Utterly Expendable: The Expendables

Perhaps they don’t realise the irony in titling the movie The Expendables, or perhaps they don’t expect their intended audience to even notice what the film is called because they’ll be too distracted by the gun play and slo-mo explosions, but they’ve invented a whole new pointlessness in The Expendables and if you watch it, that pointlessness will infect your life. It’s merely the latest in a recent eczema-like spate of lobotomised nostalgia-dependent action carnivals, hot on the heels of the equally dim-witted and ludicrously tedious explosion-fest of the A-Team and lagging way behind the classic fun of the knucklehead pedigrees we all know and love.

 TOUGH NIHILISTS LIKE A VD-LACED HOOKER

Heralded as a return to the glory days of macho violent action movies, they’re corralled together all the usual suspects (plus some others), none of which have done anything of any value since before the intended audience of The Expendables were born, and squashed them all into one feebly imagined action spectacular. If the title and the cast list alone isn’t enough warning to avoid this film like a Janiston romance flick or a VD-laced hooker then surely sitting through the parade of lumbering exploding awfulness that constitutes the trailer should be. Whilst I would be the first to admit I have fond memories of Arnold carrying tree trunks up a mountain in Commando, before jumping off a taking-off plane, outgunning a whole private army in a garden, and then engaging in a truly ludicrous knife fight with a jackass to rescue his implausible daughter, I can’t help but feel that this new movie is itself utterly expendable. It’s for people who consider their own free time expendable, as well as their lives, brain cells, relationships, self respect, and everything else. Therefore I must conclude that it’s for tough nihilists who have eaten way too much whey and pumped way too much protein into their iron to really know what’s going on. It’s for people who ask you to ‘spot them’ and people who try and fight you at traffic lights. It’s for muscley assholes, and for people who like their assholes as muscley as possible. It’s for the expendables in our society, and to prove they are the appropriate audience for this movie, anyone entering the theatre should be blown out of an airlock on entry and then exploded as they hurtle through the sky, probably trying and failing to come up with an amusing quip as they ignite.

REPEATED FAILURE  THAT DEFECATES WILDLY IN YOUR FACE

I’m all up for movies with decently ludicrous lines in them. Lines like ‘He’s dead tired’, ‘Stick Around’, or ‘What happened to you? You used to be someone I could trust.’/ ‘I woke up’ always raise a smile and the lack of these was one of the many, many reasons why the new Predators movie was a total waste of time. But I’d rather have a decent movie peppered with ridiculous dialogue rather than having to sit through a turgidly dull mass of bloody awfulness in the hope that someone may say something dumb enough to make me laugh. They can’t recapture the magic of those 80s classics. They’ve repeatedly tried and failed, as we’ve all unfortunately seen with the clanking/exploding bore-fests and increasingly uninteresting explosions of the latest Terminator, Die Hard, and Predator movies.

All in all I’m sure this is all good fun for hammy, sweatfest musclebrains who’ve guzzled enough Stella to make this movie bearable and need a distraction from bellowing at the TV or struggling to comprehend the editorials in Nuts magazine, or for people who think that going to see this movie is in some way ironic in the same way that U2 emerging from a lemon was, but it’s never going to equal the fond memories I have of this sort of wonderful macho trash from my childhood. If I want a rowdy night out I think I’d rather drink a bottle of rum and go out on the town wearing a polo shirt than sit in the cinema watching this turd of a movie as my poor eyeballs leak out of my skull in protest and my brain tries to mate with my stomach in order to stimulate itself enough to survive the monotony of the ordeal.

SLASHING OVER THE TOILET SEAT OF YOUR CHERISHED CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

The Expendables: a dumb and highly exploitative waste of everyone’s time. Especially since you can buy Commando, Universal Soldier, or Die Hard on DVD (or cheekily download them, if that’s your style). This is yet another example of Hollywood treating its audience like a brain-dead toilet and defecating wildly into the face of cinema-goers the world over, whilst having a slash all over the toilet seat of their cherished childhood memories. 

 Explodingly Sweaty Regards

 BioBLAM!