I'm here to see action stars fight each other, not speak. Why did Stallone waste my time with plot?!

Rating: 5/10 (17 September 2010)

There is a Japanese movie known as Versus. In Versus, an idiosyncratic collection of characters find their way for various reasons to a forest, in which setting they fight. After they fight, they fight again. Some of them get killed. When they get killed, they come back to life and fight again. Flashbacks show they fought in the past. A lead-out shows they will fight into the future. Versus is full of fights fights fights and more fights. It's kind of pointless but at least memorable and strange for being a purely action movie with only the merest hint of plot.
That is what I thought The Expendables was going to be. It was not. Sylvester Stallone made a strangely bad decision and gave his movie plot and character development. It may be strange to say that plot and character development is a bad choice when making an action movie (many movies do this quite well), but the movie is, after all, sold as a wide collection of meatpacking action actors fighting each other... and there is actually rather little of that, ultimately. Instead most of the movie is watching Stallone and Statham quip with each other. Which would be fine if it weren't for the fact that the lines are delivered, as expected, clunkily. And then you get the fact that some actors, like Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwartzenegger, and Mickey Rourke don't even fight at all--though to be fair to Arnold, he's busy, and to be fair to Rourke's character, he does get a surprisingly amazing monologue near the end of the film.
So, indeed, this movie has a plot. The Expendables are a group of mercenaries who go around the world kicking ass and taking names, and after the success of one mission are contacted by a shady Mr. Church (Willis) to go to South America and depose a dictator. Unfortunately, when they get there, they realize they've been mislead into a situation involving a CIA agent gone rogue and become drug merchant (played by Eric Roberts, certainly running the fun badguy gamut with roles like this and The Dark Knight), who has set up a proxy dictator as misdirection to his scheme. Stallone himself decides to pull out of the too-dangerous mission, but the plight of the dictator's daughter (Giselle Itie) makes him reconsider the lives he's taken and the souls he has yet to save. Meanwhile, Statham pines over his ex-girlfriend gone run off with abusive jerk, Dolph Lundgreen sells out the crew because of an often spoke of but not really shown junky addiction (one gets hints of deleted scenes tying together the drug trade and Lundgreen's character's problem), and the other actors are just kinda there.
That's where the problem lies. By introducing an actual plot with character development, now the characters all have hints of stories and backgrounds that are interesting and left completely unrealized. You have Ying Yang the Jet Li character, who lies about stuff for reasons not really explained, a couple of Expendables in the back crew who have fun conversations but don't really do anything but just be there, and only a couple real one-on-one battles of any "What would happen if this guy faced this guy?" significance (the best one being Li versus Lundgreen). Eric Roberts' crew has Steve Austin and some other guy. Literally, that is all. C'mon, the set up is easy, split the cast half and half as two "crews" and then have the usual double-crosses to mix things up a bit! Instead we have just enough of a plot to wish it were more fully developed, and too much to fit in all of the head-on-head spectacles we came to the theatre in the first place to see; we have enough acting to see how the acting is lacking, and not enough to really test or expand the audience's appreciation for the capabilities of these names to act. You also get strange and ill-fitted morality like how "We don't kill that way" (but apparently, killing other ways is more justifiable or something--it's worth debating if it were, you know, actually discussed).
Yes. Nobody's going into this movie expecting anything brilliant. However, they are going in expecting some mad action facedowns from popular and well known action heroes of yesteryear, and the movie is relatively lacking on this point because the movie wastes time doing something that nobody expects will be particularly brilliant.
Or, to put it shortly, instead of watching Jason Statham fight a variety of other action stars to settle those "What would happen if Jason Statham fought _____" bets, we're actually supposed to sit through him trying to make us believe he's feeling sad about a breakup.
At least it showcases Mickey Rourkes' mad thespian skills. And the action scenes that do occur are quite actiony and action filled, with lots of action, as it should be.
--PolarisDiB