.jeri.

Sylvester Stallone seems so hit and miss with his movie projects. There are certain times, in some of the Rocky movies, or even in movies like Cop Land, where he shows a certain aptitude for making character-driven movies, even if the character comes out between a lot of action scenes. In The Expendables, there are certain glimpses of that, but most of the movie feels rather generic, at it seems like he's just trying to turn up the violence to make up for what's lacking.

The cast of the Expendables is something everyone talked about, and it's the only reason I had any interest in the movie. Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, all in one flick? Sounds like fun with all those huge action stars, right? Well, really, this is a Stallone-Statham pairing, with Jet Li's character being abused, and then the non-supserstar actors like Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, and Steve Austin take up more time than I wanted. Sadly, the promise of Bruce Willis was a weak one. He shows up for one scene along with Schwarzenegger, and the two trade some boring lines before taking their exits. So really, the only person left of any interest for me was Jason Statham. He does have some cool moves, especially the scene where he sits in a gunner seat at the nose of a plane and explodes a pier.

The movie does succumb to some cliches that remind us these that Stallone is an old boy, and he's reliving his action movie glory days. The thing that made me laugh the most was an unnecessarily long segment in which the Expendables run through a building and stick explosives to the walls. The music soars and they run down hallways while sticking clumps to walls.. for a very long time. Maybe it wasn't actually that long, but I couldn't figure out why it was so emphasized. With the amount they seemed to plant, I thought they were planning to wipe out an entire city.

Overall, I've already forgotten most of what I saw because the film was rather generic. It wasn't terrible and didn't have a lot of cheesiness to it, but it didn't impress me much either. I can say that I enjoyed it well enough in the theater, but it certainly didn't overwhelm me with how awesome these Expendable guys are. It's probably worth catching at the cheap theater or for a mindless rental. All I know is that Statham stood out as being not-so-expendable as an action star while I really couldn't care less if I saw the others in an action movie again.. especially the way Stallone's still using closeups on himself despite the way his face is morphing over the years. Seriously, those eyebrows!