Sylvester Stallone’s career is an interesting one to put under a microscope. Not experiencing much success with an attempted acting career in the mid seventies, he tried to put his own film together in order to secure himself a star-making role. That effort turned out to be Rocky, and it earned him Academy Award nominations for both acting and screenwriting. He was then able, of course, to spin that into several Rocky sequels, and though they were critically successful to varying degrees, I’m sure they earned him quite a bit of scratch leading into 1982’s First Blood, which launched the iconic character of John Rambo. Sounds like a success story so far; but after that things get a whole lot worse for Sly. Stallone went from receiving Oscar nominations at the start of his career to transitioning into an impressive streak of earning Razzie nominations every year from 1986-2004 but two. When you really break it down, Rocky and Rambo are the only two things that Stallone has ever done in his career that anyone has liked (okay, and maybe Cobra), and yet he is still, thirty years later, a huge name and one of the most recognizable celebrities on the planet. I guess that really speaks to the power of those characters. Especially considering that it was a revival of those two characters that has led to a sort of resurgence in his career, and has led to him putting together this project, The Expendables. He went from a start as a legitimate filmmaker, to transitioning into being an action movie icon, to a long string of acting in films so terrible that his career was all but over, to transitioning back into the role of writer/director and reviving his iconic characters in 2006’s Rocky Balboa and 2008’s Rambo; both films that I largely enjoyed, at least much more than anything he had been involved with in twenty years. So with the announcement of The Expendables, a film that Stallone would again write and direct, and that would assemble an all-star cast of action movie heroes for an all out, senses assaulting explosion fest, I found myself eagerly anticipating the results.
The Expendables gathers together the team of Stallone himself, current action movie top-dog Jason Statham, martial arts film legend Jet Li, classic 80’s bad guy Dolph Lundgren, MMA fighter Randy Couture, professional football player Terry Crews, and Hollywood’s other current comeback kid Mickey Rourke. That’s a pretty formidable lineup for a made for men movie. Put them up against a small army led by a sneering Eric Roberts and his hired muscle, pro wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin and there has probably never been a more formidable lineup of guys who are tough on screen ever. Oh, and did I mention that Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger also make an appearance? The plot is simple enough that it doesn’t need synopsis. Stallone and his boys are a rag tag team of mercenaries for hire. Eric Roberts is an evil guy who has a made up Latin American country in his rich pockets and is using their army to do evil stuff. Stallone and his boys get hired by the CIA to take them down. What the particulars of Roberts’ business are, we don’t care. How exactly Stallone and his crew gathered together their equipment and training is not at all important. We just want to see them all fight. Stallone knows this, and appropriately doesn’t fill his script full of set up and explanation. He pits the good guys against the villains and then lets the explosions happen. The brevity of story and focus on action was much appreciated.
The Expendables gathers together the team of Stallone himself, current action movie top-dog Jason Statham, martial arts film legend Jet Li, classic 80’s bad guy Dolph Lundgren, MMA fighter Randy Couture, professional football player Terry Crews, and Hollywood’s other current comeback kid Mickey Rourke. That’s a pretty formidable lineup for a made for men movie. Put them up against a small army led by a sneering Eric Roberts and his hired muscle, pro wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin and there has probably never been a more formidable lineup of guys who are tough on screen ever. Oh, and did I mention that Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger also make an appearance? The plot is simple enough that it doesn’t need synopsis. Stallone and his boys are a rag tag team of mercenaries for hire. Eric Roberts is an evil guy who has a made up Latin American country in his rich pockets and is using their army to do evil stuff. Stallone and his boys get hired by the CIA to take them down. What the particulars of Roberts’ business are, we don’t care. How exactly Stallone and his crew gathered together their equipment and training is not at all important. We just want to see them all fight. Stallone knows this, and appropriately doesn’t fill his script full of set up and explanation. He pits the good guys against the villains and then lets the explosions happen. The brevity of story and focus on action was much appreciated.
