What red-blooded American male could resist an action movie with the dream team of Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li and Dolph Lundgren?
Well, me — I’ve unfortunately suffered through this incoherent, inept, testosterone-drenched mess, which is very much the brain-dead male equivalent of “Sex and the City 2.”
I hear you guys asking hopefully: Just how bad could this possibly be with this can’t-miss cast?
Direct-to-video bad. Awful enough that Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme, not the choosiest of artists, took a pass after reading the script.
Clueless enough that Eric Roberts and Mickey Rourke, stars of the immortal “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” disappointingly share not a single scene.
This is a movie that can’t even figure out what to do with a joint cameo by Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who look like they are stalling for time until someone arrives with an actual script.
Blame co-writer and director Stallone, who did a decent enough job with his reboots of the “Rocky” and “Rambo” franchises in recent years.
Besides wearily sleepwalking through the lead role, Stallone appears to have directed the entire film while wearing a blindfold — and edited it with a roulette wheel.
You’d never believe “The Expendables” was made by a man who’s been in movies for 40 years (admittedly including such horrors as “Cobra” and “Over the Top”) — and directing them since 1978.
As in “Sex and the City 2,” the barely-there plot is the barest of pretexts for bonding rituals — in this case, hand-to-hand combat, shootouts and blowing up lots of stuff. Between the murky photography and the muddled editing, though, it’s hard to figure out who’s doing what to whom.
A spitfire named Giselle Itie is the token woman on hand. It’s very nominally about Stallone’s band of mercenaries rescuing her from a tropical isle where her dictator father is being controlled by rogue CIA agent Roberts (with a white streak in his hair).
But in truth, the most serious eyelash-fluttering and flirtation is going on among the aging muscleheads.
“Take it off!” retired mercenary-turned-philosophical tattoo artist Rourke orders Statham (representing the younger generation) at one point. Willis jokingly (?) suggests that Stallone and Schwarzenegger might want to, um, well, get a room.
Four decades after Stallone debuted in “The Party at Kitty and Stud’s” and the Governator in “Hercules in New York,” that might arguably make a more watchable movie than “The Expendables.”