Samaritan: Not worth saving

Samaritan (2022) • View trailer

Two stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for strong violence and profanity

Available via: Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang

Well … at least this Sylvester Stallone project is age-appropriate.

 

Director Julius Avery’s fitfully entertaining urban drama is an inner-city spin on the superhero genre, although Bragi F. Schut’s script is far better suited to the graphic novel format that preceded this film by almost a decade. 

 

To the exasperated frustration of Joe (Sylvester Stallone, right), young Sam
(Javon "Wanna" Walton, left) is convinced that his grizzled neighbor actually is a
former superhero, now living incognito.

Either way, Schut’s premise is mildly novel, although the execution leaves much to be desired; viewers will depart this film vexed by a glaring hanging chad.

At its core, this story echoes the famous line from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

 

As explained in a comic book-style flashback that introduces this film, Granite City once hosted a pair of supers: the virtuous Samaritan and his equally powered villainous rival, Nemesis. Their ongoing skirmishes climaxed in an epic battle 25 years ago, which claimed both their lives.

 

Since then, much of Granite City has become a crime-infested slum burdened by the disenfranchised and helpless homeless, overrun with greed and corruption, and ruled by roving gangs of criminal thugs.

 

Cinematographer David Ungaro and production designers Greg Berry and Christopher Glass certainly make everything look gritty and grimy.

 

Thirteen-year-old Sam Cleary (Javon “Wanna” Walton), thoroughly absorbed by the legend of Samaritan, has clung to the notion that — somehow — his hero actually survived that clash. This obsession has prompted him to mistakenly assume “superhuman qualities” in a long list of ordinary citizens, much to the annoyance of bookstore owner/journalist Albert Casler (Martin Starr), who has long investigated what actually is known about their city’s former supers.

 

Sam’s fixation also is a burden on his mother, Tiffany (Dascha Polanco), a single parent just barely making ends meet. Indeed, she often doesn’t make them meet, which prompts Sam — against his better judgment — to accept some easy money from local gang lord Cyrus (the hissably evil Pilou Asbæk, well remembered as the similarly vile Euron Greyjoy, in Game of Thrones).

 

Asbæk is totally terrifying, particularly when — with eyes widened and bulging to an almost impossible degree — he leans into somebody else’s face, either with quiet menace or enraged explosions of temper.

 

Sam also has been paying attention to Joe (Stallone), a reclusive garbage collector who repairs broken appliances in an apartment across the street from the boy’s bedroom window. Sam’s curiosity is further piqued when Joe rescues the boy from a beating by a trio of teenage thugs led by Reza (Moises Arias, memorably nasty); the older man handles the punks with eyebrow-lifting ease.

 

Joe rebuffs the boy’s excited curiosity for a time, but a subsequent incident removes all doubt; the older man definitely is an enhanced being.

 

2015 Oscar predictions: The envelope, please...

Let’s deal with the elephant in the room.

As of a few weeks ago, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had 6,261 voting members. All of them submit nominations for best picture.

Alejandro González Iñárritu, left, and Leonardo DiCaprio are certain to win Oscars for
Best Director and Best Actor. But will their film, The Revenant, also take Best Picture?

Nominees in most of the remaining categories are selected via balloting by various Academy branches: editors for editing, cinematographers for cinematography, and so forth. The same is true of the four acting categories, where — again, as of this year’s balloting — 1,138 Academy members, all actors, determined the nominees.

So: 6,261 overall voting members, 1,138 of whom are in the actors branch. And all of whom are limited by one incontrovertible fact: They’re only able to consider the product booked into U.S. movie theaters during the previous calendar year. To put it another way, not one of those Academy actor members is, was, or ever will be in a position to determine which movies get made and/or released, in order to be voted upon.

Those decisions come from a couple dozen different studio heads: almost all male, and white, and young, and guided entirely by bean counters, focus groups and the panicked certainty that more than one flop in a row likely will cost them their jobs. Ergo, they all too frequently stick to the tried and true.

So why — why — is everybody so upset with the Academy, when an absence of diversity clearly isn’t their fault?

If people are unhappy about racial diversity in any category — and yes, I share their absolutely legitimate frustration — then the anger needs to be channeled toward Hollywood’s studio board rooms, and nowhere else. It’s a separate conversation.

The Oscars, one hopes, are presented to honor the best work in the best movies available during a given year. Anything else would be quota pandering, which would make a mockery of an institution celebrating its 88th anniversary this year.

So let’s embrace the tradition for what it is, and what it does — and should — represent. And let’s also enjoy the time-honored pastime of trying to predict what’ll win this year.

But before we get down to cases, some fun facts:

• The Revenant and Mad Max: Fury Road are only the fourth and fifth films ever to receive nods in all seven technical categories — cinematography, costume design, editing, production design, sound editing, sound mixing and visual effects — after Titanic, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and Hugo.

• Bridge of Spies brought Steven Spielberg his 11th nomination for best director, a category he won twice, for Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. Director William Wyler still holds the record, at 13 nominations and three wins: Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives and Ben-Hur. (But Spielberg still has plenty of time!)

• On the other hand, the total number of nominations accrued by Spielberg’s various films now sits at 128 ... to Wyler’s 127. That makes Spielberg the top nomination-gathering director of all time.

