Fridae

In the annals of American action cinema, if the Rambo films and their ilk were all about vicariously winning Vietnam all over again, a subset of the genre was all about vicariously winning Grenada all over again. For any too young to recall the Invasion of Grenada, it was probably the last winnable small neo-Imperialist war the US undertook with minimal casualties and a speedy victory, probably since the country in question was basically a tricked out holiday resort slightly less than half of Singapore’s size rather than a middle Eastern power with rich oil deposits. Say what you will about Reagan, but in this case he knew where to pick a fight.

The best known films that I recall from this genre include such entries of dubious worth as McBain, starring Christopher Walken at the nadir of his career, Fifty/Fifty, in which Robert Hays and Peter Weller save a deposed Southeast Asian strongman played by Singapore’s own Lim Kay Tong, and Let’s Get Harry, with Robert Duvall leading a group of American small towners to rescue their friend in some South American country with a drug fueled economy. A lot of these were on heavy rotation on Channel 5 in the early 90s, and so they made many a hazy memory of silly fun.

If you have seen any of the above, you have seen what you need to know about the plot of The Expendables. It basically is all about a group of American macho men (along with one British Bulldog played by Jason Statham, one Nordic ubermensch played by Dolph Lundgren and that Singaporean martial artist known as Jet Li) who have to restore democracy to a small island in the Gulf of Mexico called Vilena and save it from its hot tempered strongman. The only difference that updates it for the new millennium is that this strongman is also backed by a former CIA spook played by Eric Roberts, Julia’s talented but underrated brother who has been making comebacks of sorts as a villain (also in The Dark Knight). Its mentality, plot and mise-en-scene are so firmly Reagan/Bush I era that it’s already dated on release. Where it flies or dies though, is// in the execution, and it is there that Stallone shines.

One key pivotal scene to understanding this film involves the strategic cameos by Bruce Willis as a CIA operative and the Governator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as Stallone’s one time rival. And perhaps for the first time, they all share the screen together where once they jockeyed for leading man status. And with California being one of America’s most distressed states at the moment, one wonders if Arnold regrets ever getting what he wanted in life instead of just being another movie star, lending an air of especial poignancy to his cameo as well. It seems to me that Stallone is eager to make this film the last hurrah of an entire generation of cinema as he has gathered his fellow macho men from the 80s, all visibly getting long in the tooth, all who still can’t really act, and at the same time introducing the new generation of American macho men, like Stone Cold Steve Austin and Randy Couture, in their place.

Stallone is eager to let them all go out with a bang, and it shows. The action sequences, from car chases to mixed martial arts fights to the usual urban warfare, are great to look at and fun to follow, and the male bonding, name calling and friendly taunts between the leads all combine to produce a movie that at its best,is the very definition of macho-ness. Women, home, family? These things are best left on the sidelines, pal. Riding bikes and classic cars, wielding badass weaponry and getting down and dirty with the bad guys, and sticking by your best pals while continually challenging them to one-upmanship in such manly pursuits as throwing Bowie knives. All relationships with women are affectionate but unconsummated, with noble but beautiful women from the third world and the American heartland. That’s what this is all about. If the above descriptions sound like Eden before the Fall, Adam before Eve to you, this is your movie. Perhaps the only distraction is Stallone’s attempt at writing too clever by half dialogue, and failing to be witty or poetic in his cadences.

Probably the last hurrah of Reagan-era Machismo, The Expendables is all it has to be, and nothing more.