Review of The Expendables

The Expendables was a love note to Action Movies Past, but not a very well-written one

Well, the action scenes were great. Spectacular even. From a two man brawl to blowing up a castle, Stallone knows how to stage an action scene and make your jaw drop. Unfortunately, that’s about all this movie has going for it. Jason Statham is funny because he’s Jason Statham. But overall I felt just “meh” about this movie. I don’t think I’d even want to rewatch it despite the awesomeness of the action scenes, as good as they were it was still a bit of “been there done that”.

I was very disappointed by the use of CG. I mean, they CGed a knife through a guys back/chest. How hard would it have been to do this as a practical gag? Maybe it would have looked fake, but so did the CGI. But this was set up to be a love note to all the great action movies of the 80s and 90s, there should have been minimal CG used. I noticed it a lot. Lots of practical effects were used to great effect, but the CGI ones overshadowed them by their crappiness.

The Expendables is a group of mercenaries and the movie opens with them taking on some Somali pirates. Good setup, show the men out on a mission so you get an idea of how they roll. But then the main plot of the movie is just another mission, and one that doesn’t feel all that important. They often reference that they’re getting old and that this is their last mission, and so it’s a meaningful one to them. And maybe if this were a series of films where we followed these men over many missions it would be more about the characters and less about the mission. But that didn’t happen, so I was hoping we’d be getting some crazy balls to the walls kind of thing for them to do, one last hurrah. Instead, they go to the jungle, kill some bad guys, come home. It’s like a walk in the park for them. These guys are the baddest mercenary group around, they should have had some spectacular mission to go out on for the audience. As much as this was a love note to the 80s action, it became one itself, and not one of the great ones.

Now, I don’t want to be all negative because this was still enjoyable as something where you can just turn off your brain and be entertained for two hours. The helicopter set piece and the siege at the castle stand out as really awesome bits. Jason Statham taking out Cordelia’s boyfriends friends was cool too, but I think that had everything to do with The Stath. It really wasn’t a bad movie, it was simply “meh”, and I went in with very high expectations, so it just seemed that much worse to me.

6 punches to the face/10
Nick Nickish