The Expendables

I think that this film may have made more sense if I was mainlining Human Growth Hormone. Or this flick is HGH for the eyes. Or both.

I had fun watching this film. But I knew that I would. Yeah, this is that kind of film. If you think you're going to like it, you probably will. If you know you're going to hate it, you ain't wrong. This is a film that rips the heart out of some nameless mook and then proudly wears it on its sleeve. You've seen the list of names. You know whether you are going to like this film.

The question is whether you will like it as much as me. Notice the word like, not love. That's deliberate. There was thought put into that word choice. Not sure how much thought went into the script for this film, other than thinking up awesome ways to kill dudes. It's basically like Stallone's last Rambo but with more dudes. The Expendables plays like the latest instalment of a franchise that has been going strong since the 80's. The characters are less than sketches, they are drunken doodles. The subplots add up to less than nothing, they are there to pad out the running time.

These are not complaints, I liked these characters, which is to say I liked these actors. I liked the non action beats the script forced them through. Charisma Carpenter is in this film solely to be another strong Whedon woman who needs rescuing. She needs to be beat up so Statham can beat the dude who beat her. And that is the least senseless of the violence in this film.

The Expendables get involved in this film's plot because a pretty girl asked them Sly to. You can tell that Stallone likes this girl because he raises he eyebrows. That's a joke. You see, because dude's face has been pulled so tight that the most developed muscles on his whole body must be his eyelids. He's looked better. They all have. Which is kind of the point. If a film like this can have a point.

Wait. No. The point of this film is the violence, the gore and the explosions. And they are all present and accounted for. Plenty of shooty shooty stabby stabby kicky punchy slammy 'splodey. At least a few points where the audience I was with all turned to each other to ask 'Did that just happen?'

It did.

There is a lot of violence against the human body in this film, all filmed for maximum impact. There's a little bit of the too tight, too shakey, too edited to tell what the hell is going on, this mainly happens during the Jet Li fight scenes. Stallone is good at capturing gun and knife violence but his kung fu filming skills are weak. Which is too bad because I think his fight scene with Dolph Lundgren was pretty cool. I think it was, but I can't be sure. That Dolph, he's a big boy.

These are all big boys (even Eric Roberts who looks like a cross between Vince McMahon and Cuella DeVIlle), and they all hurt things and get hurt. Sometimes in cool ways, sometimes in cliched ways, but you knew all that just by watching the trailer.