The Expendables (2010)

Mickey Rourke is the best thing about this movie, and I’m getting used to being able to say that.  Otherwise, though, we’ve got next to nothing to admire: an appalling script, unimpressive and startlingly amoral action sequences, very poor performances from actors not even known for being master thespians in the first place, a stupid overriding concept, a ridiculous conclusion, and some of the worst military theory I’ve ever encountered in any venue.  When the only good things one can think to say about a movie are that there are no gratuitous sex scenes and at least it isn’t very long, it’s a pretty good indication that some sort of negative plateau has been achieved.

The Expendables is among the very worst movies ever made, at least in terms of wide releases; under no circumstances should you watch it.  2/10

This review will contain spoilers, not that anything could spoil a film that has nothing going for it in the first place.

I have seen precisely two films in my life for which the film’s very title was a lie.  M. Knight Shyamalan’s notoriously-awful The Happening was the first; The Expendables is the second.  For a shadowy special-ops team bearing the name in question, there’s sure a pretty heavy emphasis on not having a single one of them die.  That’s not to say that nobody dies in this movie; oh, sir, far from it.  They die by the hundreds.  Every single bad guy, and all their henchmen.  A country’s entire military establishment is wiped out by a five-man holocaust.  But those five men?  Why, they’re all conspicuously alive by the time the credits roll.  There’s even a sixth who appears to die early on and is revealed to be just fine shortly before the thing ends.  They don’t even do the decent thing and make his survival the subject of some heroic reveal, saving the day at the last moment.  No, that’s not how The Expendables rolls; he’s just there after everything’s been taken care of, calmly smoking a cigarette.  “How’s it feel to be back from the dead?” they ask him.  He shrugs.  I’m right there with you, man.

I can’t really bring myself to describe the plot, so this is just coming straight from IMDB:

Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) leads the “Expendables”, a band of highly skilled mercenaries including knife enthusiast Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), martial arts expert Yin Yang (Jet Li), heavy weapons specialist Hale Caesar (Terry Crews), demolitionist Toll Road (Randy Couture) and loose-cannon sniper Gunner Jensen (Dolph Lundgren). When the group is commissioned by the mysterious Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) to assassinate the merciless dictator (David Zayas) of a small South American island, Barney and Lee head to the remote locale to scout out their opposition. Once there, they meet with local rebel Sandra (Giselle Itié) and discover the true nature of the conflict engulfing the city. When they escape the island and Sandra stays behind, Ross must choose to either walk away and save his own life – or attempt a suicidal rescue mission that might just save his soul.

All well and good.  What it doesn’t tell you is that the man really pulling the strings on that island is an ex-CIA agent named Munroe (Eric Roberts, playing a dastardly villain – again), who’s financing General Garza’s regime in exchange for cocaine concessions.  He’s accompanied by a pretty tall guy (Steve Austin), who has no moral reservations about anything.

It all proceeds pretty much as you might think.  Along the way there are some car chases and fistfights and stuff (and two more-interesting subplots involving Jason Statham’s character, on one hand, and Mickey Rourke’s [who wasn't mentioned in that summary above], on the other), but really it’s all just leading up to the necessary massacre at Garza’s compound.  The stakes are never all that high; if the Expendables fail in their mission, that small South American island will continue to be pretty much the same as many other South American countries and things certainly won’t get any worse than they were before the team showed up.  Even when it seems like the bad guys have the drop on Our Heroes, we can always rely on those villainous swine to get so caught up in taunting them with their supremacy that a way out will swiftly present itself.

The trouble with Mickey Rourke in this thing is that he’s only around very briefly.  Serving as the proprietor of an ill-defined motorcycle/tattoo shop back in the US – and as a former member of the team – he’s the only one in the film who seems to express any sort of reservations over the absurdity of what he and his colleagues have been doing for the last few decades.  He quit, in the end, because of how badly his work was getting to him; his unwillingness to save a life in Bosnia was enough to push him over the edge where his willingness to end hundreds (thousands?) was just a matter of course.  It’s a small distinction, but a crucial one.  If I can applaud the film at all, I can do so for that.

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter; his time on screen is so short that he’s just a one-note character in a sea of half-notes.  Attempts are made to make it seem like these man have a long shared history and an easy camaraderie, but it never really works.  There’s too little time.  They’re too often blowing things up or driving really fast or punching holes through guys  with their fists (alright, that doesn’t actually happen, but it should have) for their wistful conversations and banter to amount to much.  Oh, that banter; good grief is it awful.  Couture tenderly defends the extensive deformity of his ear, and it just goes on forever.  Crews delivers an apparently-significant catchphrase after killing about forty guys at once; “y’all best remember this at Christmas!”  What could it possibly mean?  The film concludes with Statham reciting a very, very poor limerick; the teams’ smiles and groans suggest that he’s known for doing this, but there was nothing in the film up to that point to suggest that he ever did.

