To many Action Heroes fail to boil the Broth...

Rating: 4/10 (27 August 2010)

Unfortunately this movie failed to deliver for me... I was never expecting too much intellectually from a popcorn guzzling title such as this, but the casting did sound promising. The lineup was cram packed with some of my favourite action heroes, past and present. I can usually leave my brain at the door and enjoy such movies because I can suspend with my disbelief, but even realising the obvious, there were just too many elements that irritated me about this feature.
Camera shake was overly used to supposedly heighten tension. But with a cast like Jet Li and Jason Statham (and that's not to say the rest of the cast couldn't throw a convincing punch or two!), I wanted to see a decent martial arts battle without the scene being intermittently cut, chopped and shook to death. It is an action movie after all... I want to SEE the action! Indeed, the editing of the movie in general was pretty sloppy. I didn't enjoy the pacing – it felt too rushed, too choppy, too muddled.
Scripting was another big issue. Okay, I know we don't want to dwell on a love plot too long, but the motivation of Stallone's character to return to the island... well, lets just say it felt weak at best. I did enjoy Mickey Rourke's little story of regret. Indeed Rourke's performance surprisingly was the best of all, considering how short his on screen time was. His story of regret nearly had me there! But I needed a little more from Stallone to be convinced. In the end of the day, action movie or not, motivation needs to be felt, described, or at least explained.
Lets be honest, the storyline was awful! Okay once again, it being a Stallone movie I was not expecting the plot to be challenging, but was it too much to expect a movie in the tradition of the 'mission movie'? After all, that seemed to be premise and vein on which the movie was built. It's suggested in the title 'The Expendables', a movie about a group of mercenary muscle men, sent in to do the jobs that others won't. Stallone should have done his research. He should have watched the classics like, The Dirty Dozen, or Where Eagles Dare... would it have been to ask too much to try create a little tension? Of course we all know things are going to go horribly wrong at one point or another, but lets just pretend that a proper plan had been forged before our die hards have to resort to out and out carnage.
Lastly, the one thing that attracted me to the movie in the first place -the fact that there were so many action heroes involved- ultimately led the movie to fail. It was tatty and unpolished. It's clear to me that last minute scenes were created and the plot mashed around haphazardly just to fit cameos in as more mega-stars came on board the project. The scene in the church for example, with Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schawarzenegger felt totally out of place. Acting wise It was as if they were playing but parodies of themselves. Plot wise, it made little contextual sense. Schawarzenegger's character did not further the plot any way, other then they wanted to have Schawarzenegger and Stallone on screen together. Okay, bringing in the outside persona of the actor to create a little laugh within the context of the movie can be fun, but all too often the movie relied on these cheap gags. To me, it seemed to be a movie created more for the impressive trailer rather then for the sake of a movie in itself. Even the movie Machete managed to make a better narrative out of its fake trailer!
The movie seemed to really struggle with which characters to focus upon. It seemed to take primary focus around the two characters played by Stallone and Statham, yet desperately tried to scribble in one too many of the other peripheral characters, again perhaps as big names came on board. The result was, I felt we got to half know a lot of characters we really cared little about. In this way Stallone really failed to fix the focus correctly. Tell us the story of the team or tell us the story of the main two characters, but don't just half tell either!
...a movie that held promise, was nearly there in spots, but did not quite manage in its final delivery.