Pumped up testosterone fest flayed of excitement and fun - a mirthless, surprisingly boring, noisy exercise in self-congratulation

Rating: 4/10 (19 September 2010)

ex·pend·a·ble/ikˈspendabel/Adjective 1. (of an object) Designed to be used only once and then abandoned or destroyed. 2. Of little significance when compared to an overall purpose, and therefore able to be abandoned.
Remember the '80s? Those glory days where masculinity was epitomized (at least in the eyes of Hollywood) by men so enormous and muscular that even their eyes seem to flex, mowing through hordes of enemies using weapons larger than themselves with reckless abandon? Well Sylvester Stallone certainly doesn't have enough faith that you do, attempting to epitomize all the flagrant excesses of a decade in action films into a single bombastic one. So promised the movie's pre-release press at any rate. What such press failed to report was the crushing reality that Stallone may not understand the genre in which he himself proved such a pivotal figure very much at all. Or that his "opus", The Expendables, proves just as bloated, flimsy, drab and soulless a gratuitous action film as any that have crossed multiplexes in many a year.
Granted, any seeking out a film with such a bevy of behemoth-bicep performers for acting, story or emotional resonance would be laughably misguided in the first place. However, the particular joy of the '80s romps Stallone is attempting to steal from is a certain degree of self-effacing acknowledgement of their own ridiculous excesses, whereas The Expendables is played largely straight faced, as if fully buying into its own ludicrous 'epic mythology', despite being founded entirely on a plot so outrageously useless (some mumbled mercenary mission turned 'the woman I just met is cute so I will risk all of our lives to rescue her' escapade) it seems Stallone hacked out his portion of the script after one too many combat rehearsals. Furthermore, the film's pathetic attempts at surgically grafting humour or romance into the hackneyed mess only deepens the grave – hearing Statham and Stallone mope about their respective lady troubles in a helicopter marks one of the lowest points of Hollywood storytelling in ages. While there exist rare smudges of interesting musings on the rather obvious concern of "being too old for this sh*t", largely products of a bygone era (naturally no thought is devoted to the seeming necessity of padding the cast with more recent hard hitters such as Statham or Li), Stallone's film appears to have devoted more time ticking off boxes of "what other action badasses can we cast and subsequently not utilize?" than devoting any real thought to the film beyond the realm of concept.
But surely the action more than compensates for a script that is atrocious even by genre standards? Sadly no. It For a film filled with such an array of explosions, clouds of bullets and flying knives, The Expendables comes across as shockingly boring, with fights largely wrecked by atrocious visual effects (almost every character running or jumping during combat moves excessively quickly and jerkily as if replicated by cheap CGI, and Stallone's film seems sure to take the prize for 'least convincing explosions since the 1980s') too distracting to raucously enjoy. Whenever a fight sequence becomes the least bit engaging, threatening to impress with gruesome, bone crunching gleeful gratuity, it is punctually ruined by some heinous creative misfire (ie: Steve Austin attempting to deliver dialogue), which promptly derails the excitement and brings the audience back to thinking of more synonyms for 'terrible'.
Of course the acting is predictably execrable, with Stallone's decision to largely focus on his own hard-bitten hero as the lead being one of his most woeful creative decisions, harnessing one of his most pathetically nonexistent performances in a career chock full of them, seemingly nearly unable to move his body or face into more than a sour grimace. Sympathizing with such a granite lump of a protagonist proves nigh impossible let alone desirable. Jason Statham is more enjoyable, injecting some cheeky charisma and dazzlingly fluid fighting movements into a film desperate for any high points. However, Jet Li , Randy Couture and Terry Crews feel utterly unnecessary inclusions, their characters reduced to disastrous one note jokes, and Dolph Lundgren is a particularly embarrassing grunting mess as a junkie merc losing his edge. Eric Roberts does his best to make his paper-thin antagonist somewhat entertaining, but Steve Austin proves more hilarious than intimidating as a gruesome enforcer, all the more when he opens his mouth. Giselle Itié and Charisma Carpenter have little to do but yell and be sultry as the film's ignored female presence, and even the much vaunted icon cameos from Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger are too brief and gratuitous to derive any enjoyment from. As such it is up to Mickey Rourke to flagrantly walk away with the film as a cheerfully world-weary tattoo artist. Rising head and shoulders above the general quality on display with an infectious charm and delivering an unexpectedly harrowing monologue, Rourke's performance proves testament to the potential for talent to peek its head out even amidst torrents of inescapable dross.
As incongruous as it might sound to quote Shakespeare in a context where most characters would rather do their speaking through blazing bullets, seldom before has the phrase "full of sound and fury signifying nothing" been so applicable to a major motion picture. There lies a finite line between "so bad it's good" guilty pleasure and "too bad to extract any base line enjoyment from", yet The Expendables proves an expert only at epitomizing the latter, managing to deftly dance around any shred of fun, excitement, irony or bombastic enjoyment whatsoever. Paradoxically, rather than lovably reigniting the '80s (as the year's earlier hit The A-Team achieved), The Expendables articulates everything about why cinematic trends moved away from the boneheaded aesthetics of the decade's action films in the first place.
-4/10