The Expendables (2010)

Title: The Expendables (2010)

Director: Sylvester Stallone

Writers: Sylvester Stallone, David Callahan

Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Mickey Rourke, Dolph Lungdren, Jet Li, Eric Roberts, Bruce Willis, Charisma Carpenter, Arnold Schwarznegger, Randy Couture, Steve Austin

Review:

The Expendables to me, was a celebration of 80’s awesomeness. I didn’t get to see it upon its initial release, because the damn recession is holding me back from going to the movies as much as I’d like. Sad but true. But finally when I saw the box at the video store, I swear I heard a choir of angels singing as I reached for the dvd and rented it! I was finally gonna get to see this bombastic explosion of 80’s style action. But the question remained: would it disappoint? Or would it be a great film? At the very least, I expected the film to be fun. I mean, seeing all these action stars up there was gonna be a treat no matter what my expectations for the film were.

Story goes something like this: Stallone is the leader of a group of mercenaries that call themselves The Expendables. They go around taking missions and getting paid huge amounts of cash for doing them. They kill terrorists, save hostages, you know the drill. Well, one day a guy called Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) offers The Expendables a mission. They are to go and kill a dictator named General Garza. When they get there, they realize that what they really want to do is help the rebels fight against the dictator and the men who manipulate him. Will they succeed in their mission?

I enjoyed this movie far more than I thought I would. It wasn’t a perfect film, it had its glitches here and there, but for the most part I really dug everything about this movie! Especially the themes it’s playing with. Let me tell you guys a little something about the island of Puerto Rico, where I reside. In our last elections, a new governor was chosen to rule over our land. Everyone had high hopes for this guy because the previous one had driven the country to poverty, having to close down schools and government offices for months on end. But hey, it was the beginning of the recession and anyone governing the island during those years would have had a hard time doing it anyways. So in comes this new guy offering to do things right, offering the proverbial “change” that everybody needs. So of course he won the elections. Everyone put their trust in him to make things right, to work for the people, to work for our interests. Unfortunately, this was not to be. Once in power, he fired more than 30,000 government employees and used the police force and the national guard to instill fear upon the masses by having them hit anyone and spray pepper spray on anyone who dares complain or exercise their right to speak up against the oppression. He is the kind of polititian that feels more like a businessman than a politian. This is a guy who doesn’t really care about running a country, his priorities seem to be making money, Nixon style. Hell, many have compared the guy to Hitler himself. I don’t believe there has been a more hated governor in the history of Puerto Rico, and believe me, we’ve had our share of assholes in command.

So when I see a film like The Expendables, where it criticizes this kind of abuse of power, it makes me happy to see somebody notices. I saw a documentary a while back on Jamaica called Life and Debt (2001) that showed how Americans got their hotels and their resorts in one part of the island, and now Jamaicans themselves need to have a special card to go into that section of the island. How fucked up is that? Jamaicans themselves can’t go into the exclusive American section of the island? What gives? Sad to say I am seeing the same thing developing in our own island of Puerto Rico. Tourists visit only the capital of Puerto Rico, where the grand majority of the hotels are at, while the government is making it increasingly more difficult for locals to go to that area. Now, don’t get the wrong idea, I don’t hate Americans or anything, my motto is the same one that Jackie Moon had in Semi-Pro (2008) E.L.E. Everybody Love Everybody! But seriously, this situation makes me want to puke! The situation in Jamaica is freaking sad! Governments know that tourists can bring money to the island, so they sacrifice everything else for that?? The rest of the island is falling apart! You should see how many local businesses have closed down, how many buildings are abandoned. It’s an alarming amount. Yet foreign companies like Wal-Mart and Burlington Coat Factory thrive. There is a Walgreens literally on every corner of my town (literally) while I’ve seen more then one local pharmacy go down.

