Opinion: Don't Go!
I walked into "The Expendables" with low expectations. While there had been some early buzz among critics about the all-star cast (Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, and more all in one movie!) but the movie has been pretty widely panned. While I must say that I actually kinda enjoyed the movie, bad writing and bad action scenes do not a good movie make.
The plot involves a group of mercenaries known as the Expendables (Stallone and his buddies) who are hired to go into a tropical island dictatorship to bring down its leader General Garza (David Zayas) and drug lord James Munroe (Eric Roberts). Helping them is Garza's daughter (Giselle Itié), who Stallone falls in love with.
It's a pretty simple plot and one that doesn't necessarily need a quality script to be good. I didn't expect any great writing out of "The Expendables" (again, action movie), but there were some moments of bad writing that simply astounded me in their stupidity and pointlessness. Thankfully, it's the kind of bad writing that is absolutely hilarious.
A great example of this comes when Eric Roberts' character discovers Itié has been helping the Expendables. He finds her paintings in a ramshackle building and walks out to her father, painting in hand. "She paints...This is how it starts!" he yells, as he throws the painting to the ground and walks off. End scene. That's it. No more explanation than that. Seriously.
But come on! Who goes to an action movie for writing or plot? What about all the explosions and fights? The all-star cast of action heroes? This movie is all about grabbing practically every big actor from the past thirty years of action films and watching them beat the crap out of everyone who gets in their way. Surely this movie can't mess up its one big selling point, right?
Well... yes and no. There is plenty of action in "The Expendables". Unfortunately, Stallone is directing this movie and decided to fill it to the brim with shaky cam and quick cuts. I went to this movie to see Stallone and Co. rip through a ton of bad guys, not a bunch of blurs colliding with other blurs. This approach is especially annoying during Jet Li's action scenes. Seriously, the man can pull off all sorts of crazy martial arts moves and we need to make it more intense? I could barely even see what he was doing most of the time!
The shakiness and cutting get really bad as all hell breaks loose near the end of the movie and it's impossible to tell who is doing what. At one point someone started brawling with Steve Austin and I had no clue who it was. Stallone had fought him in another scene, so I assumed it was him at first. I quickly found out I was wrong when the movie cut to Stallone taking cover behind a truck. Ok, so it wasn't him, then who was fighting Austin? Was it Statham? Couture? Li? I still don't know. It's not good when a movie says it will show you big-name action heroes beating the crap out of each other, then makes every scene so incoherent you can barely recognize anyone.
While I did enjoy the stupidity of "The Expendables", I can't say I'd recommend it. The movie does deliver on its promise. It shows you several action heroes duking it out against a ton of faceless enemies. The problem is that the movie really screws up its most important element: the action scenes. They're just too confusing and incoherent most of the time to be any good. A bad script in an action movie I can take (especially one as unintentionally funny as this one), but bad action scenes in an action movie? I'm sorry, but that's a failure in my book.
