A group of mercenaries are employed to kill the general and drug kingpin ruling a South American island.
I approached The Expendables expecting a kind of comic deconstruction-cum-knowing homage of the 1980’s action film but this is no Kiss Kiss Boom Boom. Instead we get exactly what Sylvester Stallone has been doing for years. Verbatim. Basically you spend the duration watching a collection of fat-necked, rubber-faced old men with skull tattoos who ride Harley Davidsons and date ex-strippers, high-fiving each other after a long day at the office committing mass murder. The action scenes are okay if you like this type of thing, but Stallone is a bit too gleeful in his representation of mutilation, evisceration and decapitation making it all feel a bit tasteless and unpleasant rather than fun and exciting. It surely holds some kind of Guinness record for blowing things up but it happens so often, by the end it actually it had actually become a little tiresome.
Incredibly loud and incredibly stupid, it’s not as bad as some of Stallone’s earlier debacles of the 1980’s, but it’s still yet another 90 minute slice of Sly mid life crisis.
4/10
Film Noird 