"It could be as good as A-Team". I keep telling myself this as I enter the cinema for The Expendables, an all-out action 15 rated flick starring action greats Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Bruce Willis and even the amazing Arnold Schwazeneger. If those two names get your spider-senses tingling, hold back a moment: Willis and Schwarzeneger only appear in a two-minute cameo sequence early in the film, and even that is nothing to get excited about. Mickey Rourke also appears a grand, whopping three times in The Expendables, but bar a somewhat touching scene about deaths and suicides (don't ask how it's touching, it just is) with Stallone, doesn't get nearly the same sort of screen-time as his stereotypical Russian role in Iron Man 2, only really included to make up the numbers. But of course, this being an action film, it's not about the acting, it's about the gruesome, bloody deaths we all came for. And yet, sadly, there aren't nearly enough of them to keep viewers happy. If anything can be said of The Expendables, it's that there simply enough of anything: comedy; romance; fight-scenes (too often far and few in-between); emotion, none of these elements come into play more than twice here, making for a film that, while undeniably epic at times, is nowhere near The A-Team's hilarious standard, and only provides light summer-holiday-flick thrills. Shame.
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