It’s all just pitiful stuff.  But it’s not what made me angry.

Those who’ve been reading this blog recently – and who are aware of the work I’m doing for my dissertation – will know that I’m currently steeped in matters of military theory, strategy, war writing and so on.  Fictional paramilitary forces like the Expendables are interesting in what they offer to these fields, given that they remove the need for grand strategy and lines of command, replacing them instead with rapid-response, intuition, personalized combat styles and so on.  Sometimes this can be done pretty well (see something like The Guns of Navarone), but most of the time it’s not credible at all.

The Expendables has taken incredibility and raised it to a zenith I never thought I’d see reached.  How do I hate it?  Let me count the ways:

- First – and this is a complaint we might level at plenty of action movies – it is not as easy to kill a man, much less hundreds of men, as they’re making it seem.  The absurdly high body count of The Expendables relies mostly on the complete ineptitude of the enemy being engaged rather than any legitimate meeting of forces.

- Pursuant to that, the nature of the enemy force in this film is just astoundingly dumb.  Much is made of their danger, competence, and so on – a hand-picked private army, the best of the best, etc. – but when it comes right down to it they behave with about as much sense of credible battle doctrine as a gaggle of peasants shipped straight from the steppes.  Hell, the peasants might at least act with some sense of self-preservation; it appears that one of the qualifications necessary when being chosen for Garza’s elite personal army is a complete disdain for cover, or defilade, or the knowledge of the existence of flanks, or the element of surprise, or covering fire, or the non-necessity of a frontal charge in the absence of more elaborate orders.  Confronted with a squad of men in cover behind a low brick wall at the end of a basement hallway, their plan is to run carelessly down that hall firing forward and hoping it will all work out.  Naturally they’re mown down like grass.  That’s not even the worst example of their incompetence, but it’s certainly pretty exemplary.

- It’s implied that the Expendables kill all of these henchmen throughout the course of the final massacre – that is, the nation’s entire military force.  The Presidential Palace is also completely demolished, and everyone occupying even the slightest position of authority is killed.  As the team leaves the island, their mission accomplished, there’s no sense whatever that this has been a traumatizing event for the people they leave behind.  Sandra, in particular, has just been brutalized by thugs, has been literally tortured, has watched her father (General Garza) die, has been nearly kidnapped by Munroe, has witnessed the deaths of hundreds of her countrymen, and seems as happy as a clam by the time it’s all over.  I’m sorry, movie, but I don’t buy it.

- Also, let’s talk about that Presidential Palace.  During Stallone and Statham’s recon mission, they come to the conclusion that even getting near the thing is insanely difficult – dare I say, impossible? – and want to call the whole thing off as being just too damned hard.  But when it finally comes down to it, we see the team depart on the mission, enter the island’s airspace, and then — they’re just in the Palace grounds.  No problems, no detection, no explanation.  My eye twitched, involuntarily.  Once there, their plan in general is to rescue Sandra, kill a lot of people, and blow up the Palace for some reason (never adequately explained).  To accomplish this last bit, they rely on the placement of explosive charges at key points around the Palace and its grounds.  Fair enough, but there’s not even a nod to the inconspicuous, here; many of the charges are casually placed in the middle of brightly lit walls, which I guess is fine given that the soldiers they’re facing are apparently blind as well as stupid.  Jet Li even thoughtfully opens the valves on some giant fuel canisters outside, creating a gushing river of flammable liquid that spreads throughout the grounds.  Literally hundreds of soldiers are milling around out there under the floodlights and this passes without any notice whatever.

I don’t want to talk about that sort of thing anymore, so let’s wrap it up.

There are precisely three females in this entire movie; one of them is on screen for about twenty seconds, one for maybe four minutes, the other for a fair amount of time.  While the latter (the revolutionary Sandra) has a certain amount of grit and determination, her main function is to be captured and tortured for a bit while serving as the catalyst for the rescue mission that brings about the desired massacre at the end.

For all that, though, there are no sex scenes, nor anything really even approaching them.  No nudity.  I confess I was shocked.  Astonishingly, after all his striving to save Sandra and his apparent attraction to her, all Stallone settles for at the end is a goodbye hug.  “What is this?” someone cried in the back of the theatre.  What indeed.

Still, The Expendables boasts lots of cursing and vulgarity, some truly stupid ideas, and a heaving sea of wanton violence and destruction.  It is emphatically not recommended for children or grown-ups.