There was no way I was going to see this movie. The first one was so fucking stupid it doesn’t bear going into again. But I will anyway. Turns out if you set out to make a bad movie on purpose, you can still fuck that up.
Anyway, somebody somewhere really knows my demographic. They did the one, the ONLY, thing that would have resulted in my seeing this film let alone spend money to see it. They cast Jean-Claude Van Damne.
If you’ve never seen the documentary JCVD, I reccomend it. It’s so freakishly unforgiving of its subject its almost not watchable. And at the end he stares at the camera and gives a middle finger to his entire career. Even if I weren’t gay for this guy from 1989-1998, I’d have had to respect him after that documentary.
Ok, so this review now has one positive thing. That’ll be the last one.
I don’t give a shit if you call your shot and say you’re making a bad movie on purpose. The world has moved on since the time of F.I.S.T. It just has. There’s a minimal effort level expected for the assignment. Machette is a bad movie made on purpose. So’re the Grindhouse pair. So was Shoot’em Up. What those movies do not have in common with either expendables is they weren’t boring.
So, there’s a mindless non-plot. So the acting’s bad. So the film is only a light excuse to show pictures of people dying over and over. I have problems with none of these things. But one thing you cannot do is make it boring. Hero has almost no plot to speak of and no acting of consequence and is simply and excuse for a bunch of fighting. It’s a bad movie on purpose. Yet, its awesome. The fighting is fucking awesome and I could watch it all day.
Let me describe all the action in Expendables: a quick shot of people getting mowed down with an automatic shotgun. Repeat for 2 hours. It makes me think the people working at Nazi concentration camps must have been bored as fuck.
And it wasn’t funny. There were tons of “jokes” in between shittily shot mowing down scenes. They were mostly Stallone and Statham doing some kind of retarded Rosencrantz and Guildenstern bullshit.
And the cardinal sin in making a bad movie, it’s insecure. Stallone isn’t completely comfortable mocking himself. He’s a sensitive boy. Which is why he wears more blush in this thing than… I don’t even have an analogy. His face just looks like one of those 5 year olds who do beauty padgents. Or to be more consise, he looks like a fucking clown. And I’m pretty sure that’s not intentional. He takes great care to look ‘cool’ in these films. The film should be a sendup of the brawny action movies of the 80’s and early 90’s. But its not. It doesn’t have the stomach to poke much fun at the mechanism. So it just does some rifs off famous catch phrases and does more boring mowing down.
And, they somehow made Chuck Norris jokes not funny. I don’t know how that’s possible in the physical universe we occupy. I’ve got people looking into it. Top men. And they don’t know.
But there’ll be another one. Why? Because the emperor has no clothes.
Anyway, Sly, if you must do this watch Shoot em Up. Watch Machette. Watch Sidekicks for God’s sake. And hire a fucking writer.