BY NICK COSTON
Daily Arts Writer
Published August 16, 2010
Long ago, in the Pleistocene era of cable television, there was a charming program called “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” The title was a mouthful, but the premise — a man and his two robots watch terrible movies and make fun of them — was gloriously simple, both in concept and execution. The awful films that were showcased were entirely meritless without an underlying audio track of the trio’s biting sarcasm. Had the show not ended in 1999, Sylvester Stallone’s latest monstrosity, “The Expendables,” would surely find itself at the center of a season finale.
"The Expendables"
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“The Expendables” sings to us the heartbreaking love story of a 64-year-old boy, his tight T-shirts, his fire-hose veins pumping synthetic horse testosterone and Ensure and his uncontrollable need to scream “BLEURGH!” at the innumerable Rent-a-Cop opponents who stand between him and whatever it is that requires him to rock so hard. The film is a dry violence-and-grunt hoagie on flamethrower-ed sourdough; the mustard of gravitas is nowhere to be found. There are some Spanish dudes with mustaches and nationalist tendencies. There's a greasy American puppeteer behind it all raking in the local drug industry’s cash. He has a set of goons. All of them eventually explode.
Dreadful films are no fun if there’s nothing special about them. Nothing could be more boring than exiting a theater in utter disappointment but not knowing why. The turds that stand the test of time — the “Battlefield Earths,” the “Showgirls” — they knew how to make an impact. John Travolta shooting the legs off an innocent cow and Kyle MacLachlan sexing Elizabeth Berkley unconscious in a swimming pool are images as indelible as the American flag. Fortunately, if there’s one man you can trust to leave a smoldering crater of cheese on the screen, it’s Stallone. Maybe he thought he was making a good film; hopefully, he wasn’t that dumb. But he certainly made a memorable one.
From the total non-existence of Randy Couture’s character, to the Jet Li short jokes, to Dolph Lundgren’s occasional accent, to Terry Crews’s gun — whose 8,000-caliber bullets literally rip people apart — “The Expendables” yields more questions than “Inception.” Just try to count how many people are killed by knives thrown in their neck. It can’t be fewer than 50.
A late addition to the cast was Mickey Rourke (“The Wrestler”) as Tool, a former Expendable turned tattoo artist and mechanic. Halfway through the film, Tool lurches into what’s supposed to be the big impassioned monologue, the moment that breaks Sly’s chiseled heart and pumps some humanity back into his bloodstream alongside the HGH. But Tool’s words dissolve into the white noise of Charlie Brown’s classroom as you find yourself unable to take your eyes off his lips, accumulating more and more saliva with every word. It can’t possibly collect any more spit, you’re thinking, ignoring his tender ballad of regret. That junk has nowhere left to go. And just when you ask the mesmerized theater patron beside you, “He’s not going to drool, is he?” Rourke drools. It’s one of dozens, maybe hundreds of moments the viewer will be unable to absorb without glancing around the theater to make sure everyone else saw what he thinks he just saw.
Stallone’s expressed intent was to recreate the masculine glory of the action films from the 1980s. In this, he failed. But he may have delivered something far more valuable and timeless. Instead of the next “Rocky,” he’s given the world the next “Rocky Horror.” So grab some friends, drink a case of Surge, snap into a Slim Jim and hit your local Cineplex for the most violent surrealist comedy ever made.
