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Published: 19 August, 2010
by DAN CARRIER

THIS violent and tragically bad action film sells itself as being a last hurrah for a generation of tough guys who blasted their way through our cinemas in the 1980s. And what a way to bow out.

Within a minute we’ve watched a Somali pirate blown very graphically in half.

It sets the tone for a series of painful endings. Hands are sliced off. Knives dug into skulls. Legs are snapped. Heads are ripped from necks.

The small matter of a storyline tries and essentially fails to emerge from the sweat-saturated testosterone swamp of Sly Stallone and Mickey Rourke hanging out in a tattoo parlour, grunting at each other and flexing muscles.

The Expendables are a gang of mercenaries, made up of saggy, scarred psychopaths.

How they came to be in this gang is not clear, but it seems if you’ve got a problem, and you don’t know where to find the A-Team, then this lot will bang some heads together for you.

They are approached by a Mr Church (Bruce Willis) and given a mission to go to a tiny island somewhere south of the border and take out a military dictator, who appears to be based on General Alcazar in the Tintin books.

So Barney Ross (Sly) and Christmas (Jason Statham) fly a decrepit old seaplane to the island, pose as birdwatchers (very, very badly), meet gorgeous contact Sandra (Giselle Itié) and then case the joint.

This consists of driving up to the presidential palace and killing lots of guards. Subtle. Chased off the island, they leave poor Sandra behind.

To make matters more interesting, it seems General Alcazar is not really in charge at all. No, it’s a rogue CIA agent who is using the island to grow and manufacture cocaine.

This helpfully puts the goodies and baddies into boxes to make it easier  for the audience to see what each character stands for. Sly and his crew represent a Republican red-neck idea of true Americans.

They are freedom fighters, modern day Josey Wales.

They drive Harleys and their appearance stage left is to a soundtrack of pub rock.

The baddies are a moustached South American dictator and a suave agency man: they represent simplistic targets that crop up time and again in Hollywood films: corrupt foreigners and the supposed evils of big government. 

The Expendables lacks charm, is no more than a muddle of formulaic set-pieces, and in the few places where it could have been fun – Rourke chewing the fat with his buddies has potential for some skilled scriptwriting – we are instead treated to dialogue that seems to have been cribbed from graffiti on the toilet walls of a fleapit gym.

Even the moments of humour fall flat.

Arnie Schwarzenegger appears for the best part of 30 seconds as a rival mercenary after the same job as Sly.

After a brief verbal ruck, Sly pokes fun at Arnie’s new career as a politician. And that is possibly the highlight of this bizarre film whose sole purpose seems to be to massage Sly’s ego.