The Expendables: The Notable Draw

When I first saw the trailer of this movie, I was happy with the possibilities, a whole gamut of action legends in one movie. Would there be enough scenes to showcase their fighting prowess or techniques? Would there be enough moments that would actually make this film memorable to the movie going public? Would it be all hype as movies tend to be nowadays?

My favorites were all there. I thought that I would have to warn female movie-goers because of the amount of testosterone the movie would generate. The strong male atmosphere might be enough to get them pregnant. Of course, there haven’t been such reports but that is something you can expect out of a production like this, a testosterone-driven ride either to salvation or damnation.

The Expendables, led by Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone), are a group of elite mercenaries who are hired to take down an evil dictator named General Garza who rules the fictional island of Vilena off the Gulf of Mexico. The group consists of ex-SAS and blades specialist Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), demolition expert Toll Road (Randy Couture), weapons specialist Hale Caesar (Terry Crews) and martial expert Yin Yang (Jet Lee).

The interaction between action heavy weights Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger (As Trench, a rival leader of another mercenary group) and Bruce Willis (as Mr. Church) was great to behold. Unless they come up with another movie like this, when will you ever see these guys interact again?

The Expendables’ mission becomes more complicated when an ex-CIA man Munroe (Eric Roberts) is revealed to be backing up the dictator along with his muscular henchman, Paine (Stone Cold Steve Austin) and Brit (Gary Daniels). The dictator’s rule is to make sure that the people in his island cower in fear of him. In addition to that, the team also has a former disgraced Expandable in the form of Jensen (Dolph Lundgren) who happens to be an expert sniper. As you can deduce in this writing, the bad guys have five super dudes and the good guys have five super dudes, all just waiting for their turn to fight. And that’s how it turns out — a spectacle of battle, filled with beautifully choreographed fights scenes and timed explosions. People die. People live. Go see the movie, I don’t want to spoil it here!

The Good: People will never get to see a chance to see all of these notables sharing one scene ever again. Of course, with the movie pulling in millions of dollars, it’s not hard to imagine an Expendable 2 soon and with the current trend, Hollywood really loves trilogies. Mayhem and conflict, chaos and destruction, manly poses and manly actions — you don’t expect them to sit around and drink tea and have calm conversations while eating biscuits ,right? You won’t be disappointed if action is what you are looking for in a movie.

The Bad: The novelty of bringing in a pool of action stars is good and all but then as the movie goes, there won’t be enough moments for them to shine. Not enough witty dialogue to share and not enough time for the characters to be fully recognized and remembered.

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