I wish I'd been in the casting session for this year's The Expendables 3, as Stallone checked off his big list of ageing action stars, realised someone was missing and yelled "Someone get me Dr Frasier Crane!"Īlthough The Expendables played to Dolph Lundgren's strengths wonderfully, there remains a tiny part of me that wishes he got to sing Elvis Presley songs, drum and do karate simultaneously in it. Imagine how much better Requiem for a Dream would have been if Jennifer Connelly had turned to camera right at the end and said "Our lives are incredibly rough / I think that we've all had enough / His arm has gone bad / He misses his dad / And I've got to stick this up my chuff". However, I will begrudgingly admit that more films should end with limericks. "I once knew a man called Tool / To me, was the epitome of cool / He was good with a knife / Bad with a wife / And I don't think that he went to school". The Expendables script must have been read by hundreds of people, all with their own individual system of checks and balances, and nobody thought to tell Sylvester Stallone that he'd buggered the climactic limerick up. It's almost twice as long as it should be, has an unnecessary and frankly self-aggrandising midsection and ends with 'Oh yeah!'. And then he says it:Ī-A-B-B-C-C-A-A-D? That's not a limerick, you idiot. He takes a deep breath, sucking in inspiration from all around him. Jason Statham is having a knife-throwing contest with Mickey Rourke. Because this, after all the quips and explosions and death, is how The Expendables ends. Sylvester Stallone is clearly a man of three strong opinions: the opinion that all films would be better if they ended with a limerick the opinion that the limerick's traditional A-A-B-B-A rhyme scheme is fundamentally flawed and the opinion that all poems would be better if they ended with the words "Oh yeah".
No real discussion of The Expendables would be complete without a few words about its closing lines. Stallone and Mickey Rourke in The Expendables Mickey Rourke gets a borderline incomprehensible monologue about a suicide he could have prevented. Stallone gets to run through the jungle with a machine gun again. The Expendables is a surprisingly democratic film, too. It's charming, and then it gets tiresome, and by the end it just about makes it all the way back around to charming again. Watching The Expendables is like listening to an army of Vince Vaughns trying to recite a three-week-old copy of Nuts after staying awake for 72 hours. And between all the murdering? Mindless yammer. Personally I think things peak with the very first death of the film, when a Somali pirate explodes and covers an entire interior with his guts, but you may think otherwise.
The casual loss of life in this film is staggering. If that's why you're watching The Expendables again, you're not going to be disappointed. They watch it to see all their old favourites scream back onto the big screen, leaving as many dents in it as they can. But that's not why anyone watches The Expendables. It's light on characterisation and subtext. There's a baddie on an island, so the goodies go and kill him.
Sylvester Stallone in The Expendables.Īdmittedly, the plot of The Expendables is painfully slight.
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