Movie to See: The Expendables
Don't get me wrong, this is not a great film. Not a good one either, actually, but it probably has enough eye
candy to carry it for the genre. It's an action flick where tons of famous actions stars beat each other up for a
couple of hours. There is an impossible mission, and our impossible mission force of invincible good guys go out
and execute that impossible mission. Do they succeed? Well, you've actually
seen an action movie before, right?
Then I think you already know how this one will end...
Yeah, this film could have been MUCH better. (Maybe if Chuck Norris had been invited to the party...) But if
you go into this one thinking you're going to get a great script and a complicated mind-bending plot, then you're
fooling yourself and are
definitely setting yourself up for disappointment. This is about explosions, damsels
in distress, blood, guns, and a stupid number of moments where the good guys get to flex their sweaty muscles for the
camera. If you don't like that, then you
really won't like this. If you
do like that, then this one
will at least satiate your need to see a few things blow up.
Move to Skip: Stone
This movie really should have worked. The cast is great; with De
Niro, Norton and Jovovich, you can be rest assured
that the acting portion of this movie is well in hand. No problems
there. And frankly, the storyline for this movie
was also pretty interesting. There was plenty of opportunity for an
exploration into the seediest, darkest elements of the human soul...
But there was just
something about the execution of this film that was completely lost on me. I didn't find much
"thrill" in this thriller. In fact, the pace is pretty flat, and the plot is fairly predictable. It's worst sin, however,
is that there is
no one in this film that you really care about. All of the
real victims are fringe characters, and
their destinies and personal trials seem very distant from the main action of the film. In fact, it is the story arc
behind
the main action of the film that really sets up the action with our main three characters -- we just never get to explore the
behind-the-scenes story (except for bookend segments that frame the main story).
While this kind of plot-feint may have worked in a
quirky film like
Rosecrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, this wasn't a quirky film. Further, that film only worked
because everybody (or at least anyone who would bother watching it) already
knows the story of
Hamlet, so
looking at the story on the sidelines of our would-be assassins was kind of interesting and amusing. Unfortunately, in this
movie, I just really didn't care about the side bar characters (played by the heavyweight actors) or their predictable
trysts. And because I didn't
know the over-arching drama where the Norton/Jovovich/De Niro action was taking place,
the truly sympathetic story arc is completely lost. That made it hard to really care about what happened in the camera's eye.
Ultimately, it felt more like a wasted opportunity than a seedy drama. A rare miss for the big three actors in this film.
