Nowadays, it’s not unexpected to see fight scenes that are edited at such a rapid-fire pace that it’s almost impossible to tell what’s going on, or sometimes even who’s fighting who. And ever since this trend began about a decade ago, critics and moviegoers have said they don’t like it.
Yet most filmmakers love this approach, so we keep getting sequences like at the end of “The Expendables,” where you squint against the fast-flashing images and feel smart for figuring out, “OK, it looks like Stallone’s fighting Austin here. Got it.”
“The Expendables” is a blend of new-school stupid and old-school stupid — old-school in the sense that, like an ’80s action movie, the plot makes no sense whatsoever. The titular group — headed by Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham — takes a job (assigned by Bruce Willis, of the CIA) to take out a general on an island in the Gulf of Mexico.
The general isn’t a horrible guy — as far as military dictators go — but his government is propped up by a corrupt American businessman (Eric Roberts, expertly playing the a**h****) and his henchman (Steve Austin).
The writers and producers — a long list that includes Stallone, who also directed — never make it clear whether the general and his soldiers are good guys who are being used or bad guys who are willingly along for the ride. Further confusing matters, the citizens of the island don’t seem to have it that bad; we see a nice open-air fruit market on the street, for example. The only downside seems to be that Roberts, Austin and the General’s men randomly harass the citizenry by flipping over fruit stands (I guess that’s a legitimate downside, but a bizarre one).
Ultimately, Stallone’s team battles the entire army of about 100 soldiers, even though one could make a compelling case that they should be on the same side by that point. Also, the team inexplicably manages to rig every building of the military compound with explosives, which they detonate in the rapidly edited grand finale.
“The Expendables’ ” plot makes no sense whatsoever. But it least we can make sense of the sprawling cast of action stars: It exists to get people in the seats. In terms of telling a story, there’s no reason to have most of these guys in the movie. Arnold Schwarzenegger appears only to turn down Willis’ job and to emphasize that Stallone is an idiot for taking it. Jet Li is there for an unfinished arc about how he needs money for his family. Come to think of it, even Statham’s arc about his relationship with Charisma Carpenter is never resolved, and he’s the No. 2 man in the cast.
Mickey Rourke is on board to deliver monologues about how his soul has gone dark after years of mercenary fighting. In one speech, where the lens tops at his eyes and bottoms at his mouth, Rourke talks about seeing buddies killed and all that clichéd stuff, but actually he’s a good enough actor that he actually pulls it off — right up until the point where he segues into something about a woman jumping off a bridge and it ceases to make sense.
And Dolph Lundgren’s arc is so dumb that you just have to see it for yourself and be amazed.
“The Expendables” is incredibly stupid, but we all knew that going into the theater. The real question is whether it’s entertaining. Frankly, it kind of is; it delivers a fair amount of chuckles as it goes about its predictable business. And even if the characters aren’t written as they would be in a better movie (in the sense of actually possessing character), the members of the superstar cast are all charismatic and watchable.
That keeps “The Expendables” from being completely numbing, even if it is indeed expendable.