Any discussion of The Expendables must start with the cast. These actors, after all, are the reason why this film got made and the reason why anyone would be remotely interested in watching it. I don’t know how Sly Stallone did it, but he gathered a who’s who of the action elite. Some of the greatest badasses currently working in showbiz today.

So how do they do? Well….

• Stallone probably puts in the most effort, but we never learn anything about his character. A broken heart is hinted at but never addressed, and it’s outright stated that we may not even know his real name.
• Jason Statham gets a lot of screen time, but he doesn’t really get to do much with it. In fact, most of his screentime goes toward a girlfriend subplot that would have done just as much good on the cutting room floor.
• Jet Li also gets a lot of screen time, but nearly every second of it is somehow devoted to jokes about how short he is.
• Dolph Lundgren is surprisingly scary, but he’s constantly chewing scenery and he gets character moments at the beginning and end that are pure bullshit (shooting a guy is okay, but hanging him is wrong? Hello?).
• Eric Roberts plays a shamelessly stock role that’s totally devoid of nuance, but he does what he can with it.
• Mickey Rourke tries to deliver a heartfelt speech in the middle, but it’s a textbook reason why “show, don’t tell” is a good idea. He just goes on and on.

The cast also includes two wrestlers and a former NFL pro. All three suck. Randy Couture gets a brief monologue about his oddly-shaped ear and it’s painful to sit through. Terry Crews talks a bit about his favorite weapons and it’s laughable. But at least these two get a relatively brief amount of screen time. Steve Austin gets a sizable role as the villain’s right-hand man and his attempts at acting are just pathetic. I’m not kidding when I say that he had better line delivery on Celebrity Deathmatch.

Every actor in this movie gets a chance to shine. Everyone gets at least one good chunk of dialogue and everyone (save Rourke) gets at least one great action moment. This does not help flesh out the characters or make them sympathetic. Each character is given a single memorable trait — Lundgren’s a junkie, Couture is seeing a shrink, Stallone’s the leader, Statham has a rocky relationship, Jet Li is short, etc. — but this is a poor and lazy substitute for actually fleshing out the characters. Creating a roster of likable, sympathetic and three-dimensional characters is the hardest part of any ensemble movie, as well as the most vital. This movie tried it, failed and thus was doomed instantly.

Oh, and I suppose I have to talk about The Governator. It’s been widely publicized that Arnold Schwarzenegger found the time to make a cameo in this movie and I’m glad to say that it went rather well. The beginning was good, he had a nice bit of banter with Stallone… but then he says “Well, I’m busy anyway. Give the job to Stallone. Laters!” This begs the question of why Schwarzenegger would bother coming in the first place if he was just going to turn the job down anyway. And then, just to rub salt in the wound, Stallone makes some totally non sequitur wisecrack about how Ah-nuld’s character wants to be president. It really is like Stallone tried to find some way to weave Schwarzenegger into the story, allowing his cameo to make sense, only to say at the end “Nah, just fuckin’ with you. Hey, it’s Arnold Schwarzenegger!” *headdesk*

Additionally, Bruce Willis gets a cameo in the same scene, but his cameo is handled far better. His role actually plays a significant part in the plot and Willis manages to convincingly threaten Stallone. That’s not something just anybody can do.

We all know that the story for this movie is completely beside the point, but I’m going to talk about it anyway. Our setting is a small island nation under military rule with a completely Hispanic population. There, the head general is bought out by a rogue CIA bigwig who’s using the general’s land and manpower to produce cocaine. The general himself is of course powerless to do a thing about it, so the CIA has to hire our heroes and send them in.

The message I’m getting here is that life under a dictatorship sucks and brown people can’t do anything unless rich white men help them. Go USA!

Naturally, the premise comes with a native love interest. She’s played by Giselle Itie and I’m really not sure what to think about her here. On one hand, it seems like this hypermasculine male fantasy movie needed someone much younger, with supermodel looks that Itie frankly doesn’t have. On the other hand, I am so very glad that Stallone didn’t cast a girl half his age for the role. Fortunately, Itie does show some good acting chops, but she’s giving her lines next to Stallone, so take that for what you will.

Of course, anyone who goes to see this film will be concerned entirely with the action, and I’m glad to say that the action here is really quite good. For all it’s faults, there’s no denying that this movie knows how to blow shit up. I’m always amused when a film finds new ways to make something explode and this movie delivered. Moreover, the fight choreography is solid, with punches that really look like they hurt. The weaponry used is amazing and the sound design really made me feel like I was in the middle of a war zone.

So, yeah. The action in this movie is really good. Of course, it would be even better if I could see it clearly!

The film is a visual mess. The cinematographer shows an unusual preference for close-ups, frequently zooming in as far as the actors’ eyes. Seriously, there are entire sequences in which all we see of the actors are their eyes staring right at the screen. Moreover, many of the shaky-cam shots are hard to make sense of and the entire climax is made unintelligible by its night-time setting. The climax is so dark that I can’t tell one Expendable from another or which ones are being played by stunt doubles (which may have been the entire point, come to think of it). On a similar note, though the editing didn’t make the action sequences impossible to follow, it certainly came close.

Last but not least, the score for this movie is a joke. There are so many times in this movie when the music did not remotely match the action onscreen. For example, there was a moment in the Jet Li/Dolph Lundgren fight when Li was beating up Lundgren, then Lundgren turned the tables and the music actually got more uplifting.

I also feel that I have to talk briefly about the ending. Without giving too much away, the film ends with Statham reciting a bit of ad-libbed poetry — something he’d never done in the movie at any point prior — before he throws a knife at the camera. Cut to black. What? The poem had nothing to do with anything, and it seems strange that instead of focusing on Stallone or the group as a whole, the movie leaves us with Statham in the spotlight. It just seems like such a strange note for the film to end on.

The Expendables had absolutely no right to be a failure. Such a legendary meeting of professional badasses should have been a movie event of the year and of action movie history as a whole. Alas, even if this movie were to be judged by far less lofty standards, it would still be considered a disappointment. Fortunately, the actors in this movie bring a collective filmography containing a vast array of action movie classics. I humbly suggest that you go see one of them — any of them — rather than this.