The Expendables Epidemic

             The Expendables movie franchise has become a plague. Sylvester Stallone, star of the Expendables, started this movie series with the hopes of making people’s dreams come true. He wanted to bring a bunch of badass actors from the past and present together on the big screen for an action adventure. Stallone failed at utilizing the full potential of this concept by being involved in the writing and directing process. He thinks to small and ends up delivering bland stories with craptastic scripts.

               I personally am all for watching ancient action stars kick booty, but only if it’s done right. Yes the Expendables franchise has plenty of glorious action moments, but it lacks in areas such as story, humor, and effects.

The humor in these movies is redundant and stale. I rarely laugh in these films, because of the corny nature of the jokes. Famous lines like “I’ll be back” which was said by Arnold Schwarnegger are used quite a bit. Characters make mediocre jokes that don’t flow well with the script.  You get a sense that the actors themselves went up to the director and said, “Hey let me make this really corny joke, I promise it will be funny.”  A great example of this are the short jokes about Jet Li. Jet Li is the butt of jokes constantly and it’s really annoying now. Jet Li deserves betterL.

 

 Dialogue is pretty basic. The actors have wooden deliveries for their lines and boy is it apparent.  Actor Dolph Lundgren is given horrendous lines. You can barely understand what he’s spewing out. He sounds like the jolly green giant mixed with Phil Collins.

              The effects for these movies are OVER the top bad (Sci fi television bad). I’ve never gotten a good quality production atmosphere from these films.  I understand that studios only offer a certain amount of money for films, but at least make the effects look good. Often times in the film franchise CGI helicopters, explosions, blood, etc are used. The helicopters and explosions look like they were cut out of a newspaper and then added in post production. Stuff like this makes the movie feel cheap which a good thing isn’t.

 

  Finally the story. The plot for these movies is very generic. You get the cliché antagonist that kills for money, the random love interest and the near invincible protagonists. I can always tell what’s going to happen before it happens. In every single movie the good guys take on an army of bad guys and completely destroy them. What makes it worse is that each character is killing at least 10 bad guys at a time in set intervals. There’s no tension because you know they’re going to win. Action scenes like this make the movie boring.

 

Overall, the Expendables needs a major overhaul. Talks about a fourth movie are in the process. New writers and directors NEED to come and take the control. Stallone has a limited vision when it comes to the Expendables. The stories could easily be better. Improved effects would be much appreciated. When I see cheap effects I feel like I’m not worthy of seeing a solid movie production. Time and effort should always be put into making a film the best that it can be.

P.S.

Expendables 3 comes out this Friday.