Expendables

A lot of films claim to be “the ultimate action movie,” but many actually fulfill that role. Lucky for action-movie fans, you can always trust Sylvester Stallone to deliver.
There are some out there who may not respect Stallone as a filmmaker, and that is fine. He is no Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese and he probably won’t be winning any Academy Awards.
But he knows action.
He has proven it in the past, and in more recent years with the last Rambo installment. He has taken his action expertise and made the “ultimate action movie.”
The Expendables is what I like to call “awfulsome.” It is an awesome action film while having the awful dialogue, bad acting and over-the-top situations needed for action films.
Some people — and I apologize in advance, but it is mostly women — who can’t understand why it is OK for a guy to enjoy a movie where someone can hang onto a plane while it is taking off, but can’t get behind a film where a guy stops traffic to profess his love for a girl.
The reason is simple — it is cooler. And this film delivers above and beyond expectations for a great action movie. One of the big draws for the film is its cast.
Jason Statham, Jet Li, Stallone and Dolph Lundgren have all made themselves known in the action movie community and newcomers Terry Crews and Randy Couture also fit the bill for over-the-top-action-hero.
The film follows Barney Ross (Stallone) as he leads the Expendables, a band of highly skilled mercenaries including knife enthusiast Lee Christmas (Statham), martial arts expert Yin Yang (Li), heavy weapons specialist Hale Caesar (Crews), demolitionist Toll Road (Couture) and loose-cannon sniper Gunner Jensen (Lundgren).
When the group is commissioned to assassinate the dictator of a small South American island, they discover a deeper plot and decide to save the people of the island and kill lots and lots of people.
It is the plot of any action movie with mercenaries as the good guys. They are always heartless killers until they discover their inner feeling and blah, blah, blah. It doesn’t matter because no one comes for the plot, they come for the carnage.
The movie only has a plot to explain why the group is busy killing a bunch of people. It could be a movie about a puppy who is kidnapped by a ruthless animal shelter and the Expendables have to go in and kill everyone to get the dog home safely.
Guess what? I would still see it. I would pay $10 and go watch it because I know there would be a lot of cool fight scenes and at least one person getting blown in half. Does that make me sick? Nope, it makes me a guy.
This is the perfect movie for a group of guys to go enjoy so they can later re-hash all of the amazing action scenes and imagine what it would be like to be an awesome mercenary. If you are an action-movie fan, this is a must-see (there is always Eat, Pray, Love for your significant other if they don’t want to go.)

Luke Harris is the movie reviewer for the Star Group newspapers. He hopes they make another Expendables movie where the cast is pitted against the cast of the Twilight movies (Hint: he isn’t rooting for the Twilight folks). He can be reached at www.burlesonstar.net.