Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Randy Couture, Terry Crews, Eric Roberts, and more.

Directed by: Sylvester Stallone

Yes, so I finally got my chance to see, “The Expendables” today. I didn’t do much shopping for myself at the mall today. All I bought was Dave Mustaine’s new book, that was about it. Anyway, on with my review…

Plot/Synopsis: A group of Mercernaries has been deployed to Somalia to stop pirates from killing hostages. After that brief incident, Barney Ross (Sly’s character) meets with Church (Willis) and Trench (Schwarzenegger) to give Barney a mission that he needs to take the Expendables group to Vilena (a fictional South American country), to take down a dictator.  However, the dictator has henchmen to protect him and the Expendables must fight there way to take down the dictator.

My thoughts on the film? It was nothing mind blowing and nothing amazing. Just your typical popcorn action movie. The plot was simple and kind of silly. The dialogue spoken in the movie was short and simple like most Sly movies are. The writing wasn’t the best, but I loved the action. The action scenes were a fun ride. While I did enjoy the movie a lot, I had a few disappointments.

Lets get the disappointments out of the way before I start talking about what I liked about the movie:

• No sex scenes and no female nudity – Ok, I know Sly’s goal with the movie was that he wanted this film to be for strictly men. There were hot babes in the movie, yes, there was Giselle Itie, Charisma Charpenter and Mickey Rourke had a hot blonde chick in the flick, but there were no make out scenes at all. No naked tits & ass, no nothing. Time out Sly, if you’re going to make a movie for men, consider a few sex scenes and naked boobies! It’s not a complete man film without that stuff! Sorry Sly, consider this for the sequel please?
• Jet Li had very little screen time – Jet Li’s character, Yin Yang was the ultimate bad ass out of all the characters! It’s a shame he wasn’t used much. Jet Li was used for the shooting scene on a truck and he had a fight scene with Dolph Lundgren, that was it.
• Jason Statham had too much screen time more than any other character. It seemed that this film was more about Jason’s character, Lee Christmas, he was the leading character and not Barney Ross?
• Blood was CGI. The blood in the movie was so fake and cartoonish looking.
• Eric Roberts wasn’t a good villain for this movie. I was kind of bored of that role.

What I liked about the film?

• The Arnold, Bruce and Sly scene.
• The action was pretty good. Plenty of explosions, gun shooting, and car chases.
• Stone Cold’s villain character was better than Eric Roberts. Stone Cold was the real badass. It made you really want to hate the guy. It reminded me back when Stone Cold was heel back in his WWE days. Stone Cold didn’t talk much in the movie either, he just stared at the camera throughout most of the movie and when he did speak he seemed like he really was in his Stone Cold character. Awesome!
• Sly goes shirtless in the tattoo scene with Mickey Rourke. Sly didn’t go shirtless in “Rambo”, but he did in this movie. Sly’ is in impressive shape for a guy his age.
• Seeing Dolph Lundgren on the big screen again. It was so weird seeing Dolph on the big screen again but awesome at the same time. I’m very happy to see Dolph back where he belongs. Hopefully this film will help Dolph get more big screen movies and no more straight to DVD. I always liked Dolph. It was good to see him and Sly team again. Dolph’s acting in this film was pretty decent too.

Not a bad flick, but it could use some improvements. Hopefully Sly will make the sequel better!

Score for “The Expendables” = *** (3 stars as in “good”)

Kev