDEO: Watch the trailer Though he's going for a brawny appeal à la The Wild Bunch or The Dirty Dozen, this boring tale of hired guns is more like Rambo With a Posse.
When he set about making "The Expendables" - his nostalgic throwback to ensemble action films like "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Wild Bunch" - he made some smart choices.
And The Expendables could've worked in a Commando meets The Wild Bunch sort of way.
“The Expendables,” while not a perfect movie, is a call back to the classic action films of the seventies and eighties when men were buff, grizzled, hairy and fired off huge guns while also getting the woman in the end, it’s a traditional action film that is also director Sylvester Stallone’s own version of “The Wild Bunch” about old cowboys who have one last stand to reclaim their dignity and self-respect.
In “The Expendables,” Stallone, who also co-wrote the screenplay, plays a character who calls himself Barney Ross, while the aforementioned Mickey Rourke, fresh from his bit as the Russian villain in “Iron Man 2,” plays the all-too-appropriately-named Tool, a character whose entrance is an homage to “Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man” (1991).
The Expendables ends with a knife thrown at the camera, a parting assault on the audience reminiscent of 1903's The Great Train Robbery.
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It's not quite ridiculous enough to be truly great like a "Commando" or a "Red Dawn," but it can stand on its own feet and make you want see another one, assuming you're the kind of person who wanted to see this one.
Harkening back to some 1980s classics such as Predator, Commando and Rambo, the film feels old — but old in a good way, where special effects are live-action stunts and the material is treated seriously with a touch of wryness.
The major studios, with big budgets and movie star mojo, jumped on the action wagon long after it had established a stranglehold on the movie-going habits of the decade (Lethal Weapon,1987; Aliens, 1986; Robocop, 1987; Commando,1985).
…one with Hercules in New York, the other with the soft-core sex picture The Party at Kitty and Stud's (retitled The Italian Stallion after Rocky was a smash) ?
Four decades after Stallone debuted in "The Party at Kitty and Stud's" and the Governator in "Hercules in New York," that might arguably make a more watchable movie than "The Expendables."
And Roberts is backed by the muscle of none other than "Stone Cold" Steve Austin.
"The Expendables," whose title evokes John Wayne's "They Were Expendable," is like "The Losers" cast with the aging elite of the action hero movie boom.
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The popularity of these films made sense: Reagan's post-Vietnam desire to restore U.S. global dominance spiked a resurgence of patriotism, peaking with the success of George H.W. Bush's Operation Desert Storm; offerings like "Rambo" and "Predator" channeled those feelings by turning inexpressive Mr. Universes into symbols of American superiority and battlefield glory.
Harkening back to some 1980s classics such as Predator, Commando and Rambo, the film feels old — but old in a good way, where special effects are live-action stunts and the material is treated seriously with a touch of wryness.
There was one scene where Terry Crews waxed poetic about his uber-gun and it was a pale shadow of Jesse Ventura’s description of “Old Painless” in Predator.
Before “The Expendables” was ever put in to production, director John McTiernan had the foresight to include a roster of cinematic bad asses for a film that involved a bunch of mercenaries battling an unseen hunter in the jungles of Central America.
“We’re here to take control of an island, and to do it fast – because they’re showing Fred Astaire in Swing Time in the community room at dinner at 4pm,” said Stallone.