Half A Giraffe

Unlike a lot of Christian Bale movies, The Expendables doesn’t star a man with no emotional range who pushed his mother down a stairs. No, this one stars Sylvester Stallone in the role he plays best – the 80′s.

Sly Sylvester “the Italian Stallion” Stallone is back…again…with basically the same film he always makes. “Random Action Crap 4″ it might as well have been called, followed by a picture of a man blowing up a toilet with a gun. Not that it’s entirely serious. Unlike the recently released Rambo First Blood 6 “Revenge of the War”, this movie knows it’s retarded.

There’s quite an amazing cast. Not that a lot of acting gets done. I mean, they kinda just stand around and kick shit. In one sense the cast includes an Oscar winning writer, some of the highest paid stars in Hollywood as well as the Governor of the U.S. state of California, but in another sense it’s basically a list of actors people haven’t taken seriously in 20 years.

The biggest issue I’ve got with the film is that it isn’t particularly a comedy. There are slow scenes with Mickey Rourke painting and talking about his life, where ironically Mickey Rourke talking about his actual life would be more interesting. If you went into this movie in your French beret, with a cigarette-holder in one hand, the collected works of Wittgenstein in the other and expected to be moved…well that was your fault. But if you went in expecting comedy, you’ll be disappointed by the great number of non-comedic scenes.

True Lies worked because it was funny. The audience was laughing with James Cameron.

There isn’t the same purpose here. It lacks direction, as if a guy who couldn’t speak properly wrote it. This isn’t quite the academic point it might seem (“ac-a-dem-ic” means stuff you learn in dem fancy colleges for any hardcore fans reading this) as it kinda falls between two stools.

Jason Statham. I don’t know why but I kinda prefer the crappy every-man Jason, the kind of guy he played in Snatch, to the saving the world Jason. I guess he looks like the sort of guy your dad might hang out with. I mean I know he’d kick my ass, and works out and that – but if Stallone and Schwarzenegger look as though they’d rather be flying through the air with a bus load of school children on their back on their way to the Martian City of Elders, Statham looks as though he’d rather be watching the premier league in a dingy pub somewhere in Manchester.

For the action scenes we have a lot of the same swirly confusing camera “which ones Stallone, which ones Megatron” crap. It deserves to be said that there are some good action scenes too, but only in the way a barrel of sewage might contain the occasional edible trout.

What’s curious about the Expendables is that it’s not really a parody. You go in (I went in) thinking it’s going to be a send up of action movies, but it really isn’t. There are serious scenes and ultimately this is the movie’s greatest weakness. If you want an action film, go elsewhere. If you want a comedy, go elsewhere. If you want an action comedy film, see True Lies.

Reviewing this movie kinda feels like telling a clown to straighten his dickey-bow. But like deciding to hold a child’s birthday party at an accountancy firm, someone made the decision that it needed to be an actual film. I basically arrived for stickers and party-bags but then someone said we could only play pass the parcel between lectures on double-entry book keeping.

Tags: action, arnold schwarzenegger, bruce willis, cinema, expendables, funny, jason statham, movies, sylvester stallone

Posted in Staff Writer |