The Expendables

The Heavy Weight of Nostalgia

I remember reading that Sylvester Stallone got the idea for *The Expendables* after attending a concert of 1960s pop groups. He realized that while one aging rocker alone on stage might be a tragic sight, ten of them together is an event. That's about as honest an origin story as this movie could have. It is, from start to finish, a film about the sheer arrangement of old muscle. Stallone rounds up the heavyweights of 1980s action cinema and tests whether their combined mileage and menace can still cut through the slick CGI gloss of 2010. Whether that lands probably depends on how much blunt-force punishment you're willing to enjoy.



As a director, Stallone has always been drawn to bodies that look worn down. He shoots Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, and Mickey Rourke less like untouchable heroes than like men doing hard labor for too long. Everybody is sweating. Everybody looks a little battered. But the style keeps getting in their way. The cinematography leans hard on shaky-cam, maybe to disguise the slower reactions of men in their fifties and sixties, and the result is that the fights blur into mush. Critic Paul Preston of The Movie Guys noticed this friction, arguing that "it's all the setup for a great '80s movie bogged down by the style-over-substance requirements of the 2010s action movie formula". He's right. The whole point is to watch these guys throw down, and the camera keeps refusing to let you see it properly.



There is an early scene that more or less stops the movie so it can admire its own stunt casting. Barney Ross heads into a church to meet a mysterious client played by Bruce Willis, and then Arnold Schwarzenegger appears. It's staged like the diner scene in *Heat*, except instead of two men sizing each other up in a serious way, it's a smirking contest with mumbled trash talk. Arnold looks a little strange there, stepping away from his actual job as governor of California for what feels like a favor called in between old friends, and the dialogue is brutally stiff. Dramatically, it does almost nothing. Still, I smiled. It's such a weird little museum display of action-movie history jammed into one dim room.



The real surprise here, though, is Dolph Lundgren. If Ivan Drago is your main reference point, what he does as Gunner Jensen feels genuinely off-kilter. Lundgren has a master's degree in chemical engineering in real life, and here he plays a man who seems chemically hollowed out, an addict collapsing inward inside that giant frame. Watch him in the scenes with Jet Li. He doesn't just seem tired. He looks emptied out. He gives the movie a jagged little current of sadness that doesn't really belong in a film mostly interested in blowing up a South American island.

You don't watch *The Expendables* for its plot, which has Eric Roberts as a rogue CIA agent perspiring through a paper-thin dictatorship story. You watch it to find out whether the old feeling is still there, the one from being twelve years old and bringing home a VHS on a Friday night. The movie is clumsy, deafening, and often stuck with terrible dialogue. But under all the gunfire and macho posturing, there's a stubborn insistence on not fading away. They're older now. They still swing.