Jason Statham at some point is cheated on by his girlfriend, the lovely Charisma Carpenter. That is pretty much all the plot I could extract from the 103 minute explosion that is The Expendables. But if you are looking for any negative criticism of Sylvester Stallone's valiant tour de brute force, please look elsewhere (read: everywhere.) The film is currently unmatched in it's machismo and masculine vigor, and while Stallone aims to remind us of a time when these traits were lauded, the film is firmly entrenched in the right now.
These men are mercenaries: well trained, heavily armed, elite soldiers of fortune delivering pocket-sized wars to the doorsteps of anyone with the appropriate funds. In the film, the appropriate funds come from Bruce Willis as Mr. Church, fervently cementing the inherent homage to the Die Hard-like sentiment. But more importantly, in the theater the role of the benefactor of explosions is played by us. (I provided a hefty, very modern-day $13 out of the 38 million box office yield(*) simply for something to explode - and oh, DID they explode.) Thus, The Expendables is more than just Stallone, Lundgren, Willis, and Schwarzenegger making a comeback. We the viewer are coming back. And the film does exceptionally well welcoming us back with wide-open, tatted-up, ripped arms.
So now we're all back. But even at the very onset, the film's premise goes even further and asserts that... we've never even left! Mercenaries for hire are all the rage in The Expendables universe; have always been. There's no need for a back story or a weak formation of the team montage like the recent A-Team movie or Inception. You already know who's down. They're sublimely familiar. The roster reads more like your cell phone's contact list then an IMDB page.
The film begins with our friends in a standoff with Somali pirates holding a hostage. The politics of the film are overtly simplistic and tropes and cliches outline the antagonists, sometimes with culturally insensitive hues. Great! In this way, The Expendables poignantly emulates the denial of nuance and subtlety that exists deep within Americana, our media and our arts, whether we admit it or not. It's the post-everything hyper-liberalization of culture that has left an empty, sinking feeling in our stomachs. The Expendables nobly aims to fill that with an explosion or two.
So from Somalia we travel to South America because Bruce Willis said so. Once again very simple politics and developmental dialogue background immaculately choreographed fighting and explosions. There's some banter, some laughs, knives get thrown, red-shirts get shot, someone gets a new tattoo at some point, an airplane shootout, a car chase, a boxing match with Mr. T, Hulk Hogan wins the belt back from the Rock, a double cross, man hugs, some short jokes, an Old Spice guy (no not that one), maybe some objectification of women, and basically everything else that could be manly was allowed to roam free across the celluloid, untethered from logistics or politically correctness (admittedly, I chuckled when I put together that Jet Li's character's name was in fact Ying Yang.)
So untethered of a film, I felt no obligation to place the customary spoiler warnings anywhere in this post. Honestly, you can't spoil something so sweeeeeet. Also, as mentioned before, the plot is somewhat hazy to me and will probably be to you as well, so shrug. And not hazy in that "Shit! Inception blew my mind, bro! Do you think it kept spinning?" sort of way. More like, a 104th minute would have permanently ruined your ability to suspend your disbelief ever again, in turn killing the art of film for you forever, and perhaps actually killing you. Ignore that. Eventually the beautiful Charisma Carpenter saunters back into Jason Statham's life. So don't worry. Be a man, go watch the movie. I'd go again if I could find a theater that seats 20 thousand and got as drunk as I did the first time.
