The Expendables

What year is it again? I feel like I just walked out of 1987. The Expendables has been cast to the T with raging testosterone. You know you're in for some explosions when Mickey Rourke has the most emotional scene in a film, and he's only in it for five minutes. Sly Stallone has pulled through this time after countless misfires. He has taken the comraderie of a movie like Predator, with all the big tough guys joking around as they blow the bad guys to smithereens, and injected it into the plot of Rambo II.

The Expendables has car chases, kung-fu fights, knives, grenade launchers, severed limbs, severed torsos, old cars, old trucks, lots of motorcycles, tattoos, sexy women with foreign accents, seedy bars, evil dictators, water boarding, shoot-outs, explosions, a body count in the 100s, and Dolph Lundgren. (I don't know what it is about that guy.)

Who cares about the plot? Stallone and Jason Statham and Jet Li lead a squad of mercenaries into an unnamed third world country to take down a drug-running, gun-running dictator so the starving people can have a chance at democracy. Blah blah blah, whatever. Eric Roberts is one of the bad guys. You know what you're getting into.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis make cameos. All the rest of the cast are played by wrestlers and UFC fighters. If Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal were to have made appearances, then there would hardly have been room for Chuck Norris's foot. At any rate, this is the best cast of ass-kickers in the history of cinema, and Stallone doesn't let them go to waste.

The violence and action in this movie is awe-inspiring. The one-liners come rapid fire like His Girl Friday. Blood spills by the gallon. There is an explosion to rival Apocalypse Now. And everyone looks like they are having a good time, which is important, because that helped me to have a good time. There's nothing like a morose action film, with Matt Damon looking serious all the time, to take the fun out of guns.

There is so much action going on in this film, I don't know how they coordinated all of it. The climax is wall-to-wall with explosions and fight scenes, with Stallone fighting this guy, and Statham fighting that guy, and ten other things happening at the same time, and it's so silly and brainless and harmless, that I have to recommend it.

You know the action movie cliche where the hero never runs out of bullets? Well, this is the first movie where the hero never runs out of knives. So many knives are thrown and bad guys stabbed, slashed and turned into amputees, I just have to wonder where they stowed all those knives.

These guys look like they could be friends. You can imagine Stallone, Rourke, Statham, Li, and Lundgren hanging out at some beach house, and arm wrestling over who has to do the dishes. Between the lot of them, they have enough bulging veins and muscles to lift a dump truck up and change the tire rather than bothering with a jack. Stallone is sensible enough to include scenes of them just clowning around, because he knows half the reason anyone is going to see this movie is because so many of them are in it. It reminds me when they got Pacino and De Niro together in Heat. Except without all the Oscar nominations.