Sylvester Stallone speaks directly to lower brain functions. The director-actor understands that an action movie can have an outline rather than a plot; that how you dress this frame can more than compensate for a lack of any so-called higher artistic aspirations. Basically, The Expendables is your standard buddy black op. An elite pack of psychopaths must unlawfully invade a Latin American country suffering under a crackpot dictatorship and tear everything apart. For spice, the weak-piss Generalissimo is backed by ex-CIA heavies, with abilities that mirror our heroes, looking for somewhere tropical to get their coca crop grown. Continuing the body horror thread that the director hit upon in 2008's Rambo, Stallone's Expendables is dressed with traumatic ultra-violence. The film often most concerned with how easily a human body can be pulverised until it resembles nothing at all.
Accordingly, each of the mission men is assigned a ruinous, comic book superpower: Stallone is a quick-hand pistolero; Jason Statham a shuriken sniper; Jet Li a wushu bushwhacker; Randy Couture is a tumbling MMA bone snapper. Terry Crews becomes an instant action icon thanks to a spot demoing the latest in combat shotgun technology from Military Police Systems Inc. Crews' performance as Hale Caesar plays like an embedded teaser trailer for a one-man army franchise that audiences are sure to demand. Unusually, nobody is marginalised. Everybody gets their moment and an admiring close-up. Stallone shoots deep-focus faces, daring you to stare at the canyons and crevices lived into these frowned up fizzogs. Stallone's eye is loving and sympathetic, particularly when regarding the brooding confusion of Dolph Lundgren's Gunner, a satellite crew member who gets a meta-textual encore. Sylvester Stallone, an actor's director? Who knew?
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