A Botox of a Movie

Rating: 4/10 (23 August 2010)

Some men buy hot cars when having their mid life crisis, some men make movies. In this horrific homage to the brutal close-up and an America that doesn't exist, Stallone has fashioned a movie that is so thin on substance and excessive on violence, it is at best a fairy tale. This movie could have been titled, Cliché, because that is what it is at every corner. Stallone must have seen the movie, 300 and liked the graphic splattering of blood, because you see it so often in this film you wonder if he's not being slightly ironic. And why he decided close-ups of every aging hero was interesting is nothing less than bewilderment. Yes, Mickey Rourke gives a three minute speech with a close up of nothing but his lips, but the speech is flat, detached, despite the close up (what else?) of tears on Sly's famously botoxed cheek. This is one of those movies we Americans like: we always win, we never get shot and we ALWAYS teach our enemies a lesson. Somewhere in the back of one's mind, we're thinking, they can't even find bin Laden and yet this little group infiltrates and basically destroys a government...if only. But it is really the excessive, meaningless violence that is most troubling. There is no regard for human life in the slightest here. Men are killed on the average of three per second. It's not interesting violence. Its not martial art eloquence, or supported by any kind of romance of violence, its dirty, bogus, badly photographed violence that leaves one running for silence later.