This is how it starts.
This Friday, THE EXPENDABLES II grunts and explodes into cinemas like an angry, elderly buffalo having its final orgasm. It is fitting, then, that today’s Guilty Pleasure should be the first EXPENDABLES, the dream action’er which could have been soooooo good, and in a way, is. But for all the wrong reasons.
Like the balls we hear so much about, here’s the plot in a nutshell. A bunch of badass mercenaries are asked to take out a third world dictator, but whilst doing some recon, realise they can’t be arsed. When team leader Barney (Stallone) feels guilty about the (sexy female) freedom-fighter who stayed behind, he and his team go back to the island to save her and commit minor genocide. The team consists of Rambo, He-Man, Wong Fei-Hung, Crank, a UFC fighter who was in The Scorpion King 2, Angel Heart and the massive black guy out of White Chicks.
And that’s just the heroes. The main villain is James Munroe, played by Eric Roberts; brother to Julia, dad to Emma and the secondary villain in THE DARK KNIGHT, (until Two Face turns up). He THEN played the antagonist in Roger Corman’s SHARKTOPUS which is (and I honestly mean this) much better than this film. At least it’s intentionally funny. If that three-time Hollywood cad isn’t enough, his burly protector is Stone Cold Steve Austin, a WWE legend whose straight to DVD fight-film-fodder is so generic he makes Steven Seagal look like Francois Truffaut.
Then we have the guys in-between, which leads to the long awaited, first ever on-screen collaboration between the greatest American action stars in history; Brucie, Arnie and Sly…ie. This is the ‘action movie’ equivalent of De Niro and Pacino sharing screen-time in Michael Mann’s extraordinary HEAT (1995). That scene positively crackled. The tension, the pregnant pauses, the subtlety of both men leaves the audience exhaling as the Sword of Damocles dangled above their heads in that cafe. With THE EXPENDABLES’ menage a trios, we get a few wise cracks about sucking dicks, a couple of in-jokes about their lives outside of the film and some of the least convincing tough-guy dialogue since they heyday of Chris O’Donnell. It’s still fun to see them all together, though, playing off their real life rivalries and giving some crowd pleasing metaphorical winks to camera. And the scene is mainly there to set up for the sequel. Which, unfortunately, does not feature Chris O’Donnell.
There are two women in this film, both of whom are victims of abuse by men, both need saving by men and neither of whom get anything interesting to do. Lacy (the girlfriend of Statham’s Lee Christmas) is played by Charisma Carpenter, who has proved how bloody good she is in Buffy/Angel. Yet screenwriter Sly doesn’t bother giving her anything to do other than be a reason for Christmas to lay the smackdown on the guy(s?) who duffed her up (in fairness, seeing our homegrown hero wail on a bunch of basketball playing douchebags is fun). In fact, amid all of the action and goofballery, there’s a truly nasty sequence which does not belong in a film like this. Giselle Itie plays Sandra (yes, Sandra), a freedom-fighter who rallies against her warlord father. When captured and tortured for information about Barney’s mob (which would have been a better name, I reckon), she is waterboarded. It’s very uncomfortable to watch and causes the tone of the film to fly all over the place. One minute you’re cheering and whooping Dolph Lundgren and Jet Li having a scrap, the next we’re seeing 50% of the females in the film being almost drowned under the voyeuristic gaze of her male abusers.
THE EXPENDABLES is full of bits that we don’t know how to react to. Most of it is pretty straight forward, we cheer when they fight, blow things up and shoot really big guns in a never ending barrage of bullets. That’s all fine. But then, they have moments of light hearted ‘banter’ among the mercenaries, shooting the breeze with some excruciatingly unfunny dialogue which you laugh AT and not WITH. Poor Jet Li’s character is named Ying Yang, which is one notch above being called Chin Chong. He get’s lumbered with a running gag about being short, while Randy Couture plays the inexplicably named Toll Road, who has a minor monologue about why his ears look so odd in a sequence so breath takingly lacking in actual jokes you can’t help but laugh. And you DO laugh, but at the wrong times.
There’s a moment where a heavy calls Dolph Lundgren’s Gunner ‘a joke’ to which he replies ‘Life’s a joke, SHITBIRD!’ then twats him one. There’s a sequence in which Mickey Rourke’s ex-Expendable and current tattoo artist Tool tells Barney about the time he didn’t intervene with a young girl’s suicide attempt and in essence let her die, and it’s utterly hilarious. By God, it isn’t meant to be, it is supposed to be so harrowing a tale that Barney decides to go back and save Sandra, but it’s just SO corny, SO po-faced and SO lacking in any dramatic substance that you can’t help but chuckle. Then, the coup de grace. When the villainous Munroe captures spunky but ultimately weak (ie. female, apparently) Sandra, he finds that she also paints. He grabs one of her pieces, shows it to her despot father and shouts ”THIS IS HOW IT STARTS!’ I half expected another action movie legend to pop up with this expression…
And then we laugh. At the wrong points, always, but we do laugh. Due to bafflement, mainly, but also because we are enjoying just how terrible the film is. And it could have been so good, for the right reasons. No waterboarding, no cowbarred emotional backstory, something decent for the women to do, more silliness, quips, fights, guns, explosions, such adrenaline fuelled stuff that boy’s dreams are made of. Will THE EXPENDABLES 2 make up for that? Check our review to find out.
I feel like walking up to Sly and saying ‘You want to make The Expendables 3 an ACTUAL pleasure and not a Guilty Pleasure? Okay… This is how it starts….’
The Expendables is out this Friday the 17th of August.
For more Guilty Pleasures, click here.
And remember…
