If there’s one thing I never liked about Rocky II, it’s the insistence for heroic triumph that allows for Rocky Balboa to defeat Apollo Creed, a reversal of what made the first Rocky such a memorable film. The win didn’t matter—it was the inextinguishable spirit to overcome odds, the underdog story, that made the original such a proud film. It provided a shimmering parallel to Sylvester Stallone’s career, too: bent on making it as an actor, he himself penned a story for him to star in that showed his drive.
We never saw that drive again from Stallone for quite some time. After the death of the Rocky franchise, the self-parody Rambo has become and his toplining days behind him, Stallone once again had something to prove. That he’s not yet done, that an old dog still retains his teeth. This rejection of pacification resulted in the shockingly excellent Rocky Balboa, a movie that pumped new life into an aging action star’s career. But his follow-up, Rambo, no longer had that underdog fire to prove something; it seemed to push him back to the same top dog arrogance that would eventually lead to projects like, well, The Expendables.
The Expendables, you could say, is the culmination of Stallone’s silliest action outputs. A tribute to an era of when the size of the star’s muscles, not the director’s filmmaking ability, define the heft of an action movie—unsurprisingly conjured, orchestrated and performed by a star from that era. The movie is unabashedly loud, violent and explosive. So much so that it comes across as a baiting prank when, in between their mass killings, partners-in-mercenary Barney (Sylvester Stallone) and Christmas (Jason Statham) would often stop to talk about women and share their vulnerable feelings with one another. Or that one moment where ex-Expendables Tool (Mickey Rourke) delivers a teary monologue on a mercenary’s haunted moral sacrifice, in the sincere soulful manner only a Mickey Rourke can get away with plastering on a movie like this. That’s all the movie is about, really: violence, and the sensitive men who commit them. The plot is, heh, expendable.
It probably shouldn’t be a surprise that a film this accountably macho has a total of two female characters, both of whom serve as prizes to reward all this violence. Christmas’ subplot is misogynistically hilarious—he loses his love (Charisma Carpenter) because, as a mercenary, he’s absent and secretive; but he easily wins her back by literally beating other men up to a pulp, swooning his woman with one macho display of assertiveness. When Stallone wants to pay respect to the accomplishments of manly beings, he lets it permeate every inch of the screenplay (which he co-wrote), rather than just the action scenes.
Before this movie came to fruition, when it was nothing more than a script and a cast list, I liked to joke about how it couldn’t possibly be real—that it’s some sick ploy to get men’s balls swelling in order to harvest bottled black market testosterone. Now it’s here, and it’s very much real, but it remains a joke. Try looking at the film’s line-up standee at your local theater and not burst into fits of giggles. The whole thing is designed to express male overload, like a gay pride float for heterosexuality. For a guy, and especially an action movie fan, there’s a definite thrill to this—even the idea of it existing is enough to excite. The film tries to cater to what potential fans would want to see out of the participants: there’s a oneupmanship between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, there’s a fist brawl between Stone Cold Steve Austin and Randy Couture, hell, Terry Crews even lobs a crucial football throw.
Yet I can’t help thinking that the idea—and title—would fit better had it been a collection of cheap action has-beens (which Jet Li, Statham, Crews, Couture and even Rourke are not quite yet), fighting against all odds as a metaphor for their struggle to remain relevant in a cinematic landscape that has shoved them to the oft-ignored bargain bin. Such a thing would mark the film as a show of solidarity and perseverance, a wake-up call to fans of old. Instead, what we have is a straight-to-video production, trumped up and hyped silly by the name recognition that litters the screen, in order to coax action junkies into believing that this will no doubt be the magnum opus of cheesy action films.
It’s fun, it’s rambunctious and it’s clearly made with a great deal of love for the genre. But a wake up proves that the finished product can never be quite as satisfying as that “there’s no way this is happening” hybrid of skepticism and anticipation that made me giddy before its release. Now that it’s here, give it a few weeks and it’ll disappear into the same bargain bin that it purports to be fighting out of.
"The Expendables" opens August 13, 2010 and is rated R. Action. Directed by Sylvester Stallone. Written by David Callaham and Sylvester Stallone. Starring David Zayas, Eric Winter, Mickey Rourke, Terry Crews, Steve Austin, Giselle Itié, Charisma Carpenter.
