“Ex-pend-a-bles, Fuck Yeah!”

The Expendables is fucking awesome. I was very apprehensive walking into the theater; I knew the stakes were high and the outcome could be disastrous if the film took itself too seriously, but I can now attest it delivers on every promise it made to its audience.  It proves to us that the 1980s action movie essence is alive and well in twenty-first century America. The Expendables has everything I could ever want—hilarious one-liners, over-the-top action scenes, complete disregard for human life, ignorance and simplification of exotic cultures, and unabashed, flaming homoeroticism.

For 103 minutes, my eyes were wide, my jaw was slack, and my erection was zipper-straining. I was so excited I forgot about the hooch-filled flask that I customarily sneak into public theaters.  That’s right, I was so excited, I FORGOT TO DRINK.  I was taken back to my childhood, when muscle flexing by big sweaty Adonises was the only thing that could save us from two bit banana republic baddies and a Republican administration was bankrupting the country and prostituting our collective dignity under the guise of “Morning in America.” This was a time when hardworking Americans spent their devaluing dollars on action films that by and large subscribed to a few core conservative principles.  The Expendables carries this same torch, and comfortably fits up there with the best of hypermacho cock-fests of the 80s.

Most of the attention for this movie centers on how they crammed nearly every single major action star and muscle-bound badass of the last quarter century into a single movie.  I’m sure you’ve already heard the roll call, but it merits repeating: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Eric Roberts UFC’s Randy Couture, NFL’s Terry Crews, WWF’s Steve Austin, David Zayas (from Dexter and Oz), and a few more UFC fighters.  And this is a fraction of the original line-up. Turns out Steven Segal turned down a role because he has issues with one of the producers, Van Damme didn’t want to be in it just for the sake of being in it and Wesley Snipes had the Terry Crews role, but had to decline it because he’s going to jail.

I told my father, who shares my love for mid-80s big-screen fascism, about this impressive cast list and he asked “Wow, what’s it about?” and I could only respond “I don’t care!”  As I’ve said before, we’re not talking about a plot-driven movie, here.

For anyone who intends to pay more attention than I did, the details include something about a professional team of mercenaries called “The Expendables” who have to save some fictional Central American country from some two-peso generalissimo who turned on his CIA masters and decided he hates Yanks more than he loves butchering his own people.  Even this hearkens back to the 1980s, when the CIA and American government propped up and armed thuggish dictators, guerillas and death squads in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala who murdered tens of thousands. But fuck that boring history shit; let’s talk about ‘splosions!

It was impossible to keep a tally, but in this movie, at least five hundred people are shot, stabbed, beaten, bludgeoned, strangled and exploded. Stallone, who has come back to directing in recent years, has really established himself and clearly knows how to give the audience what they want, and what they want is blood by the barrel.  This was the strategy that worked so well for him in Rambo IV, wherein Stallone resurrected a long-obsolete and tired character in order to give us one of the best body counts–in both quality and quantity–in film history. Wanton violence is Stallone’s trade and he’s got a skill for depicting it.  In The Expendables, Jason Statham holds a guy while Jet Li breaks his neck and his head nearly comes off.  While being shot at during a highspeed chase, Dolph stomps a man’s face into the dashboard of a car killing him and leaving bootprints. “INSECT!” Dolph yells. In one of my favorite scenes, Stallone overflies a pier two football fields-wide and dumps jet fuel on three dozen human beings while Statham ignites a flare, instantly liquefying everyone that wasn’t given a line of dialogue. Fucking great.

Speaking of dialogue, The Expendables has some amazing one-liners—Statham and Stallone go undercover on the exotic island of Vilena to plan their eventual mission.  When the customs guy asks them their business, they flex twenty-inch biceps and reply “We’re ornithologists” with straight faces. Unintentional maybe, but I thought it was hilarious.  Statham’s pocket starts buzzing during a Mexican standoff: “Getting’ a text,” he says before shooting five people. Awesome. Then there’s Dolph again, who screams “I’m firing a warning shot!” before shooting a man’s torso off.  Terry Crews saves his partners’ butts by mowing down a dozen men and he shouts to his buddies “you better remember this shit at Christmas!”

Most of the great lines, however, are reserved for Eric Roberts, who has apparently decided to become one of the all time go-to heavies in movies over the last ten years. This time he’s a rogue CIA agent who plays great lines off of Zayas’s evil General Garza:

General: “Some things just aren’t worth the money.
Roberts (matter-of-factly): “Yes they are.”

