Ok, here's a serious review of The Expendables. First off, if you're looking for a complex plot with lots of twists, well developed characters, etc, you're obviously watching the wrong movie. The point of the plot and dialog in this movie (and all popcorn action movies really) is to feed us, the watchers, a reasonable explanation for why the stars are in a situation where bullets are flying everywhere, bombs are going off, and chit has generally hit the fan. The Expendables does this just fine. Sure the plot is cliche and very predictable, but that's not why you're seeing the movie is it? (Although the dialog was better than I expected. Not great mind you, but decent and surprisingly funny at times).
No, you're seeing it for the innovative, pulse pounding action and the Expendables delivers this is spades. I mean we get it all. The scene at the beginning in which they butcher a bunch of Somali pirates, Jason Statham vs. a bunch of metro dbags on a basketball court, a good car chase, a pretty gritty hand to hand scene that features Stallone and Statham whooping up on some baddies using knives, guns, and their fists, which is immediately followed by a badass escape-from-the-island sequence. And then there's the ending fight, which is quite literally the coolest action sequence I've ever seen in a movie. There are more guns, explosions, hand-to-hand sequences, and crazy deaths than you can literally imagine. Terry Crews snaps a few necks like they were twigs before pulling out a fully automatic shotgun that might as well have been a howitzer. And believe it or not, Stallone had enough vision as a director to make it entertaining and fresh the whole way through. It wasn't just shot after shot of them firing from the hip and then bad guys dying. It's a creative action sequence.
So yea, hate on The Expendables if you want and say that other films like the Bourne Identity are better action movies because they have a decent plot, but the truth is that Bourne doesn't bring 1/10 of the action firepower to the screen that Stallone did in this one. That's because making a complex, interesting plot takes lots of screen time, which would necessarily mean that there's less time for action. All you get are a few short sequences scattered throughout. That's not Stallone was trying to do and frankly, that's not what his viewers wanted either. We wanted action and high badassery. We wanted to see Statham strafing soldiers with a plane-mounted machine gun. We wanted to see the boys set off enough explosives to blow up an entire palace. We wanted to see Couture vs. Stone Cold.
Stallone delivered the goods. It's the perfect popcorn action film.
[This message has been edited by atfarmer (edited 8/13/2010 4:28p).]
