Expendable Plot

I like action movies. It's hard no to. I'm pretty sure it was an evolutionary necessity. Previous to action movies, men were all just a bunch of wusses. Then John Woo started making movies. Men all over the world got excited and machismo flowed through their veins like blood of henchmen in Kill Bill. We were finally able to build up the courage, muscles, fighting skills, absurd weaponry, agility for outrageous stunts and logic that doesn't always make sense. And this was how humankind eventually destroyed the evil dinosaurs.

So it made perfect sense for me to see Expendables, which is possibly the ultimate guy movie. It stars Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, the honorable Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Terry Crews (the Old Spice "Building Kick" guy), Randy Couture, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, and maybe other people. Statham is amazing in almost everything, but that's not a good reason to make Crank 2 or Death Race.* Just keep making movies with the exact same plot and action scenes as Transporter 1 and 2. The action movie fan sub species seemed fairly hyped for the first ever time Sly, Bruce and Ah-nald shared the screen, but it was over in 2 minutes and boring.

Strangely enough, that's not my only criticism of this movie. It seemed that rather than hire writers, or even a single writer, to make a script that made sense and had a plot, Stallone decided to let all the "actors" make their own "plots." This must've made sense at the time for two reasons. First off, after hiring all of these action stars and treating his face like Mr. Potato Head, Sly probably had no money for writers. Secondly, everyone is familiar with the old saying "Too many chefs makes the soup delicious and even Oscar worthy." This led to lots of plot threads for each character and a twist that everyone saw coming and nobody cared about. Still, without this movie, I'd never know how to infiltrate any Third World Countries, and it's possible we'd all be speaking dinosaur now.

*Or even Crank, really. That movie was no good.