Here's my official review:
Alright, I'm not supposed to tell you this. In fact, I could get in VERY deep trouble, but I'm gonna reveal a secret. Last year the Man Council met at a top-secret location and one of the items on the agenda dealt with movies. You see, all of us men on the Man Council agreed that we wanted the ultimate man movie. One that was made just for us, one that had all of OUR favorite action stars, one dripping with testosterone, and out came The Expendables.
The Expendables stars every action movie star you could care to watch (except JCVD and Steven Seagal, but you can't have your cake and eat it too), Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, and Ahnold. There is also up and comer Terry Crews, Steve Austin, and Randy Couture (who did surprisingly well). One disappointment was that there is only one scene with Willis and Ahnold (and a nice crack about his politics), but maybe we'll get more in the future. Now, the story is not unlike countless other action movies. A group of for-hire bad mammajammas who go about bringing death and destruction in cool ways after being hired to assassinate a leader of a small country involved in drugs. How could this possibly go wrong, right?
Unfortunately it did go wrong, sometimes very wrong. Perhaps this was in part due to being written and directed by Stallone himself, perhaps because it was just too much to hope for, but this movie definately fell a little short from the great idea conceived at the Man Council. The pacing of the movie was very off, starting off great with some heart-racing action sequences, then the movie leaves you feeling it drag on in the middle with a bunch of silly, confusing, unnecessary subplots going on, often times being left to a short conversation and not really being explained. Then speeding back up like a flying bullet with some more great, explosive action to finish up the film.
Now you wouldn't necessarily expect a great plot or amazing dialogue from a movie like this so it may not be completely fair to judge it on these factors, but with dialogue like "How are you here?", "I just am", it's kind of hard to overlook. The biggest problem with the movie has to be Jet Li's character. It's not his fault, but probably more credit goes to Stallone who made him into being a wuss. Here you have one of the greatest movie martial artists of all time and he's a wuss?!? What were they thinking? Also, some horrible CGI they threw in at the end (don't want to give it away, you will notice it) didn't help the cause. Neither did Mickey Rourke's character, it's never really clear why he's even in the movie.
All that being said, the action is incredible and it is well worth watching if only to see all of these greats sharing the screen together. Terry Crews is one of my new favorites and a special gun he uses is incredible to say the least. So, ladies, get together with your friends and watch the latest craptackular Jennifer Aniston rom com and men, get your buddies together for a night of action acting greats, poor storylines, and even better explosions. This one is definitely for the men, by the men and although it's a renter, not a buyer, it's worth a viewing.
I give this a 7 out of 10.