"The Expendables" Expends Little Effort

Hey look! Sylvester Stallone is in the same scene as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis! Jet Li is fighting Dolph Lundgren! Mickey Rourke and Jason Statham are throwing knives together! And they gave Terry Crews a really big gun!

The only thing that can really be said for "The Expendables," the new action film patterned after the action spectaculars of the 80s is that it is exceptionally well cast. The gimmick is that you have a collection of famous 80s and 90s action stars together in the same film, along with a couple of the wrestling world's finest and a former member of the NFL. Massive quantities of testosterone are presented on the screen, but unfortunately much of it goes to waste. I've heard fretting that director Sylvester Stallone was unable to secure the appearances of even more older stars like Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal, but it's hard to imagine that it would have been worth their time.

"The Expendables" follows a group of mercenaries led by Barney Ross (Steven Stallone), who take on dirty jobs that require mowing down countless numbers of people with machine guns, blowing up buildings, and elaborately choreographed hand-to-hand combat. Each member of the team gets a few defining characteristics, but are otherwise dependent of the screen personas of the stars portraying them. Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) throws knives and bickers with Ross about women and getting old. He's the only one who gets a whole subplot to himself, trying to woo back an unfaithful girlfriend, Lacy (Charisma Carpenter). Yin Yang (Jet Li) has insecurities about his height and keeps angling for a pay raise. Toll Road (Randy Couture) is a demolition expert who sees a therapist. Hale Caesar (Terry Crews) likes firearms an awful lot.

The crew is hired to disrupt the drug operations of an oily businessman, James Munroe (Eric Roberts), and a corrupt general named Garza (David Zayas), who control the small island nation of Vilena and bring its inhabitants much misery and woe. The only thing in Vilena Ross thinks is worth saving, of course, is their lovely guide Sandra (Gisele Itié). As an added complication, Munroe and Garza also hire Gunnar Jensen (Dolph Lundgren), a former member of Ross's team who we see being let go for excessive brutality in the opening scenes. And that's really all there is to the story. The much-hyped appearances of Willis and Schwarzenegger are limited to a single non-combat scene that lasts all of five minutes. Mickey Rourke plays a tattoo artist guru character, still sporting the same hair from "Iron Man 2," and stays firmly on the sidelines too.

There is nothing in "The Expendables" that we haven't seen done better in any number of similar action films over the years, and it's disappointing to see such a promising team-up of talented actors amount to so little. Stallone seems to want to address more timely themes, including scenes of Somali pirates, a prisoner being waterboarded, and extensive dialogue about battlefield regrets, but none of it ever goes anywhere. The writing is very sub-par, with only Ross's and Statham's characters enjoying any sort of development, and even then it's only perfunctory. With the mix of heavy accents in the cast, however, this was probably a necessity. Nonetheless the villains are bland, all the secondary characters are underused – Steve Austin barely registers as one of the baddies' minions – and most surprisingly, the action scenes are severely underwhelming.

Poorly shot, poorly lit, and difficult to follow, the fight and chase sequences are terrible. Thus the movie fails to deliver on the single most important element that could have made up for all the other deficiencies. There are the requisite explosions of ridiculous size, the weaponry overkill, and the shots of our heroes posing in badass fashion. But when it comes down to it, the only people doing anything interesting onscreen are Jason Statham and Jet Li, who are the two proven action stars still young enough to get into serious fisticuffs without hurting themselves. The credits reveal that Li brought his own fight team and choreographer, though he ends up getting rescued from most of his fights by others. With so many characters to juggle, I guess someone had to play the low man on the totem pole, and it was probably safer to have it be someone who could still take a hit.

There are some pleasures to be had from seeing "The Expendables." The nostalgia factor is very, very high, and it's wonderful to see older stars like Dolph Ludgren and Arnold Schwarzenegger onscreen again. Stallone, however, acquitted himself better in both the latest "Rocky" and "Rambo" films, leaving his role in "The Expendables" feeling extraneous, like a failed revisit to one of his other, more obscure 80s film heroes. The rest of the cast have plenty of better credits to their names, and the team-ups and match-ups between them are brief and unremarkable. Only Li's fights with Lundgren and Statham are any fun, and they're not worth sitting through the entirety of "The Expendables" to see.