Disposable

The Expendables, Sly Stallone’s hoary, old-timers’ action pic, derives its title from the intellectual ‘high-point’ of Rambo: First Blood Part II, where the eponymous hero explains to his Vietnamese aide that he is expendable and what that means. And, it could be said, that this latest outing by the Italian Stallion takes its title a tad too literal. It’s trash but it’s good trash.
Stallone assembles a formidable array of meatheads from the 1980s and 90s, with the notable exceptions of Jean-Claude van Damme, Steven Seagal and Kurt Russell, with Jason Statham thrown in as he looks older with his shaven head. There is an English baddie henchman but Statham is the counterpoint and it is an admirable touch that the chief villains is American – Eric Roberts, brother to Julia and sometime Master timelord to Paul McGann’s Doctor. It would have been easy to have a foreign evil supreme for the US multiplex audience to vicariously enjoy the eventual demise. Still, a remark by Stallone’s character summing up the soldier baddies as brutal ‘monkeys’ (with the directed acting of these army extras complicit) sails close to the wind given their Latino ethnicity from the fictional island of Vilena – which, in all honesty, should have a tilde over the ‘n’, hence Vileña.
Time is given over to introspection for this type of movie. Much of it revolves around the hard life of a mercenary – Dolph Lungren’s drug abuse, Statham’s fragmentary love life, Mickey Rourke’s despair. The heart bleeds. Other parts are beyond parody (though this film could have done with a whole hunk of irony) such as the ludicrously camp generalissimo or Robert’s rogue CIA man commenting “painting – this is where it starts,” as if being creative automatically leads one to a path of rebellion.
Given the Gubernator’s cameo, it was appropriate that the ending is a combo of Commando and Rambo 3, with hundreds of soldiers to be extravagantly dispatched, since they clearly have no families and deserve their fate through their brutality. They have it easy compared to the principal baddie henchmen and Roberts who all suffer horrific deaths. The action is cartoonish, without veering overly into the sickening bone-crushing that made Watchmen nearly unwatchable and certainly headache-inducing.
The Expendables is fine as far as it goes in its limited way but it could have been so much more. Self-awareness must go beyond the fact that they are fast approaching pensionable age and having on the cast an actor with the name of Charisma Carpenter (who is most welcome in her token role nonetheless). Of this potential, a glimpse is given in the unlikely quips during the fight scene of Lundgren and Jet Li or Li demanding he gets paid more because he is shorter and therefore has to work harder (an aspect of the movie Altaa appreciated). It could have done with more of the laconic humour of Commando or Snakes on a Plane. It was disappointing that Bruce Willis wasn’t given the opportunity during to his brief appearance to say “Yippee-kay-yay mo-fo” (to put it mildly) or at least a post-modern take on that. Little things like that for the action buff to revel in. As a result, it is a little flat. Enjoyable for one viewing but essentially this is The Disposables.