The Expendables review

Stallone. Statham. Li. Lundgren. Crews. Couture. 'Stone Cold' Austin. And of course Willis and Schwarzenegger. By now chances are you will have heard about the cast of The Expendables, Sylvester Stallone's homage to the kind of mega violent, anti-pc actioners that enjoyed their hey-day in the early eighties. It is, after all, what the marketing department have focused on in promoting the film; the teaser trailer a stark affair with it's star's names projected against a gleaming silver skull. If the names mean anything to you, and if you remember fondly the films that this so clearly wants to be, then The Expendables is spot on Friday night man-tertainment. Just don't expect an Unforgiven style critique of the genre.

The plot is almost entirely redundant: a team of soldiers for hire, the titular Expendables, are given a suicidal mission to assassinate a South American dictator, seemingly with CIA connections. It's a plot almost ironic in it's simplicity and knowing nods to cliche; the setting of a remote island, the feisty, attractive damsel in distress, the double-crosses sign-posted from a mile away. Some will call it hat-tipping, others will see it as lazy, but the main problem comes from a sluggish first act that fails to keep up the momentum of the opening ten minutes.

So it falls on the cast to make the movie, and for the most part they are successful. Stallone does his familiar grumbly-mumble thing as Expendable in charge Barney Ross, with Statham bouncing off him nicely as knife expert Lee Christmas (seriously). The two form a classic double act, one old one young, and get most of the screen time. Jet Li is let down again by his English skills, but there's no denying the man can fight. Dolph Lundgren gets to have fun as the token 'unpredictable member' of the team, and Randy Couture and Terry Crews round out the team with one-dimensional macho characters. It's a fun group as a whole, but more could have been done to embellish the lesser characters with a bit more personality than 'gun nut' and 'guy in counselling'.

What the film lacks is a truly despicable villain, with neither David Zayas' conflicted General or Eric Roberts' dastardly ex CIA agent being sufficiently odious. Oh for an Alan Rickman type to lift this film into true greatness!

Of course the main draw for this sort of film is the action, and thankfully it's just as bone-crunchingly brutal as hoped for: fight scenes and car chases pepper the movie, but it's in the final half hour that the movie reaches it's potential, with a non-stop barrage of mayhem that will have Commando lovers grinning from ear to ear. Stallone doesn't scrimp on the gore either, with shotgun blasts making limbs evaporate into the air. Fights are a mile away from the highly choreographed scenes made popular by The Matrix and Bourne movies, but are nice and weighty: punches actually look like they hurt. And there is sure to be a drinking game in the future for every time someone has their neck broken.

Then there's that scene, the first on-screen meeting of Stallone, Willis and Governor Ah-nuld, former Planet Hollywood business partners and former 'biggest stars in the world'. Sure the dialogue is delivered with all the grace of a supply truck reversing into Tescos, but there's an undeniable thrill to seeing the old giants together at last, given extra gravitas by Schwarzenegger's six year absence from the big screen (his last film was 2004's Around the World in Eighty Days). Plus there is a killer line that got one of the biggest laughs I've heard from a cinema audience for a long time. An MTV Movie Awards spoof seems wearily inevitable.

The Expendables is a far lighter film than Stallone's most recent, John Rambo, and so removes much of the unpleasant aftertaste associated with watching Americans commit megadeath in a foreign country. However it's undeniable that this is not a film for everyone, and people in search of a more cerebral experience would do better to watch Inception instead. But if you are looking for a rip-roaring, hardcore, old-fashioned man-film, you could do a lot worse than give The Expendables a viewing.