So hurray for The Expendables and hurray for Stallone in wanting to shed some light on this type of behavior. I thought it was extremely interesting how the island under the dictatorship in the film is unnamed and fictional; it could probably represent Puerto Rico and Jamaica or any other country in which the same situation is happening. I identified with the character of Sandra, the revolutionary who wants to stay and fight against the evil dictators and businessmen, to fight for the freedom of her people. There is one awesome scene in which Eric Roberts (representing big business) tells General Galarza “I own you” and basically lets him know that he has to do whatever Big Business tells him to, because the funding comes from them. And of course, I love the fact that the good guys realize this is all wrong and that something has to be done about it. This let’s me know that The Expendables has its heart in the right place, at least these guys are killing and blowing shit up to stand up for what is freaking right! An action movie with a conscience! Holy shit that’s unheard of! Let’s not forget that Jason Statham stands up for women’s rights as well, defending the love of his life from an abusive boyfriend. Hurray for this movie yet again.

But let’s face it, we came here to have some fun and I gotta say I had tons of that! What I enjoyed the most was the dialog believe it or not. These guys are all aging action stars (most of them anyway) and they have a history behind them of action films. What I loved about this movie was how they kept referencing their personal lives and their film careers through the dialog of the film. Example: when Arnold Scharznegger walks into the film and he and Stallone meet we are led to believe that they are both leaders of different mercenary groups and that at one time, they worked together. Translation? “We both used to be action stars at one point”. Arnold says he doesn’t need the gig so he is giving the mission to Stallone and his crew. The dialog that follows that conversation goes something like this:

Arnold: “Give this job to my friend here, he LOVES playing in the jungle, right?

Stallone: Right.

Arnold: Hey, how about dinner?

Stallone: When?

Arnold: In a thousand years?

Stallone: Too Soon.

Bruce Willis: What’s his problem?

Stallone: He wants to be the president.

In this conversation, the animosity that Arnold and Stallone had during the 80’s is alluded to. You remember how it was right? They use to make fun of each other in their respective movies. They kind of acknowledged each others existence and were willing to make fun of each other, but they still kind of hated each others guts. I always got the idea that it was all in good fun anyways, this movie proves it. And the line “he loves playing in the jungle” is an obvious reference to Stallone’s Rambo films. And then the two go on about weight, and Stallone tells Arnold, “whatever weight I loss you found pal” And the film goes on and on like that. Speaking of Arnold’s participation in this film, it is so freaking robotic. He kind of like walked through the scene not even trying to act, he had this silly grin on his face the whole time, honestly people? To me, Arnold was the worst thing about this whole movie, and in all honesty, that whole scene (though kind of funny) was terrible because the dialog felt robotic. I almost got the feeling like none of the actors were actually together; it felt as if they all filmed their scenes separately; the one sour note in an otherwise great flick.

Its all in good fun!

Speaking of performances, I was amazed to find out that the best actor in the whole film ended up being Dolph Lungdren. Man, Lungdren is a better actor now then he ever was! EVER. The guy hasn’t stopped acting and let’s not forget he directs his own films, so as far as I’m concerned, the guy is still very much in his game. Lungdren has actually gotten better with age! Holy shit, he was devouring his scenes, making all the other action stars including Stallone himself look bad. There is this moment in which Mickey Rourke shows up and tells this story, it is a small part, which can be considered a cameo, but damn, he really gave it his all. Kind of makes you wonder what’s a real actor with some real acting talent doing in the midst of all these action guys, who’s one specialty is kicking, punching and blowing shit up? Lungdren and Rourke both surprised me, and stood out like a cockroaches in a chicken dance.

Statham, taking action to a whole other level!

I liked that fun vibe the film had; it reminded me of the silly premises and ideas that we used to see in films of the 80’s. I mean, seeing these guys flying around on a plane, as if they were this special team of rebels going up against the evils of the world, I kind of got the feeling I was watching another version of the A-Team. Cigar chomping tough guys with secret handshakes, beautiful women, fighting over who kills the best and who kills the fastest.

Stallone, behind the camera, directing

It seems to that with this film, Stallone is passing the torch to Statham as the current king of action films, not a bad assessment. The film ends with Statham and the rest of the crew relaxing at Mickey Rourke’s tattoo shop (makes perfect sense for his character to have one don’t it?) having a knife throwing contest, all the other action stars kind of miss, but Statham ends up winning, perfectly hitting the middle of the mark with the knife. It’s as if Stallone was saying “this is the guy who’s taken my place okay and I give him my blessing” Plus, its obvious Stallone likes Statham. Statham is the one with the most screen time out of all the action guys and hes always next to Stallone through out the whole film. Hell, he is next to him in the freaking poster. So, according to Stallone, Statham is this generation king of action films.

