The Expendables: very disappointed

During the last week of basic training, we got 'town passes'. This let us visit the sites at San Antonio with friends and family. You had to wear your blues so you stuck out like a sore thumb, but it was great just to get out! Eating was a bear just because you couldn't get a crumb or mark on anything you were wearing. It was me, my mom, and my grandparents. We were at the mall and we came by the theater to see Inception. We missed it by an hour. We looked at our options and my eyes landed on The Expendables. I remember seeing the poster since before I left. Everyone was in it. Everyone I loved to see in action movies as a kid. I used to fantasize about what it would be like if you could get all your favorite action stars into one movie. That would be a heck of movie! The actors would set aside the paycheck and just come together to make a great movie. It finally happened. I bought the ticket and went in.

Stallone looked strange. I know he is old. I knew that going in. But he looks . . . strange. He looked strange in Rambo, but I forgave it, because a disturbed, warrior assassin-turned-boat-mechanic could look strange. He probably looked strange in Rocky 6, but it was too long ago for me to remember. Anyway, I was studying his face. Was it Botox again? It was enough that Axl Rose had done it. I don't get why people think it makes them look better. Why do they exchange no wrinkles for hideousness? If Robert Redford can do without it, anyone can. It also looked like he was wearing make-up. Now this is already violating major commandments for the raw-action movie genre. No make-up. For Heaven's sake, no Botox. And if you're going to be old, do it the Sean Connery way. There is a line though. Harrison Ford might have crossed it in the 4th Indiana Jones. Maybe. Even Schwarzenegger crossed it in Collateral Damage. Stallone was going in the right direction when he played an overweight cop in 1997's Copland. The Rambo years were over and 80's excess had stalled. The attempt to resurrect Rambo and Rocky is intriguing; I'd say Rambo succeeded, but Rocky failed. Schwarzenegger had it right when he went from movies to politics.

But with The Expendables, Stallone did a no-no and mixed it with a fantasy we all had when we were kids. It should have stayed a fantasy, because the odds of making the fantasy a good movie are very small. It works in a movie like Ocean's 11, full of heavyweights; it works because the people behind the scenes made it work. Who do we have behind the scenes here? Stallone: who hit it big with Rocky. In my opinion, I think Stallone got lucky with what would have been a good story if anyone made it. Rambo worked because it raised the cookie-cutter action flick to the second power: it was a game changer.

But back to Botox Stallone. Yes, he's huge, ripped, muscular. But we know it's fake. We know he is trying to look the part. We know this is a nostalgia-movie: old men reminiscing about the days when they ruled the world of action. The secret is for us not to know that. But it's hard to ignore the elephant in the library. And even when they're not old, we know they're force-fitted to suit the old guys; their coolness is supposed to offset the old dudes. Poor, poor Dolph Lundgren, the crazy guy, the unreliable loose-canon. This movie really makes it known how God-awful of an actor he is. Ultimate fighters aren't good actors. The younger-hip actors are put in to make the old ones relevant. That's it. And it's obvious. The people that go in hailing this as the best action movie since Die Hard are idiots. They can't think. Their brains are made of cheese. This is a movie you play in the background at a party while everyone is getting drunk. You look at a scene every once in a while, watch some body torn to shreds by a barrage of bullets, and then go back to drinking your guts out.

The movie is making a lot of money and it has a 7.4 at imdb.com. That tells me a couple of things. One: that a lot of people wanted this movie to work. I have a feeling that most of the 10/10 reviews secretly were disappointed, but they don't want their childhood fantasy to be tarnished. It's like trying to keep together a melting snowman as the sun comes out more and more. I'm done it myself. There's movies I wanted to be good so bad, and when it was over I'd defend it to the death, even though I'd secretly agree with what most of my detractors were saying. Two: the taste for a good, campy action flick still exists. This was done perfectly in Predator. Larger-than-life actors, thrown in a blender against the backdrop of a great story, great music. The action scenes taken by themselves are generic, but the originality lies in the execution. Commando works because it's less of an action flick than a Schwarzenegger flick, so the poor execution is forgiven. The Expendables could have been filled with the generic, stereotypical action flicks, but polished into solid, fast-paced glory, but the pace in the movie was tiring, boring. I felt nothing. That's the word, though: boring. A couple scenes moved me: the confession from Mickey Rourke's character. Schwarzenegger's cameo was almost meaningless. The only thing I appreciated was the lack of Botox - the President-comment was cute but forgettable. And all I could think was that he should leave the movie-set and get back to fixing California.

Yes, they're too old. But why was it that it didn't bother me with Bruce Willis in Live Free or Die Hard, or with Sean Connery in The Rock? It was done right. The backstory made it believable. They were characters, not caricatures of themselves. I never thought of Sean Connery as Sean Connery in The Rock; I never thought of Bruce Willis. I could care less who Bruce Willis is. It's John freaking McClane I want to know about. Who thought about Stallone's character, or Schwarzenegger's character, or Statham's character? No one. We were thinking about the actors. But that's all backwards and inside out. The whole point of the movies, of art, of mimesis, is to hide the actor and reveal the character. There was none of this in the movie. And even when a movie succeeds to entertain without the mimesis, the actor has to have the help of all the characters, an interesting story and script and all of that. True Lies, for example, or any Schwarzenegger movie, really. I could care less who his character was, because Schwarzenegger, in real life, was a character in himself - that's what made his movies watchable. But that charisma isn't there with Stallone, who is sort of goofy, and Willis, who stays to himself.

Just some thoughts. Why did Stallone use Botox? Why?