From heroes to zeros

• Source: Global Times
• [09:23 August 24 2010]
• Comments

Sylvester Stallone (left) leads the pack in a scene from The Expendables. Photo: IC

By Nick Muzyczka

With a cast that reads like a Who's Who of muscle-bound action heroes, The Expendables was always going to be targeted at a particular demographic.

Plot and character development were actually never going to matter so much in this much-hyped Hollywood production.

The only question was how successfully director Sylvester Stallone could manage such a rich assemblage of tough-talking, mean-walking, ego-laden hard men, without the whole thing descending into a festival of cheap one-liners and cheesy one-upmanship.

The answer, unfortunately, is that The Expendables is a miserable, lazy and ultimately dull action film, as tired and washed-up as its aging cast.

Meet Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) and his friends Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) and Ying Yang (Jet Li), a strangely scruffy and haphazard bunch of elite mercenary fighters, who seem to have a lot of free time on their hands.

Suddenly cameos by Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger (both of whom reach career lows in their short scene together) save the boys from their fate of long, drawn-out, endlessly inane and insane chatter about tattoos and troublesome women.

They have a new job! Button-down lumberjack shirts and old T-shirts are swapped for Kevlar jackets and smoke grenades as the warriors head to some random island "in the Gulf" to topple an evil opium growing scheme conducted by a constantly sneering rogue CIA operative (Eric Roberts) and a comically stereotypical Latin-American military leader (David Zayas).