Here’s my review for the original Expendables, which I sort of liked.
SPOILERS AHEAD! SPOILERS AHEAD! SPOILERS AHEAD!
I don’t want to think of Sylvester Stallone as a simpleton, but he keeps forcing me to with movies like The Expendables.
Here’s the thing: I like Stallone. He strikes me as an earnest movie-maker with decent storytelling instincts. I thought Rocky Balboa was great, and I could really sense his desire to get back to the roots of the character that made him famous.
But even in Rocky Balboa, I got a sense of Stallone the simpleton. The movie’s plot hinges on a video game that pits the aging Rocky against the current heavyweight champion — and you know what? I bet that’s where Stallone got the idea. A video game. By comparison, in the leadup to the release of Rambo (the fourth in the series that began with First Blood), Stallone (if memory serves) revealed that he got the idea for the fourth Rambo from a magazine article, as well as from the Saw movies, although the horror franchise only guided Stallone’s hand in pumping up the volume of the violence he depicted. (The splatter-gore aesthetic, while less intense in The Expendables, is still with Stallone.)
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