The Expendables

The Expendables

After rejuvenating his career and saving Rocky and Rambo from the depths of crappiness, Sylvester Stallone turned his attention to the straight action movie. This is old school action. when men were manly men, good is good, bad is bad, and the explosions are big. Simply put, The Expendables is Stallone's love letter to the big, dumb 80's action movie.

And like a dumb 80's action movie, the plot is pretty simple. The Expendables are a rugged group of mercenaries led by Stallone that is hired to take down a dictator in a small Latin American island. Done. Synopsis over.

But look at the cast he's assembled to play his combatants! Stallone is joined from the some of the big tough guys of the last twenty years - Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Steve Austin, Eric Roberts, Randy Couture, Mickey Rourke, and Terry Crews (plus a nice cameo from Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger). That's an impressive roster of muscle.

Unfortunately, Stallone is a little too accurate to the 80's action film because he picks up the bad parts elements of the genre as well as the good. So that means the women characters are all there to be saved by our heroes and have no role or personality other than that. It also means the writing is stiff and the humor...well, these guys are all trying really, really hard to be funny. They want to be witty, spitting out one-liners and little jabs at each other, but it is all forced and painfully unfunny. For example, the big joke of one scene is when Statham introduces himself and Stallone to a pretty girl by saying, "I'm Buda and he's Pest." Hahahah, it's a pun, get it? Budapest! It's a city in Hungary! Plus, he called Stallone a pest. Hahahahaha.

Sigh.

The movie is full of awkward dialogue like this. I guess Stallone didn't learn something very important that two decades of hindsight should have given him. The 80's one liners were rarely funny unless they were spoken by Arnold. He's the only action star who could combine bad ass and comedy so effortlessly. Everybody else was just trying too hard. This movie shows that this rule still rings true.

But that's not to say the movie is all bad. If it is one thing we lost since the heyday of the action movie, it's that now every movie needs to have story arcs, character development, and all that fancy stuff that makes for good cinema. But what Stallone understands is that these movies aren't meant to be good cinema. They are meant to be explosive and fun. Who wants character development? I just want to see Stallone knock the crap out of Steve Austin! Instead of each character having a subplot, we wait for each character to have his big 'action' moment. And Stallone is nice and gives each character a standout fight, which is nice to see. He takes advantage of his cast's prowess.

So there you go. Once the characters stop talking and start punching, it movie starts to become a whole lot of fun. So good for Stallone for resurrecting a certain type of movie in all its good and bad glory. If this is your type of thing, you're in for a treat! 

BEST LINE: Yin (Jet Li): "I need more money. I work harder than the rest." Barney (Stallone): "No, you don't." Yin: "Yes, I do. Everything is harder for me. When I'm hurt the wound is bigger, because I am smaller. When I travel, I need to go farther."

MVP: This one is easy. As fun as it was to watch all these tough guys in a movie together, they were all upstaged by one thing - the automatic shotgun. Hale Caesar (Terry Crews) has a shotgun that he brags about early, and then you kind of forget about it. But when he unleashes that puppy during the movie's climactic battle...WOW. Best word to describe it.

TRIVIA: Stallone tried to gather even more old school tough guys for the movie, including Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Siegal, and Wesley Snipes. They all couldn't participate for one reason or another. Well, there's always the sequel!  UPDATE: So the sequel is has now come out and sure enough, Stallone nabbed some nice additions to his cast, throwing Van Damme and Chuck Norris into the mix, along with bigger parts for Schwarzenegger and Willis.  For the third film, I hear he is hunting Wesley Snipes and Harrison Ford!

The Bank Job

The Bank Job

A decent little heist film directed by Roger Donaldson, The Bank Job should have done better at the box office. From what I remember, the marketing tried to make it out to be a 1970s British version of Oceans 11 - all hip and stylish and fun - but that is hardly the case. This film is grounded in reality, and evokes a gritty realism that benefits the movie immensely.

Based very loosely on a true story, The Bank Job is about the Baker Street Bank Raid. A former model named Marlene (Saffron Burrows) hires a group of petty crooks led by Terry Leather (Jason Statham) to break into Lloyd's Bank and steal the contents of all the safe deposit boxes. But the movie gets even more interesting after the robbery. Terry has opened a Pandora's Box - among the items he has stolen are dirty pictures of a royal princess being used by radical activist Michael X ( Peter De Jersey) as blackmail and coveted by MI5 government agents. He's also taken an incriminating accounting book from porn magnate Vogul (David Suchet, best known for his superb work as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot). So now Terry and Co. have the police, radical activists, organized crime and government agents on their tale. All these plots are not strung together in an overly stylized way, but are told realistically. Donaldson does an admirable job of balancing all the converging plots and to his credit, I was never confused. It also helps that this story is loosely based on a real story - half the fun of the movie is trying to figure out what is real and what the filmmakers fictionalized. Surprisingly, more is real than you might think.

The movie certainly has its flaws. Jason Statham, as much as I like him, kind of sticks out. He does a acceptable job, but his acting just seems more suited to the wild and woolly Ritchie films or over-the-top fare like Crank and Transporter. Given the realistic tone of the rest of the film, I had trouble buying him as the lead. Also, the movie that has spent so much time reminding us of the gritty Brit films of the 1970s (like Get Carter) kind of wusses out in the end and goes a bit Hollywood - giving us an unnecessary and out-of-place fight scene and then wrapping up everything in a nice, little bow. That was a little disappointing.

But still, overall, The Bank Job is quite a nice, little movie. I definitely recommend it. I am hoping you will be pleasantly surprised like I was.

BEST LINE: Agent Tim Everett: "We are in this matter for the royal, er, portraits only. The proceeds and the pissoffs are your problem."

TRIVIA: If you blink, you'll miss him. But Mick Jagger plays one of the Lloyd Bank employees.

MVP: The main government agent is Tim Everett, a tall, tuxedo clad, raven-haired agent who flirts and smokes a lot. Remind you of someone? There is no doubt in my mind that this is supposed to evoke James Bond. And as played by Richard Lintern, Agent Everett doesn't play the role with even an ounce of irony or as an anti-007. On the contrary, Lintern plays him completely straight - if James Bond were real, he probably would be a whole lot like this guy. And that is fascinating to watch. When Daniel Craig retires, I think Lintern would be a nice choice. He's got the right combination of smugness and intelligence.