- Director: Sylvester Stallone
- Written by: Dave Callaham & Sylvester Stallone
- Starring: Almost Every Action Hero Ever
Oh... they go wrong. They go very, very wrong. They go wrong on so many levels that it should be a fucking sin, and Stallone and the screenwriters should be cast into the most horrible, depraved pit of Hell for unleashing this cinematic travesty upon the world. My god...
The plot... shit, was there a plot? I have no idea. It has something to do with some made up island in Venezuela or something, and Stallone and his team of bulky action heroes are supposed to go in and kill some guy that was a former CIA agent, and there's also some stuff about the leader of the island and his hot daughter... I don't know, who gives a shit? The film is so fucking convoluted and confusing with all kinds of intersecting plotlines and boring "political intrigue" that I almost went into a coma. Characters disappear and then reappear, they do things that don't make any sense, and there are so many ancillary characters that I have no idea who is who or how they completely fit into the plot.
But who cares about the plot, really? It's an action film, right? And it has almost every major star ever! Well, you're wrong my friend. Yes, every name that is on the poster make an appearance in the film. However, the core "Expendables" group is made up of Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Randy Couture, and Terry Crews. Everyone else, like Steve Austin, Dolph Lundgren, and Mickey Rourke, are either enemies or simple cameos.
Still, that would be fine, but you know who the film decides to focus on? Statham and Stallone. That's it. They get the most screentime, the most backstory, the most action scenes, they get almost the entire film. The rest of the Expendables, you know, THE GROUP THAT THE FILM IS NAMED AFTER, get 20 minutes or less of screentime, and when they are on screen, all they get is the occasional one-liner to vomit out during a firefight. The film is basically Stallone sucking his own cock.
Dolph Lundgren by far gets it the worst. The amazingly cool action star who was fucking Ivan Drago in "Rocky IV" becomes a villain, betraying Stallone. On top of that, he gets killed after Stallone shoots him! All in all, he has about 30 minutes of screen time, granted, a bit more than the rest of the group, but still! I'd say becoming evil and getting fucking killed is much worse than simply being one of the background characters (besides, who cares about no-names like Randy Couture?).
Stallone obviously has some sort of personal vendetta out for Lundgren. He defeated him in "Rocky IV", what more does he want? Defeating him AGAIN at this point, 30 years later is just a kick in the balls for Lundgren, who by all accounts is a nice and charismatic guy.
I'm sure you were also excited about Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, right? Well you can fuck off for all the movie cares! Willis and Schwarzenegger literally get 5 minutes of screentime. I can deal with that, Schwarzenegger is still governor and is probably very busy and Willis probably had other projects going on at the time. But you know what they do during this 5-minute cameo? They fucking talk. Two of the most badass, quintissential action stars get a cameo in one of the biggest action films of the year and they fucking talk. Seeing the trio of Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Willis together is also incredibly surreal. All of these big action stars just standing there, talking like they're old chums. It feels less like they're playing characters and more like they're playing themselves, especially when Stallone takes a jab at Schwarzenegger by saying, "He wants to be president."
That's one of the major problems with the film as well. It has a hell of a lot of star power with some of the biggest action heroes ever, but it's not executed very well. As I said, the screen time for each star is incredibly discordant, but they're also each shooting out one-liners, as they would if they were in their own solo films. But this just comes off as incredibly strange, like an action hero "Celebrity Deathmatch", if you will, with all of these big names fighting for supremacy, battling for the most amount of one-liners until they accidentally break the fucking universe from one-liner overload.
Again, this would be fine if the dialogue had any sort of competency, even to the point of being so lame it's awesome. But no, it doesn't even have that. It's beyond bad-good, it's so far beyond bad-good that it's created it's own separate universe created especially for itself. I will share some of the lovely exchanges in this film:
There's a scene right after Statham has just shot up a bunch of bad guys with a gun. Stallone turns to him and says, "That was some good shooting." Statham responds with, "That was a statement!" I'm not fucking with you guys. That is real, actual dialogue from the film. It's not even a one-liner, it's Statham explaining what Stallone just did. He might as well have just said, "THAT WAS A SENTENCE."
There are also some bits of dialogue that just don't make any sense, like they were trying to make a one-liner but gave up halfway through, pulled a shot of tequila and said, "FUCK IT". For example, there's a scene where Terry Crews is showing off his weaponry to Randy Couture. He says something about how if his gun can't do the job, then his knife can. Couture responds with, "You should be my doctor." What?! What does that even mean?! It's like they were talking to two completely different characters on two completely different dimensional planes and the camera somehow caught the two dimensions in transit.
The film is full of completely retarded things like this. Even the character names sound like something a 12 year-old with Down's Syndrome would come up with. Do you like a bunch of badass, grizzled action heroes that could rip your face off? Well then get ready for such awe-inspiring names as "Hale Caesar", "Lee Christmas", and "Yin Yang". Again, those are actual character names, they are completely real. They named a fucking Asian character "Yin Yang". Words fail me.
"But wait," I can hear you saying in my head, "surely the film has a lot of great action scenes, right? I mean, with all of that action hero star power there must be some great stuff, right?" Okay, you want to know what the action is like? You really want to know? Well, I hope you like ShakyCam! LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS OF FUCKING SHAKYCAM. IN ALMOST EVERY SINGLE SCENE.
The cinematography is some of the worst I've ever seen in a film. It's like they hired a spastic retard to control the camera at the exact same time there was a planet-splitting earthquake. I get that they were trying to go for a gritty, docudrama style, but why the hell does the film need it? Especially a film with a bunch of complex action scenes where it's integral that we know what the fuck is going on?! Half the time I couldn't tell what I was looking at or who was fighting who, and it didn't help that the color scheme in the film consisted of black, grey, and puke green. It literally looked like somebody vomited on the lens.
Overall, "The Expendables" is a great example of wasted potential. It's one of the coolest-sounding action movies ever, I thought that there was no possible way they could ever fuck this up. Well, they did. The film has so much wasted potential you could compress it into a small star. The fact that they could screw something up with this much potential has pretty much completely destroyed my faith in Hollywood. Granted, it was slim before, what with "Avatar" making 2 billion dollars and whatnot, but this is just the lowest of the low. Hollywood has become like the crazy drug addict that is sucking dick for money. It has no shame and is willing to do anything at all to get some money. Fuck this bullshit. Fuck it to hell.
No comments:
Post a Comment