The Expendables (2010)

I can't believe it's been five years since this came out.  I bought it a while back along with both sequels but this is the first time I've sat down and watched it since the theaters.  I have to say, it actually made more sense this time.  Maybe I wasn't paying attention in the theater or maybe not having ambient noise made it easier to process the dialogue, but this came a lot closer to good.  Still a popcorn flick, definitely, but one with a hint that more is going on.  The fight scene edits are still terrible, though.  Original post:  8/21/10

  I took a week off from posting because my favorite cousin, Christy, she of The Experiment, came up to visit. So of course we watched movies. She hadn't seen Kick-Ass, which I had, so I threw that on. Then we decided we hadn't seen nearly enough awesomeness for one day, so we went to see The Expendables.

If you saw the line-up of actors and thought "Ugh, what are they doing? None of those guys has acted in anything since the 80's" you can shut your stupid face! If however, you looked at that same cast list and thought about constructing a giant model of Stallone's head using the mountain of spent blank shells they invariably used in the movie, congratulations! You are an 80's film fan.

Don't go for the plot, which is pretty thin. A group of mercenaries decides to take on a suicide mission in order to reclaim the last little bit of soul they have left. Really, only one of them decides that and the rest just come along for the ride. The editing is a little schizophrenic, and that fucking shaky-cam threatens to ruin the fight scenes, but none of that matters.

The movie is gloriously violent. Eric Roberts is a slimy, sleazy bad guy and you can tell he's the bad guy because he's the only one who looks like he knows what a dry cleaners is. Dolph Lundgren is a drug addict, though it's never mentioned what particular drug he's on. Something that gives you crazy eyes and makes you sweaty.

Meth? Heroin? Estrogen? We don't know.

Jet Li and Jason Statham break their curse of working together. Probably because Li is criminally under-used in this film. That's just a personal opinion, however. If the rest of the gang had just turned him loose on bad guys like a kung-fu Tasmanian Devil and sat back to smoke a cigar, I would have been happy. Of course I would also have been pleased if every line of dialogue had been replaced with more fight scenes. I'm pretty easy in that regard.