A group of elite mercenaries on a mission against a ruthless dictator.
Stallone continues is comeback story with another successful movie. This time is one of those “I can’t believe they never did it” ideas. An ensemble movie that reunites most of the major players of the eighties action scene, like “Ocean eleven” but on steroids.
Stallone is apparently well liked enough by his peers that he manages to get a lot of big names. Jet Li, Statham, Rourke and Mixed Martial Artist Randy Couture are all members of the expendables. Stone Cold Steve Austin is the main henchman of the bad guys while Willis and Schwarzenegger come for a very funny but too brief cameo. The big absentee is Van Damme who said that the movie was underwritten only to publicly regret it after it came out.
At the beginning is all very funny with famous stars popping everywhere but after a while we realized that Van Damme was probably right. The plot is really not very good. It’s serviceable stuff that reminds me of the countless straight to TV action stuff that killed the genre in the Eighties. It tries to be deep and to establish motivations for our heroes but fails terribly at it and anyway we really don’t watch movie like this for character stuff.
As an action movie there are funny moments and some of the stunts are interesting but in the end they lack that spark of imagination and creativity that makes good explosions fun to watch. Is nice to see retro action eighties style but after a while I had trouble not dozing off.
Let’s hope better for the sequel.
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