Where Stallone’s script started to fall apart for me was with the dialogue. Being a team of tough guy mercenaries, The Expendables interact with one another in a ball breaking, locker room manner. This much is to be expected. But the banter back and forth, the ribs, the quips; they’re all painfully unfunny and just terribly unimaginative. It started to make me think about Stallone’s career overall. What does he do that separates him from the other big action stars of his time? I’ve often said that action films shouldn’t forget to be fun. I’d rather watch a cocky, wisecracking hero blowing stuff up than a grim, gritty one nine times out of ten. But looking back, that was always Schwarzenegger’s role, or Willis’ role. Stallone had success with Rocky and Rambo, one being a down on his luck meathead so devoid of charm that it became endearing in itself, and the other a killing machine so inhuman that he took grittiness far enough that it came all the way back around to being fun and awesome. All of those other movies he was in, the ones where he tried comedy like Stop, Or My Mom Will Shoot, or the ones where he tried to pull off the buddy cop like Tango & Cash; well those films were awful. It started to occur to me early on that while I enjoyed what he did reviving his wheelhouse characters of Rocky and Rambo, Stallone just wasn’t the man for the job when it came to writing and directing an irreverent Dirty Dozen type ensemble piece. His most successful work is full of super serious stuff like “I want what they want…” and “Because I’m afraid, is that what you want to hear?” monologues. Not back and forth. Rambo never quips. When Rocky tries to make a joke we roll our eyes. Once Stallone and Statham’s characters start spending large chunks of this film discussing their romantic lives the whole thing started to feel more like parody than it did a straight forward, ass kicking action movie. If The Expendables has one great flaw at its center, it’s that Stallone was the guy who wrote the dialogue.
The characters all seem to succeed or fail based on which actor it is portraying them. And, even more, they seem to be written with each actor’s skill set in mind. I guess, firstly, it should be pointed out that Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger really don’t have anything to do with this movie at all. They appear in one scene that feels very tacked on, doesn’t impact the rest of the film at all, and is mostly just a surreal distraction to take you out of the goings on and reminds you that you’re watching a movie. That this scene was featured so heavily in the advertising is unfortunate and misleading. It points to me that Stallone and company were much more focused on how they wanted to market this film than they were in how they wanted to craft it as a piece of art. Stallone himself plays Barney Ross, the leader of The Expendables, and a pretty blank slate, tough guy character. He does an okay job, and his status as an action icon lends a lot of credibility to the film, but it’s certainly not a role that’s going to be spoken of when people start to break down the man’s career. Jason Statham is Lee Christmas, Barney’s right hand man, and the guy who gets the most stuff to do in the film. Other than probably Stallone, Statham gets the most screen time. He’s there for all the action, he gets his own romantic subplot, and he’s more or less the anchor of the film. Statham cements his place as the current face of action films here. He has the most on screen charm, he is the most natural and comfortable delivering dialogue of all the main characters, and he’s still in his physical prime and able to pull off some big actioney stuff, unlike some of his more aged co-stars. Aged like Jet Li, whose ridiculously named character Ying Yang is predictably the martial arts expert of the group. He’s around mostly to show off his fighting skills, and to absorb some short jokes from the other, beefier actors on the screen, and he does a fine job at both; but he looks a little old and tired in the role. I would venture to guess that Li was cast much more for his name than he was his skill as an actor or his enthusiasm for the role. Dolph Lundgren plays Gunner Jensen, the loose cannon of the group, and his is probably the performance I liked the best next to Statham’s. He has always been able to project a very intimidating aura of danger, and he was perfectly cast as the member of the group who may just be too violent and too unhinged for even the kind of work that they’re doing. He might be the most evil guy in the world. Mickey Rourke doesn’t show up in any of the film’s action. His character, Tool, is retired from the killing people trade and serves as the crews tattoo artist/elder statesman. Sporting long locks, tiny glasses, and a ridiculous little skinny pipe, Rourke’s character takes on the role of a sort of HGH Gandalf, lending his wisdom and experience to the goings on. He has a couple of monologues that don’t have much to do with the film other than being a chance to squeeze in Rourke and let him do some acting, and I don’t fault the film for it at all. He’s a man who is always, at the very least, interesting to watch, and his scenes are brief enough to not negatively effect the pacing. Terry Crews and Randy Couture round out the crew as Hale Caesar and Toll Road. Despite an excuse to add two more ludicrous names to the character list, I don’t really know what the point of these guys were. They get very little screen time and very little to do during it. In the case of Crews I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing because nothing much struck me about his small performance, but in the case of Couture this limited involvement was clearly a blessing. Always looking awkward and uncomfortable on screen, I’m just not sure if Couture is cut out for this acting thing, and he was the weakest link of the film without a doubt. It didn’t help much that his character was so ill defined. We’re told that he has a therapist, but nothing much is made of it. I guess he was supposed to be the quirky member of the group? Like a roided up Woody Allen? Whatever the intent, it didn’t translate to the screen at all. Roberts and Austin are pretty effectively evil. Roberts plays the slimy weasel and Austin the grown up bully and both are perfectly suited to the roles; no real complaints from a villainy standpoint. And both of them have pretty big names like Stallone wanted. Win-win there.