"So you want it to say Schwarznegger sucks? You Sure?"

Final words: fun times. Storyline might be generic cause we’ve seen this story of the good guys going against the oppressive government before, but hey, guess what? This type of thing is still happening in the world, so it’s freaking relevant. We need some real revolutionaries NOW, but whatever, till they arrive, I guess we got The Expendables to take care of business and make things right, at least in the film world.

Rating: 3 ½ out of 5

Surrogates (2009)

Title: Surrogates (2009)

Director: Jonathan Mostow

Stars: Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, James Cromwell, Ving Rhames

Review:

The only extras included on the Surrogates DVD are a commentary from director Jonathan Mostow (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) and a music video by a band called Breaking Benjamin. The song is called “I will not Bow”. Immediately upon watching this music video I knew who this movie was made for. Teenagers. Teenage boys to be precise. I got nothing against teenagers (I was one too at some point!) what Im actually worried about is the type of shitty films that are being made for them! So anyways, I decided to watch part of the music video, just to see what kids are listening to nowadays. The song is so vomit inducing I stopped half way (sorry if I insulted any Breaking Benjamin fans) but watching this video helped me understand the main reason why this movie sucks so much. I mean it’s as if the filmmakers thought “this movie is for teenagers, we don’t have to explain things a lot, don’t take things too seriously!” You could almost feel the filmmakers not caring much for what they were making. You could almost hear them say “this is just a PG-13 sci-fi movie, lets hurry this thing along!”

The premise of this movie is that everybody has a cyborg that does everything for them. People don’t even bother to go out of their homes because the cyborg will do it for them. People have to connect to the cyborg at home while the cyborg goes out into the world and lives their life for them. This has its pros and cons. Pros are you don’t have to go out and risk anything. You don’t catch deceases; you can do dangerous things and not be afraid of dying. You can go out and get crazy without worrying about any negative repercussions. The downside? You’re not living your life. Your real body stays at home, it doesn’t get any exercise, and basically, you stop wanting to really live. You become so dependant of the machine that you become ashamed of your humanity and want to be the cyborg all the time. They market the surrogate experience as being “like real life…only better!”

Interesting premise for a movie no? Yeah, I thought so too. Unfortunately, it is executed in the worst way possible. I’m a huge science fiction nut, don’t know if you guys have noticed it, but I like to really watch science fiction movies. I love how society can be explored through them. And to some extent, this movie does explore a part of our society. It speaks about our dependency on technology, about our loss of humanity. And that’s all fine and dandy (and not all together new) but damn it, why did the movie have to be so bad? One of the major horrors of this movie, is its atrocious script. It never really dwells on anything too long. Its like a child with attention deficit disorder. It shows quick little snippets of information that we are supposed to take for granted just because a character said it. Explain something quickly, move on to the next thing.

Case in point? The leader of the “Human Coalition”. The character that Ving Rhames plays in the film. This is a very important character because it represents the counter point to the way things are. It’s the character that has to stand up for what is right. He has to stand up for the humans. How do we grasp that he is rebellious? That he hates machines? Well, there is this one five second scene where he is sitting in some sort of radio station thing. He grabs the microphone and says: “Look at yourselves. Unplug from your chairs get up and look at the mirror. What you see is how God made you. We’re not meant to experience the world through a machine!” and then he has to stop talking because the government has discovered him. I mean, is this how we “flesh out” a character in this movie? Is this how we know what this guy feels? Ving Rhames appears only about three times in the film. Briefly. We never really get to know him as a character, we only get to know his functionality. This is the leader of the rebels, that’s all you need to know. Pfft. And this is supposed to be the leader of the humans! The characters in this movie are about as superficial as the cyborgs that the film is criticizing. Not much attention was paid to characters and situations. This is as simple a script as they come. Some plot points are simply explained away in a sentence, and we are supposed to take them for granted. As a result, you know exactly where the film is headed, and the film is over before you can blink.

