Gregg vs. Sally: The Expendables

Earlier this summer, our resident movie expert Gregg Beever took one for the team and accompanied me to a screening of Sex and the City 2.  He’s since been crouched in the shadows, waiting for the perfect movie that would allow him to exact his revenge on me.

Which is how I wound up at The Expendables last Saturday.  What follows is our review of the film, as conducted via Facebook Chat.

Sally: okey doke. so. the expendables. this was my payback for making you endure sex and the city 2.

Gregg: It was basically the polar opposite of Sex and the City 2.

Sally: gender wise, i agree. in terms of being awful, i’d say they’re cut from the same cloth.

Gregg: Can’t argue that…although it was easier watching Expendables as my lust for explosions and needless gore were being pandered to.

Sally: i will say that steve austin was a triumph!

Gregg: If they handed out Oscars for best former wrestler to marginally handle four lines of dialogue, he would certainly get my vote.

Sally: ha ha, i wonder who else would be nominated in that category.

Gregg: Stallone, for having the balls run a bridge at age sixty. “Running” is probably not the term.

Sally: wobbling?

Gregg: Waddling briskly? Shuffling, maybe

Sally: i felt bad for stallone though. he was actually pretty good – but everything around him was a catastrophe.

Gregg: I think the film does a good job covering up his age, aside from the bridge scene where he’s struggling to run for his life from a hail of gunfire. I mostly believed he was capable of kicking ass. His stunt runner brought me out of that illusion a bit.

Sally: did you look at the wikipedia page for the movie? it was only seeing the cast of characters names in print that I realized how truly ridiculous they are.

Gregg: I did not.

Sally: it sounds like the characters in a short story by an eight year old boy.

Gregg: Essentially. There are a lot of attempts at humor that fall flat…just like Sex and the City!

Sally: i know exactly the part you’re thinking of. the part with arnold schwarzenegger, right?

Gregg: Yes, where he “burns” Stallone.   “We should go out for dinner”

Sally: “when?”

Gregg: “In a thousand years”  SNAP!

Sally: YA BURNT.

Gregg: You’ve been terminated!

Sally: you’ve been burn-inated!

i suppose maybe we should maybe try to explain the plot.

Gregg: Oh, I can explain the plot in like two sentences.

Sylvester Stallone is an old mercenary leading a gang badasses who fly to some remote South American Island were a hot chick is in need of saving.

They leave the island thinking it’s not worth the trouble, but then Stallone talks it over with his buddy Mickey Rourke who “lost his soul” not saving a hot chick when he had the chance. Then Stallone is like, I could save a hot chick! I could save my soul!

Sally: it’s a metaphor. hot chicks=souls.

Gregg: Truer words were never spoken.

Sally: okay, what did you like the best about this movie?

Gregg: Jason Statham.

Sally: yes! he and jet li were really good.  FYI, their characters were named Lee Christmas and Yin Yang.

Gregg: Lee Christmas? I think those were code names though, right?

Sally: but they’re still the worst code names ever. i’ve been trying to find some rhyme or reason to them, but they don’t seem to mean anything. there’s no motif or anything.

Gregg: Yin Yang. How much thought went into that?

“You’re Chinese, right Jet?”

“Yup”

“Yin Yang”

Sally: DONE!

Gregg: Jet Li “fuck”

Sally: THAT’S A WRAP!

“writing movies is easy” – whoever wrote the expendables. was it stallone?

Gregg: Yeah, and Dave Callaham. Who also wrote Doom.

Sally: wikipedia says stallone has an idea for the sequel.

Gregg: Goodie.

I was thinking today about something that really bugged me about one particular scene.

Sally: Let’s hear it.

Gregg: There’s a scene in the first act where all the characters are together in their secret garage hide out, and Randy Couture’s character explains how he got cauliflower ears.

Now, I don’t know much about Randy Couture, but I suspected that he wasn’t in make-up, he just has cauliflower ears. And I was right.

Sally: WHAT?! you mean he wasn’t just ACTING cauliflower ears?

Gregg: So that means, at some point, some producer or writer said “Hey, the audience is not going to understand what’s wrong with his ears.”

“Let’s explain it to them”

So you have Randy Couture, playing a fictional character, explaining how he got cauliflower ears.

Sally: yeah, it seemed like there was a lot of exposition for things i didn’t care about. but when there were things that i found puzzling, such as, why are the guys from the best mercenary teams in the world both in their late 60s, i get nothing!

Gregg: Or why no one calls the cops on Jason Statham after he hospitalized six basket ball players

Sally: and not to jump all over the place here, but can i just ask, are those bullets that make people explode a real thing? is this something new i need to be worried about in day-to-day life?

Gregg: The gun that Dolph Lundgren had that seemed to dissolve human flesh? I have no idea.  I nearly stood up clapping when he obliterated the first dude with it.

Sally: HA HA. i like that within the context of the movie, it was like “hey, where’s the people-exploding gun?”

“oh, i gave it to the unpredictable loose cannon guy that we can’t trust and who keeps trying to injure members of the team.”

“phew, okay good. i thought we forgot it on the plane.”

Gregg: It sure was nice of Stallone to forgive Dolph for attempting to murder everyone. Class all the way, Stallone

Sally: hey, gregg, THAT’S WHAT FRIENDS DO. now come here so i can murder you.

Gregg: If you try to murder me Sally, I’m sorry but friendship over.

Sally: okay – so here are the things that i liked about the expendables:

-i liked that stallone still wants to be an action hero, and i think he pulls it off, as long as he doesn’t run.

-i liked that there was no gratuitous gross sexiness with young ladies/old men.

-i liked that there was no time wasted with anything like logic, or plot, or character development.

-i did not like that the movie wasn’t funny, because i felt it had been sort of sold that way, and thus i felt tricked.

agree/disagree?

Gregg: I agree with everything except the logic/plot/character development thing. Even in action movies there has to be some emotional attachment to characters, or else we don’t care. Did I care if Stallone saved the girl? Not really. Did I care if he saved his soul? Well, I didn’t really know what he did to lose it.

Your plot doesn’t need to be particularly original or thought provoking, but it does need to make me care about what is happening on screen, and the Expendables fails repeatedly at this.

Sally: it also didn’t help that there were like 800 people in it. this was like the arcade fire of movies.

okay, my last question for you is this: would you see another sylvester stallone action movie?

Gregg: Probably, but only because I seem to enjoy torturing myself. Resident Evil: Afterlife anyone?

Sally: thank you for your time sir. while i would describe this movie as not very good, i will say that it was entertaining. mostly just to you and i though, the people in front of us probably wished they had a people exploding gun for the jerkoffs in the back row.

If you’d like to see the Expendables for yourself, check out the movie showtimes here.