When it was all said and done, I didn’t understand why this film wasn’t treated much more as just a Stallone/Statham team-up film. Their characters are the only ones that really amount to anything, their interactions are the heart of the film, and cutting everything else out could have given the script a lot more focus. Okay, the Dolph Lundgren going rogue subplot could still have stuck around, and Mickey Rourke didn’t hurt anything by hanging around in the background, but I think the film tried to go too big in order to justify it’s all-star lineup selling point. In the end the roster list of action stars was pretty falsely inflated, and a lot of the characters got shorted focus because there is only so much runtime in a film largely dedicated to action sequences for everybody to get character moments in. Once again, the marketing of the movie got in the way of the execution.
But before I give the action sequences presented here a unanimous endorsement, it should be noted that not everything was presented in a manner befitting a clinic on the genre. There is a big car chase sequence that caps off the second act that is just an absolute mess. All of the problems inherent in every bad action movie I’ve seen over the last ten years are here. There are too many camera angles that never sit still, there are no establishing shots or attention paid to blocking the scene in order to establish spatial relations, and the edits come too quick and don’t allow anything to register or impress. In a very real and very important way, less is more when it comes to shooting a big, kinetic action sequence. You need to establish where everyone is in relation to each other. Map out where everyone is going to go over the course of the events and why. Pick a small handful of perspectives for the audience to view things from and switch between them sparingly, depending on which will have the most visual impact for that particular beat of the mini story told. Keep the camera pulled back, frame an entire sequence of events so that we can watch them play out, and give the audience a chance to follow and appreciate what you have created. This is how you craft an effective action sequence. There is a car chase scene in Children of Men that is probably the best chase sequence I’ve seen in a film all decade and the entire thing is one take from one camera. The depth of focus reached by the DP allows for enough complexity to keep the sequence interesting, the singular point of view makes it easy to follow and gives the impression of being a part of the action rather than an observer of it, and the whole thing blows away everything here or anything else out there in films that are completely built around chases and action. There’s an assault on a palace that serves as the final, big action climax of this film and it largely suffers from the same ills. We go from being told an assault is imminent to jump cutting right into the action. We see our guys running around in the dark, planting bombs and taking out guards, but we have no idea where they are in relation to each other, how many bombs they need to plant, how many security guards they need to take out, or how dangerous and impossible the whole situation is. Consequently, there are no stakes. The Dirty Dozen is a classic film that this and many other films have patterned themselves after, and it has a similar assault on a palace end sequence. The difference there is that we get a “going over the plan” scene. The schematics of the place are laid out for us on a map, the steps of the plan are given to us, everyone’s part in said steps is made clear. Consequently we go into the thing already invested. We know the stakes. Tension can be created. If we know the plan, and something happens to jeopardize the plan, we feel the anxiety of the situation. If we know the layout of the place, and we know where everyone is supposed to be, the situation can become very tense when we see somebody isn’t where they’re supposed to be or hasn’t kept up with the planned timeline. Stallone just gives us a mish mash of actioney looking things that may or may not be leading to some sort of plan and we end up not being very invested in any of it. Visually it’s constructed weakly enough that we can’t follow much of it anyways, and suddenly it becomes that cacophony of action white noise that I’ve talked about. The audience tuning out is the result soon to follow, and Stallone is lucky he had that semi-automatic shotgun to wake them back up or his big finish could have come off as a real dud.
