Just Garbage

Rating: 1/10 (20 August 2010)

Really. Like many other reviewers, I had high hopes for this movie. I thought it would be in the tradition of Space Cowboys, the old pros come back for one more shot at the bad guys. But it quickly just degraded into typical shoot-em-up crap. Spoiler: The scene with Schwarzenegger is a complete rip-off - about a minute long, no action, has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.
About 65% of the movie is people fighting or shooting at each other or blowing things up, and it really did just get boring. The execution wasn't even that good - fight scenes had obviously sped-up footage that looked like those old dinosaur movies, sound effects were bad (every punch had the same fake thud), and the characters looked like they were in pain - not from the bullets which never touched them, but from the awful plot. Poor Jet Li complained the whole way through that he wasn't getting enough money - he was practically begging to be let out of his contract go so he could go work on something better - even a commercial.
Mickey Rourke was good but didn't have much of a part, or any purpose for being there. Also that 250-round per minute shotgun thing, going boom-boom-boom, was funny every time. But not worth the 9 bucks and two hours of sitting through another ridiculous re-hashing of the rogue-CIA-guy and "small band of mercenaries invades and overruns tiny central American dictatorship" story.
I was expecting a good poignant aging-action-hero movie, or maybe a comedy, but this was just laughably bad. It's baffling how this could be the number 1 movie, unless a lot of people were sucked in by the hype, like I was. Also the 7-point-something rating on IMDb has got to be inflated - rottentomatoes gives it a 42% which is more like it.
When I heard that Seagal and Van Damme turned down roles in this film, I thought it was because they were too full of themselves. But now I realize it's because they knew it was crap.