Google

Saturday, August 14, 2010

The Expendables

Medium : English
Starring : Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke

Director : Sylvester Stallone


These days, every week
4 or 5 releases from different languages are reaching theaters. So choosing a movie from them, to watch on the first day, would be a tough task. This time, the choice was unique for me, I have decided to watch one of the costliest and richest productions from hollywood (as far as casting is concerned), titled 'The Expendables'. Days before, seeing the trailer of the particular movie, I was wondering how could it be possible to make a 'Twenty 20' type project in English. The number of faces that came one after other in that video were beyond imagination as it included Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham ('Transporter' series fame), Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren ('Universal Soldier' fame), Mickey Rourke ('Iron Man 2' fame) along with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis ('Die Hard' series fame). The mega multi-starrer project is directed by Stallone, who himself is the writer and director of many action oriented movies.

In the beginning, a group of highly trained private defense force named 'Expendables' (Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren etc) has been shown, involved in a mission to save hostages in Somalia. Though they were successful in it, there happened a misconduct of a member (Dolph Lundgren) during the fighting and he is being thrown out from the group. Now they gets another mission (from Bruce Willis) to free an island in South America from the dictator military general. Two among (Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham) the gang, goes there and got successful in building a stepping stone for the fight. The leader of the gang getting into love at first sight with the General's daughter. How the gang frees the country from the military general and some ex-American officials are shown in an action packed second half.

The relevance of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis, who are there for a minute, is unknown. The only good thing happened there is Stallone making funny
remarks regarding the President's role on Arnold. The end shots of the opening mission are confusing. The way in which the gang reaches the island and then move to the destination for the climax is not shown clearly. The family matters of Jason Statham is an old Indian concept only. Action hero from Asia, Jet Li has not been given a stable role. The tattoo expert (Mickey Rourke), giving sentiments about his family would have been a wastage of time if Stallone wouldn't get motivated to go back to see his lover. As usual, here also you have ultimate bomb blasting in the end killing all the soldiers, leaving the heroes with our much wounds. The action sequences are done well, especially the one involving Stallone and Statham in the aircraft.

As we have seen super hits like 'Rocky' and 'Rambo' series from Stallone in the olden days itself, it is difficult to support his creativity in this project. The director had used a darkish tone for telling the story. Though it creates the mood, it is not good to have such frames in night sequences. We will find it difficult to follow the incidents happening at night, due to lack of clarity.


'The Expendables' is an action movie with an old theme, the only advantage in watching it is that we can see so many action heroes together in a single project.


Rating : 6.5 / 10

No comments: