Film Yap: The Expendables

Watching The Endpendables is like being in an amateur film class. At the end of the term you watch everyone’s short films and most are pretentious. Then the football player who took this class as a blow-off shows his video. It’s him and all of his friends running through the woods with their fake guns and screaming most of the time. They think they made the most awesome thing in the history of cinema, but it’s just embarrassing.

The Expendables is that movie with a giant budget and worse actors. In an attempt to be the greatest 80s action movie made today, they just made a really boring 80s action movie made today. Blah blah blah. Some country has some evil guy in charge. The evil guy has to be Eric Roberts because he was born to be evil in a suit. So a mysterious guy hires Sylvester Stallone to take him out.

Sorry, his name is not Sylvester Stallone but Barney Ross. Jason Statham is Lee Christmas. Jet Li is Ying Yang. Dolph Lundgren is Gunner Jensen. Steve Austin is Paine. Terry Crews is Hale Caesar. Mickey Rourke is Tool. Why have characters when you can just have ridiculous dumb names.

The names reflect the rest of the movie as they go around shooting bad guys and throwing quips to each other. Both are lame in their execution. There is not one memorable action scene because everything is unimaginative and poorly shot. The jokes are so painfully bad that it’s impossible to even laugh at them out of pity. Yet, the film still pauses for you to laugh like it’s expecting uproarious laughter.

The entire existence of this film is to bring together a bunch of stars that used to be beloved. But Stallone’s camera doesn’t even use that to their benefit. Almost the entire movie is filled with single shots of the actors instead of showing them together. They all do individual things and when they’re together it’s too confusing to figure out anyone’s purpose. Why does this group need so many people? Also do they know they’re not very competent?

There is nothing to connect to and yet people still saw this in droves. It’s not as good as the other 80s films and not even as good as the rest of this summer’s fare. There were four films this year about a ragtag team of mercenaries (The Losers, The A-Team, and RED to an extent). This is the only one to not have any worthy characters (or even amusing archetypes) and not a single cool moment to validate them. Expendable, indeed.

The extras are absolutely amazing for all of the wrong reasons. The gag reel is void of anything worthwhile aside from Eric Roberts burping. The making-of treats Stallone like a valiant hero risking his own safety to make this movie. It is hysterical how melodramatic it is. None of it matches to Stallone’s commentary. The film is completely forgettable, but Stallone breaking it down like it’s Citizen Kane is the most wonderful thing. It’s so idiotic, it’s endearing. Rent the DVD only to listen to this; skip the film.

Film: 1.5 Yaps

Extras: 5 sarcastic Yaps

http://www.thefilmyap.com/2010/11/21/the-expendables-2/