The Expendables
Testosterone is necessary for building muscles, aggression and a competitive edge in athletics but it’s not overly necessary in chess tournaments and spelling bees and that should be a clue for you when I say that The Expendables is a testosterone movie.
When you get some of the biggest action flick legends of the last thirty years in one movie together you know that the action is going to sizzling hot and the interaction might gel enough to lift the film above the mundane and into the Valhalla old action flick heroes deserve to live in (a little like Rambo IV or Rocky VI both of which had Stallone in the starring role as does this movie). Alas, with The Expendables this does not happen.
To be fair the action rarely drops below the high octane levels you expect but while the action sequences are slick and eye-poppingly good the plot has enough holes to drive a bus through, too many opportunities to give this film a heart as well as muscle (like explaining The Expendables moniker for example) are missed and when it comes to also packing in a brain beside all that brawn it becomes evident that the testosterone overdose is never going to permit this.
Self-referential in the way the action heroes behave it has the same old-fashioned appeal that streaky bacon commands in the age of calorie-conscious dieters equipped with cholesterol counters: you know you should not really be enjoying this movie but you simply cannot help yourself.
The sad fact is that while this is top-grade eye-candy it does nothing to engage you in any other department and it even lacks the visceral level we have come to expect from the genre thanks to the slickness of the action sequences which rob it of any uncertainty of the outcome (so what if it’s just six men against 200? These are action movie icons dammit!).
Should you go and see it? If you really have nothing better to do on a lazy weekday evening I could think of far stranger ways to spend 103 minutes. Action jocks (and there are many of them everywhere) would not want to miss this one, but if you really feel you’re needed in the culinary class or are going to be missed at the Chess Tournament then I suppose you could get a DVD rental.
