I adore 1980’s action movies, on the grounds that films such as Die Hard, The Terminator, First Blood, Cobra and Commando established a strong set of genre conventions and requirements. In short, these films laid the groundwork for an entire genre. However, these kind of action movies are simply not being made any more. With this in mind I went into The Expendables with high hopes that I would witness something which would sit proudly alongside its forbears in the action genre, and I did. Sort of.
The Expendables’ certainly delivers an incredible cast of action heroes of the past; Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, and cameos from Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger all give the film a real event movie feel. In addition to this great cast there is some truly old school action movie set pieces and fight scenes on show here. Highlights include Stallone and Jason Statham’s attack on a dockyard and the bone crunching fight scene between Stallone and Steve Austin. Another thing that The Expendables has going for it is that, in true classic action style, there is a small army of troops and baddies to act as fodder for the ass kicking good guys, this is pretty much a must for a body count movie of this kind. As well as plenty of these fodder characters, The Expendables also boasts the atypical CIA operative gone rogue baddie, who is played with a delicious sense of sinister enjoyment by Eric Roberts.
However, the thing that made the movies which The Expendables is referencing so special was not only the explosions and the body count, but the tightness of the narrative. Die Hard, for example is such an iconic action film because not only does it contain thrilling action sequences but there are no wasted scenes and unnecessary asides. The same simply cannot be said of The Expendables, there are some scenes in the movie which simply do not need to be there. Most notably, all of the sequences featuring Jason Statham and Charisma Carpenter are completely unnecessary; the only possible use for these sequences is to explain why Jason Statham is a bit more annoyed in the second half of the film. He’s a freelance mercenary who kills people for a living, the audience already know that he is an angry man; we do not need ten minutes of nonsense filler to tell us this. Another issue I had with the film was that some of the deaths, especially that of Steve Austin’s character, were disappointing and hampered by questionable effects and poor execution, which is very disappointing for a movie with an $85 million budget.
Although the movie has very obvious weaknesses and is nowhere near the level of the classic action movies of the eighties, The Expendables is a rare modern example of a good old fashioned actioner. Unlike many of the current crop of action films which are always striving to justify themselves by trying to say something about the social and political climate of our times, the film is totally unpretentious and unapologetic about the fact that it is an action film, and in action films the impossible is the norm and a lot of things get blown up, and it is on this level that it largely works. However, The Expendables never really reaches the heights of its influences, which is a great shame.
