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Tuesday, August 30, 2011

The Expendables [ Movie Review ] ★★

On paper, it seems to be a dream project for the fans of action movies from the 80s onwards. Just the mere names of Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a movie together would be enough to convince some of the movie fans to purchase a ticket for The Expendables. If it wasn't enough, the inclusion of Randy Couture (Mixed Martial Arts star), Terry Crews (former NFL star) and Steve Austin (WWE star) should send the movie's testosterone into overdrive mode.

But it's not the action movie that was expected from a collaboration of men with such caliber. It boils down to the issue of too many cooks spoil the broth. The Expendables had to take the time to give the numerous stars their screen time and that derails the build up for a good action movie.

Another problem would be that in a movie with so many macho manly stars and hardly any supporting acts to portrayal the weaker guys, it's really hard to define macho-ness the male star.

Then there the issue of having too many B grade actors in a movie. A B plus B does not equate to an A. In fact, the poor acting by the B grade actors actually made the movie even harder to sit through. Just imagine one B grade actor trying to top another B grade actor's act. Give me one action movie with one B grade actor will do.

All this problem mentioned above might have been solved if the script was stronger to accommodate all the stars and the director was more fitness in craving a good o action flick with a large ensemble. It has been done before with Dirty Dozen and the Ocean's Eleven series. The Expendables was simply not well made as an ensemble movie and the perceived excessive manliness cum Gung ho-ness of the old action movies felt rather subdued.

But it made enough money for a sequel and it's reportedly shopping for more male stars to join in the fray. Let's just hope that the folks who bought the movie tickets to The Expendables were not worn off by the novelty factor.

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