The Expendables Review

Posted this on the online gaming forum I belong to, HDTVArcade. Thought I would post it here.


Well, I got back from the movie a little bit ago, and had time to think about it. I have decided that the movie was not really what I wanted, for several reasons. A little history though.

I am a massive Stallone fan, I have been for years. I grew up watching his stuff on Sunday afternoon, on the local broadcast channel in Houston before it got merged into UPN. He is not a great actor or a good writer, but he always cracked me up, and his movies are very often hilariously violent and good fun. However, before Rambo, the last movie I really liked him in was Cop Land, which capped off his 90s movies for me, most of which I enjoyed on some level. When he announced he was making a new Rambo movie, I was really excited. Considering how awesome it turned out, I was in turn really excited to see The Expendables. Same studio funding it, expectation of brutal violence and lots of fights, and several of my other favorite action stars of the last 20 years, I was pumped.

Initially, everything seemed fine. Stallone knows how to frame a shot, and knows what he wants in the movie. However, the script was not very solid, lots of cheesy lines, and wooden delivery. Most of the lead stars are not really good actors, which made it even worse, all their strengths lay in beating the ever living crap out of waves of bad guys. The only people in the movie who I would consider actors would be Jason Statham, and Mickey Rourke. In their own respective movies, Statham and Rourke have proven themselves to be good actors, especially if they have a good cast and a quality script. Not the case here. Now, none of this would have been a problem if the action was good. And it was....only problem is half the time you could not see anything.

Whenever Stallone was doing dialogue, everything was fine. However, anytime stuff started to blow up, people were getting shot, or someone was getting punched, the movie turned into a quick cut shaky cam fest that was worse than the second and third Bourne films. Now, I actually like those two films a whole lot, and I can deal with the shaky cam in them. Here, I found to to be very frustrating. In all of Stallone's other action films, even if he was not directing, the action has been well framed on a stable camera. Go back and watch the .50 Cal sequence in Rambo again. You can see EVERYTHING. The Expendables, in a comparable sequence near the end of the film, you could tell what was happening for sure, but it was a blurry mess. This was much the case for any of the combat in the movie. You could tell what was happening, but quick cuts, and the shaky cam made it feel like they were covering for sloppy fight choreography, or for actors who could not really fight, but that makes no sense! Randy Couture is a UFC vet, I know for a fact he can fight. Jason Statham has a extensive background in martial arts, he can also handle himself. And Jet Li, well, he needs no introduction at all. I was really hoping to see him go all ninja on some bad guys, but his fight sequences were the worst. Also, whenever they used CGI for something, it was pretty bad. This was especially disappointing after the awesome effect fest that was Rambo.

The best sequence in the movie, which I will go into as little detail as possible, was near the end of the film. It is about 10 minutes long, involves all the major people doing different things, and is pretty awesome. Lots of throats get cut, people get shot, kicked in the face, and blown apart, it was all great fun. But the whole time, I got the feeling that none of the action was seamless. And I know, most action sequences are spliced together from lots of different takes, only the really good ones are shot with no cuts. However it frustrated me that I have seen all three of the people mentioned in the previous paragraph do well choreographed fights, or fight for real, and this time I felt like I did not see anything that had not already been done before, when I could see what was going on.

If you have not figured it out yet, I came away from the movie not too happy. If the action camera work had been better, I could have forgiven the terrible script and predicable plot, and just enjoyed stuff blowing up, and people killing each other. However it was not to be, and I came away very sad.

6/10 (Would have been a 8/10....stupid camera) If you can deal with the camera, I would see it, it is bloody good fun. But sit as far back as possible.