Another thing that bothered me a lot about this movie was that it had an epic storyline that was delivered in such a small scale. I don’t know if this has to do with the economy and with studios tightening their budgets, but this films storyline implied world wide repercussions, yet the film chooses to show only what happens in a small city street. (SPOILERS AHEAD) Like there’s this scene where all the surrogates are deactivated and I thought to myself “okay, this is where the shits really going to hit the fan, were going to see how this is going to affect the whole world” I mean, think about it. If everyone uses their cyborgs to live, that means that even people flying planes are using surrogates. This means that doctors performing operations are using surrogates. I was expecting to see the shutting off of the Surrogates to be a spectacular part of this film. Sadly, repercussions of this world affecting event is reduced to seeing a couple of small scale car crashes on one small city street. (END OF SPOILERS) This just showed me that this film was epic in scale, but not epic in execution. I felt cheated. That’s the best way to describe it. I felt that if I had seen this film in theaters, I would have felt like they stole my money.

The whole idea of robots doing everything for us and us loosing our humanity has been done before in way better films then this one. And since I think you shouldn’t even bother watching Surrogates, I have compiled a list of better films that address the same themes, only better. So take notes, for you will have yourself a far better time watching the following films then you ever will watching Surrogates.

Artificial Intelligence A.I. (2001) - Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, now there’s a movie big in scale that explores these same themes in detail, not as if it was reading the cliff notes. Cause that’s what I felt like Surrogate’s script was like. As if I was reading the cliff notes for a much better film. A.I. is one of Spielberg’s masterpieces with excellent special effects, performances and it explores the whole aspect of artificial intelligence taking over our lives in much detail.

I, Robot (2004) – This film comes to us from Alex Proyas (Dark City, The Crow) and though I would never go as far as saying that its one of his best films (actually its one of his most commercial ones) its still better film then Surrogates. Its kind of like a murder mystery about the first “murder” committed by a robot. Will Smith investigates. Not awesome, not great, but a hell of a lot better then Surrogates.

Strange Days (1999) On Kathryn Bigelows Strange Days people also start preferring to live experiences through technological means rather then through real life. It also has a “leader of the revolution” that is being hunted down. The future in this film is not as squeaky clean as the one depicted in Surrogates. This is a grimy city on the verge of chaos. The film takes place on New Years Eve 1999, all the chaos and “end of the world” mentality that people had during the last year of the old millennium is executed very well thanks to Kathryn Bigelows excellent direction.

Brainstorm (1983) – This film stars Christopher Walken wanting to live in a virtual reality world. This film plays with a lot of the same themes as in Strange Days, actually Im sure this is the film that inspired Bigelow’s film. But this one gets a bit more philosophical with its implications. The characters on this movie have found a way to record human experiences, and once you put the magic helmet on, you can re-experience the whole thing. But what happens when the government wants to get a hold of it? And what happens when you record someones death? Can we see what happens after death?

So as you can see, when compared to these other movies, Surrogates treats its themes in a simple, child like matter. As if spoon feeding the audience, but with fast food instead of a nutritious meal.

I did like certain aspects of the film though. I mean, I liked the premise; I just didn’t like how they chose to execute it. I did enjoy the whole thing with everyone being a robot. I mean, lets face it. Sometimes when you go out into the world and see “the masses” humanity going about their business, you can’t help but think that we are all programmed in our own way. I actually love this theme of humans relying too much on technology; again, I just didn’t enjoy how they pulled it off on this particular film. But some of the visuals were cool, like these moment when Bruce Willis gets on a train and everyone on it is obviously a surrogate with their blank eyes and their plastic looking skin. I liked the idea behind the weapon that disables the surrogates. Unfortunately, this movie needed to think bigger, needed to explore its themes in a more elaborate way. Even this films action sequences are lackluster! There’s this chase sequence that involves a helicopter crashing into the ground. A great idea, if only the helicopter didn’t look so CGI!

Oh well, I’ve gone on long enough about how bad this movie is. It’s been quite a while since Id seen such a terrible movie. I mean, I guess every generation has its fare share of bad science fiction films. I remember when I was a kid (this was during the 80s) we got movies like Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (1983) or Ice Pirates (1984). They might not have been great films, but at least those teenage oriented sci-fi films were fun to watch. Watching a film like Surrogates is just painful.

Rating: 1 ½ out of 5