General: “We don’t kill family!”
Roberts: “Come to my house on Thanksgiving.”

General, talking to a man he’s accusing of stealing from him: “How can I know you are telling the truth if I can’t see inside you?”
Roberts walks in, shoots the man in the head: “I can see inside him, and all I see is LIES!”

Great stuff.

Anyone who says that Stallone and the rest are too old clearly hasn’t seen Rambo IV, where he proves that social security checks won’t stop him from tearing out the jugular of someone half his age.  I mean, Stallone is 64 fucking years old and look at him on the set of The Expendables:

Fucking stacked.

For a long time I wondered how 80s action movies could be so homoerotic and somehow so oblivious at the same time.  But after seeing The Expendables, I said, “Thank God they finally get it.” Stallone clearly knows how gay this stuff really is.  There’s no way he directed and edited an this entire film without getting it.  To start with, throughout the film, the Expendables keep talking to each other about their “relationship” and Dolph even terms their fights “Lover’s Quarrels.” Not enough? How about the fact they all hang out at a bar called Tool’s.

Need more? Mickey Rourke plays a former “Expendable” who has retired, saying “I don’t want to die in the mud, I want to die next to a woman,” which is probably the least stupid thing I’ve ever heard anyone say in an action film, but Stallone looks visibly disgusted at the idea.  Rourke talks a lot about getting pussy, but we all know he’s still fighting the beast inside. Take the scene where Stallone shows up at Rourke’s place while Rourke is on a date.  Instead of telling Stallone to fuck off so he get laid, he sends the girl away, and Stallone whips off his shirt and Rourke gets on top of him and gives him a tattoo. Statham walks in and the go on about how sexy he’d look with another tattoo and how women are unreliable.  Remember, Rourke is doing all this instead of entertaining a promiscuous (albeit trashy) woman upstairs.

I can keep going: Stallone doesn’t even bother to kiss the babe at the end of the film when he clearly has the opportunity. When Jet Li mentions he has a son, every other guy in the room is surprised, because they never expected him to have actually had sex with a woman. Jason Statham loves to shoves his knife (read: penis) into men and does it about 200 times, a little gratuitous even for my tastes.  Overall this movie probably has more penetration of the flesh than an average porno, and it’s all man-on-man.  As the Pièce de résistance, Jason Statham confronts a team of sweaty, semi-nude men on a basketball court.  He puts his hands all over them, kicks the shit out of them and then pulls out a knife, and stabs their basketball.  His line?—“Next time I’ll deflate all of your balls!” Um, yeah, into his mouth, maybe.  Seriously, how in any conceivable universe is that not gay? There’s no way Stallone is not trying to tell us something here.  I’d also like to say that while cruising the IMDB chat boards, I came across a topic titled “Name a movie gayer than Expendables” with the first post simply reading “I DARE YOU!”

But it’s more than that hypocritical homophobia, though, that shows how far Stallone has come—it’s the little things. Remember Eric Roberts is a U.S. Government agent who was in charge of sedating and controlling Latin American countries. His character’s name is James Monroe.  Why is this funny?  James Monroe, the fifth president, is best known for establishing the Monroe Doctrine, a piece of policy basically saying the United States has exclusive rights to fuck with any country it wants in the Western Hemisphere. Back in the 80s this kind of thinking led to death squads and Iran-Contra—anyway the name is a subtle but revealing joke.

Perhaps the most layered scene, however, is when Bruce Willis calls up rival mercenaries Schwarzenegger and Stallone to talk business about a job.  Willis basically calls them both gay and asks if they suck each others’ dicks.  Schwarzenegger and Stallone don’t deny it and share a meaningful glance. After more playful banter, Schwarzenegger essentially calls Stallone a retard and walks off.  “What’s the fuck’s his problem?” asks Willis.  “He wants to be president,” quips Stallone.  Basically this is how I imagine the last Planet Hollywood shareholders meeting went.

Is this movie stupid? Without a doubt (in one scene, Statham is undercover in a hostile foreign country with army guys crawling all over, he sees a woman and yells “Hey, are you our contact?!” across a public bar).  But Stallone knows just how stupid it should be.  Is this the best time I’ve had in a movie theater in months?  FUCK YES!