Fresh from revisiting the hugely popular Rocky and Rambo franchises to commercial, if not critical success, Sylvester Stallone has assembled a gargantuan cast for a revival of the ultra-violent gung-ho action movies of the 1980's (or a poorly conceived vanity project, depending on your point of view). Whilst it's commendable to see Stallone attempt to hark back to the days of pre-CGI action-cinema, can a bunch of mostly has-beens really offer anything fresh in a genre that has come leaps and bounds since Stallone toppled the VHS shelves over twenty years ago? Should these relics of cinema consign themselves to retirement, or is there still life in these old dogs after all?
Stallone plays Barney Ross, leader of a rag-tag group of posturing mercenaries who call themselves 'The Expendables', guns-for-hire who take only the most dangerous and foolhardy jobs going. Their mission this time around is to dispose of a crack-pot dictator on a small island, financed by a ruthless businessman who is exploiting the impoverished local population to grow drug crops.
Whilst the draw of The Expendables will undoubtedly be the inspired principal cast, the novelty of seeing them together on the screen wears off very quickly. For a director who harked The Dirty Dozen and The Magnificent Seven as influences, Stallone must have been forgotten his notes on set. There's no real sense of interplay or camaraderie between the characters with anyone apart from Stallone or Statham feeling superfluous, except to drive the miniscule plot forward when needed. It's a real shame to see the majority of the cast reduced to throwaway one-liners, this doesn't feel like an ensemble cast, it just feels like a gimmick.
Although we're not expecting Short Cuts from Stallone, we do expect a solid action film and this is where The Expendables really fails to deliver. The Expendables contains the most sloppily edited action scenes in recent memory. Whilst you can see that an aged Stallone is really trying to give it his all on-screen, the end-result doesn't matter as it is simply impossible to comprehend what exactly is going on. Climatic battles between Lundgren and Li and Stallone and Austin are overblown, poorly shot and quickly cut, watching these titans tear lumps out of each other should have you whooping at the screen, not looking at your watch.
The Expendables would be classed as poor even if it was to straight-to-video, as a summer blockbuster it's nearly unforgivable. Whilst it's been alleged that the shoot was plagued with financial difficulties and on-set injuries, does it really excuse 103 minutes of lousy direction and (astonishingly) a high amount of extremely obvious CGI? Whilst it seems that Stallone has no problem revisiting iconic characters, he appears to have no control when revisiting an entire genre. Whilst it probably won't tarnish Stallone's iconic status, The Expendables should have delivered so much more.
Jonny Dawson
