An Action Movie For Action Fans

Rating: 5/10 (9 February 2011)

Without any hesitation at all, I have to say that this is a must see movie for any fan of action movies. It has action in abundance from beginning to end - everything from blazing shootouts to martial arts. For the most part it's a lot of fun, and often moves into overdrive in the action scenes. It even features what I thought was a decent enough performance from Sylvester Stallone as Barney Ross (a name you have to love for this kind of character) who's the leader of a band of apparently special ops mercenaries. Stallone also directed to no great note, but the point of the movie was the action, which is well done. The whole thing opens with the team taking on a group of Somali pirates and leads up to a huge and frankly overdone battle between the team and a group of soldiers they've been hired to do battle with on a Caribbean island. That last battle was overlong to the point of tedious, going on for about 20 minutes with hardly a word of dialogue. That was fun for a few minutes but it should have ended a lot sooner than it did.
The story was strange. The team was supposedly hired to take out this Caribbean dictator and possibly the Americans who fund him. In the end, though (and actually pretty early on) the movie became a "save the girl" story as Barney sets out to rescue the dictator's daughter, who's actually opposed to her father and gets captured and tortured by his soldiers. That seemed to be the wrong direction to take. The movie should have perhaps held its focus on the battle against the evil dictator.
It's fun from an action perspective, an even features a couple of notable and uncredited cameos at the beginning from Bruce Willis as the guy who hires the team and from Arnold Schwarzenegger as a potential rival who loses out on the job. You have to love Stallone's line as Schwarzenegger walks away after losing out on the job: "he wants to be president." It's enjoyable enough and definitely action-packed. It didn't have enough of a consistent storyline for my liking, but real action fans will love it.