William Bibbiani Reviews The Expendables!
We’re men. (MANLY men!) We’re men in…
It’s a fact: The Expendables is so fucking manly that it will give everyone in the audience an extra testicle. In other words, ladies be warned… because this is a flick for the fellas.
The Expendables is a film in which every line of dialogue mentions either guns, penises, death, your mother, or explosions, and in which women represent more than they’re actually good for. These are men who don’t need women, but understand that as heterosexuals they’re supposed to want them around. These are men who disappear on their girlfriends for an entire month without so much as a by your leave, but then can’t comprehend why these ladies would want to go out with someone else after all that time. These men are trained to kill Gods with their left nostrils… Aren’t they worth the wait?
The Expendables don’t spend ALL of their time killing people. Sometimes they just hang out.
By now, fans know that The Expendables isn’t so much a movie as an excuse to put as many male action stars as humanly possible together on the big screen for the first time. There are some glaring omissions (Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, Kurt Russell, Wesley Snipes), but one gets the impression that writer/director Sylvester Stallone will get to them in the sequel. In the meantime, we have to “settle” for Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Steve Austin, Randy Couture, Gary Daniels, Mickey Rourke, Eric Roberts and Terry Crews, along with two cameos by Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, which were probably supposed to be a surprise but have since been ruined by every trailer. The plot is rudimentary: Half of those guys are mercenaries who are hired by one of those guys to kill the other half, who are also mercenaries, working for another one of those guys. Along the way, many people explode, have their limbs chopped off and are set on fire. It says a lot about The Expendables and the purity of its purpose that setting one of those guys on fire is not enough to kill him. Instead, the fire only weakens him enough that he can be killed afterwards by a macho, macho, macho punch to the face.
To The Expendables, a situation like this qualifies as “Good Natured Ribbing.”
The Expendables, it must be said, is a very good “Guy Movie.” It may even qualify as a good movie by less stringent criteria as well, if you’re not put off by the obvious pandering to its target audience. Boom, boom, splat go the action sequences, and you’ll cheer every single time as clever – or at least cathartic – murder and mayhem fill practically every frame. These are “good guys,” one imagines, because the other guys are worse. I’m reminded of the animated series for “Rambo,” which took a tragic figure, disenfranchised with killing but forced into further damning his soul by outrageous circumstance, and turned him into Pro-War superhero destroying continents because Uncle Sam told him it was the right thing to do. Mickey Rourke has a somber monologue in The Expendables about the exact moment when he thinks he lost his soul forever. Then everyone goes out and kills everyone in a third world country, because “it’s the right thing to do.” These are men so manly that they don’t know the meaning of “irony.” They may not even be able to spell it.
But hey, we accept violence in movies because we know that, in real life, it’s bad. Movies like The Expendables and the kinds of movies that made its one hundred and seventy-seven stars famous present the fantasy that in the right context, wanton destruction is not only justified, but also pretty darned cool. The Expendables is an exaggeration of socially acceptable male bonding, much of which inexplicably involves the casual glorification of violence: hunting, football, darts (they’re pointy, right?), etc. With a single protagonist a film this flimsy couldn’t have supported a feature length running time, but with a team dynamic there’s something uplifting about the experience. Masculinity may be out of fashion these days, but The Expendables reminds us that there’s nothing wrong with spending all your time with other virile men, shooting things out of powerful other things and leaving only enormous splats in your wake.
If you’re a guy, The Expendables will probably make you splat your pants in utter joy. If it doesn’t, then you’re probably just in the wrong fucking theater.
