Worse, Stallone is a terrible director, who constantly shoots scenes in close-up – so much so that you feel as if you’re watching the movie through binoculars. No one goes to “The Expendables” expecting Shakespeare, but the film’s script is so thin and flimsy the entire enterprise feels as if it’s built out of hype and marketing. Lundgren is a loose cannon, and Rourke is haunted by a woman he once had a chance to save but didn’t. There are two extended set pieces – one featuring Stallone and Statham raining hell from their plane, the other a tunnel battle in which everyone gets to kick butt – that are passable, at least by Golan-Globus standards.īut you also get cheesy CGI buildings collapsing, an obviously animated wall of fire, some muddled plotting (“Here’s what I think is happening,” Stallone says at mid-film before explaining everything that’s transpired) and truly execrable characterizations. At least Stallone loves his gore and explosions, so you get to bask in the glory of bodies blown in half, knives jabbed into faces and some enormous fireballs. The heroes waltz in and out of the bad guys’ lair with relative ease, considering they’re squaring off against an entire “army” (I don’t need a movie like “The Expendables” to be plausible, but there is a limit). Evil) who is the muscle behind a military uprising in a Latin American country where everyone speaks in broken English (“Everything bad that has happened, you bring!”) and no one can hit a moving target. Instead, we get a nonsensical plot about a drug kingpin (Eric Roberts, sneering like Dr. That scene, which the trailer already spoiled, is the high point of “The Expendables” – a tantalizing, too-brief glimpse at how much fun the movie could have been. “The Expendables” is simply a crummy, nonsensical picture made by a faded movie star trying to regain some box-office luster, with a bored Mickey Rourke popping in now and then to deliver a dramatic monologue and a moment in which Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis appear together for the first time – for all of two minutes. The movie had been billed as a throwback to the action flicks of the 1980s – the decade the genre exploded along with the advent of home video – but that pitch turns out to be false advertising. But the auteur has no excuse with “The Expendables,” which includes the irritating opening credit “A Film by Sylvester Stallone.” The actor directed and wrote (with David Callaham) this ensemble shoot-’em-up about a gang of likable mercenaries hired for jobs even the CIA won’t touch.
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