Bullets, Explosions, Boredom

Rating: 2/10 (13 September 2010)

Commando, First Blood, Rambo 2+3, Die Hard, Terminator, Scarface, Lethal Weapon. What do all these films have in common? They're all 80's action flicks. My relationship with these films is a very love/hate one. The ones with a plot, action scenes that relate to the story and have a good flow are enjoyable. Then there are the likes of the Rambo sequels which have a non existent or a very generic plot, contain explosions, bullets, random senseless violence and more explosions and just bore me to death. The Expendables was supposed to be a revisit to the past of the 80's action genre. Which route did they take? As you might have guessed by my rating, it's the latter.
The story. I'll try to explain what little of that I understood. A bunch of random dudes (played by popular actors) like to shoot bullets and blow stuff up. There's an evil ruler in Vilena who they have overthrow by doing what they do best i.e destroying everything. Later they find out that there's an evil ex-CIA American who's backing the dictator up (why is he evil? God knows...) so they have to take care of him too.
This movie pretty much throws every single 80's action cliché at your face without being charming or nostalgic. The evil foreign dictator, his daughter who disagrees with his methods, the guy who betrays the team (obvious since the first scene he's gonna do it), the crappy punchlines and catchphrases, the East Asian comedic relief, the token black guy, explosions just pushing people away, bullets never hitting the good guys and many more.
OK, so perhaps you're thinking 'It's a cheesy 80's popcorn action flick. Enjoy it for what it is'. Well, there's a problem here. The action scenes are not exciting at all. They're scattered all over the place. The smallest thing will ignite a long, boring action scene. 'Hey, that guy looked at me funny. Let's kill him and start a huge fight with everyone around us'. And, the creators of this movie decided to jump on the shaking camera bandwagon which is beyond annoying. Just imagine, Jet Li doing martial arts while the camera is shaking like there's no tomorrow. Sounds retarded, no? It worked in the Bourne movies, Shooter and a few others because it added intensity. Why? Because we actually cared for the characters. Over here, they could blow up any second of the film and I wouldn't give a crap.
There's nothing more left to say about this film. The characters are stiff, the story makes no sense, the action is stupid. This can be safely added to the legions of crappy shoot em ups. The only intense thing about the whole movie was the somewhat well composed music.