Film Review | The Expendables

The Expendables, as it turns out, is just a film. This is slightly disappointing, given the fanfare with which is marched its way into the modern Hollywood hype machine. The marketing presented an admirably ludicrous concept: helicopter all of the greatest action stars of the 80s and 90s, stop to pick up a sprinkling of new names, then dump them into one of those infamous ‘undisclosed locations’ (usually a politically incorrect caricature of some third world regime) and let them do what they do best: act badly, deliver worse one-liners and cause a generous amount of backside recoil. The fact that Sylvester Stallone not only stars but co-writes and directs this landmark-by-default film just adds another layer of testosterone-justifed abandon.

Then there’s the added poignancy of the project itself. It is a creature out of our time: today’s action heroes have nothing on the vintage stars gathered here. For reasons I suspect only gender studies theorists might be able to provide, the alpha male has oddly fallen out of favour on the silver screen. Robert Downey Jr, Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman et al, delivering action culled from angst-ridden comic book storylines, give us heroes wrecked by self-doubt or, at least, some form of ‘real’ psychological discomfort. It is hardly surprising that, within this milieu, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Vin Diesel – arguably first-class graduates from the Schwarzenegger and Stallone school of brawn-over-brains – failed to really take off as the action demigods they were touted to be (The Rock only survived because he had a plan B: a good sense of comic timing and a reluctance to take himself too seriously).

So The Expendables is also an elegy, a funeral procession we can weep over so that maybe, just maybe, the stars will regale us with an encore. It’s just sad that, beyond the hype – which, considering the beleaguered status of true blue action stars, I would hazard to say was justified – there still needs to be something (won’t really call it a ‘story’) to keep the action scenes held as firmly into place as possible. Sadly, it appears that Stallone thought having all his buddies together behind a camera was enough. But if old age teaches you anything, it’s that at some point, the world stops caring about your inner brand of specialness, and that to recreate any magic, you just have to do some real work.

A group of hard-nosed mercenaries are approached by the shadowy Church (Bruce Willis) to overthrow tyrannical South American dictator General Gaza (David Zayas) and restore order to the troubled island country of Vilena. Stoic soldier of fortune Barney Ross (Stallone) rounds up an unstoppable team that includes former SAS soldier and blade specialist Lee Christmas (Jason Statham); martial arts expert Yin (Jet Li); trigger-happy Hale Caesar (Terry Crews); and cerebral demolitions expert Toll Road (Randy Couture). Having just dispensed with volatile junkie Gunner (Dolph Lundgren), the team travel to Vilena on a reconnaissance mission, where Barney meets their local contact, a cagey guerrilla fighter named Sandra (Giselle Itie). It isn’t long before they discover that their actual target is not General Gaza but James Monroe (Eric Roberts), a former CIA operative who has recently gone rogue. Monroe won’t be easy to get to either, because his hulking bodyguard Paine (Steve Austin) is a force to be reckoned with.

The main problem is that Stallone isn’t a very good director. In fact, he’s only barely competent and even then, only when it comes to the action scenes. True, they are pretty much all that matters. But the fact still remains that he’s directing an ensemble, and when dialogue involving more than three people in the same room feels like a bad school play (with every player patiently taking their ‘turn’ to speak after a pause), you just start to lose interest. It’s important to create some tension and camaraderie, so that the explodey bits will feel all the sweeter, but Stallone doesn’t seem to bother.

This is unfortunate because we know he’s definitely capable of this when he tries: both Rocky and Rambo rose above the action film dross by injecting some humanity. Even the ‘emotional’ hook falls flat: we’re supposed to buy the fact that Barney returns to Vilena because he cares about Sandra, after Mickey Rourke’s Tool – the team’s contact, doubling over as tattoo artist – gives a moving monologue (delivered in superlative acting that simply jars with the rest) about his time in Bosnia, and the scarring effects of giving your humanity away in a time of war. But without the appropriate build-up, this just comes across as tokenistic, something Stallone can scarcely afford, given that the film is already a self-conscious patchwork that provides neither the pleasures of parody nor the zesty reinvention-within-the-homage of a Tarantino.

For fans, it’ll definitely do the job, insofar as providing a nostalgia trip best undertaken tipsy during a cinema outing with the guys. But the promise of a sequel just feels, I don’t know, slightly pathetic? Stallone’s try-hard method of rekindling the love for ‘real man’ action by plucking all of the troops out of retirement is supremely ironic: what could be less manly than safety in numbers?