• All six of director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s films have earned at least one Oscar nomination.

• Jennifer Lawrence has become the youngest actress to earn four Oscar nominations, having snatched that honor from Kate Winslet.

• With a span of 39 years between Sylvester Stallone’s Oscar nod for 1976’s Rocky and last year’s Creed, he has broken the previous record of 38 years, held by Helen Hayes, Jack Palance and Alan Arkin. Stallone also has become only the sixth actor to be nominated twice for playing the same character, after Bing Crosby (Father O’Malley), Peter O’Toole (King Henry II), Paul Newman (“Fast Eddie” Felson), Al Pacino (Michael Corleone) and Cate Blanchett (Queen Elizabeth II).

The Expendables 3: Way past their prime

The Expendables 3 (2014) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated PG-13, despite relentless violence, brutality and profanity
By Derrick Bang

What an overcooked, overlong, overloud waste of time.

Any semblance of the modestly clever, “aging Dirty Dozen” scenario — which the first film in this series possessed, to a minor degree, back in 2010 — has been buried in an endless, mindless fusillade of bullets, bombs and badly delivered, grade-Z dialogue.

Little realizing that their mission is about to go pear-shaped, Barney (Sylvester Stallone,
right) leads comrades Toll Road (Randy Couture) and Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) to
their unscheduled appointment with a notorious arms dealer.

I note star Sylvester Stallone’s credit for this film’s story, with further input from scripters Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt. The notion that three whole people were required to write this laughable mess, frankly, defies belief.

Okay, granted, we’re not talkin’ Shakespeare here. This series’ sole raison d’être is to gather a bunch of aging A-, B- and C-level action stars, feed them tough-guy one-liners, and set them loose against some power-mad villain with delusions of world domination. Cue the aforementioned bullets, bombs and badly delivered dialogue.

But the cartoonish qualities, admittedly present back in 2010, have devoured this tedious excuse for a threequel. The first film’s modest efforts at actual characterization — such as Charisma Carpenter’s presence as Lacy, tempestuous wife of Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) — have been jettisoned. Carpenter is a no-show here, as is any layering that might make us care a whit about these anti-heroes.

They’re simply well-muscled point-and-shoot stick figures who have no more actual screen presence in this chaos, than the army of uncredited stunt doubles who actually perform all of these crazed action scenes.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Mel Gibson makes a memorably crazed über-villain as psychotic arms dealer Conrad Stonebanks; Gibson knows how to chew his way through all this nonsense. In great contrast to Stallone’s morose, stone-faced non-performance as primary hero Barney Ross, Gibson enthusiastically embraces every aspect of Stonebanks’ bad-bad self. More power to him.

Newcomer Antonio Banderas also is a hoot as Galgo, an insecure chatterbox who threatens to bore everybody to death with his ceaseless prattle. Banderas’ performance — and patter — are an amped-up echo of his comic voice work as Puss in Boots, in the animated Shrek series; the irony is that this approach succeeds better than most everything else in this pinball machine of a movie.

Grudge Match: Down for the count

Grudge Match (2013) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rating: PG-13, for sexual candor, profanity and sports-related violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.27.13

This film may not be as bad as expected, but it still isn’t very good.

Grudge Match has the smell of a breathless high-concept pitch, and you can hear the exclamation marks: “Stallone and De Niro! As former rival boxers! Talked into one last bout!”

Razor (Sylvester Stallone, left) walked away from his boxing career years ago, a decision
wholly supported by Sally (Kim Basinger), the former sweetheart trying to rekindle their
relationship. Unfortunately, longtime rival Billy (Robert De Niro) refuses to accept this,
and keeps trying to change Razor's mind ... via increasingly hostile behavior.

At which point scripters Tim Kelleher and Rodney Rothman tried to cobble up a narrative to suit this premise. With bewildering results.

The completed film feels like it wants to be a broad comedy, which would suit the sensibilities of director Peter Segal, whose résumé includes exaggerated farces such as Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, Anger Management and the ill-advised big-screen adaptation of Get Smart. But despite the occasional comedy trappings, Kelleher and Rothman keep flailing away at sincerity and schmaltz: real-world emotion that Segal couldn’t deliver if he hired Federal Express.

The finished product is an uneven mess. Every time we start to ease into one of the story’s heartfelt exchanges, we’re yanked out of the moment by a clumsy, grating scene that seems to belong to an entirely different movie. At which point the gentler pathos, no matter how well delivered, feels contrived. And a cheat.

Sylvester Stallone does the lion’s share of the heavy sentimental lifting, and he deserves credit for an impressive job. His character has heart, and we genuinely feel for the guy; he’s trying to play out the hand he dealt himself, with grace and dignity. Stallone knows precisely how to maximize his morose, mopey expression, and — surprise! — he quickly gets us in his corner.

De Niro, on the other hand, is inflated to the extreme: a farcical, foaming-at-the-mouth caricature of a human being. De Niro overplays to the last row of the second balcony, and Segal apparently lacked the wit (or courage) to suggest that his star might tone it down a few dozen notches. The result, then, is that De Niro tramps through every scene like a rhinoceros in cleats, flattening any semblance of authentic emotion.

Which is ironic, since De Niro’s character is given a lot of the baggage expected from contrived, feel-good “dramedies” of this sort: A grown son he never knew! An adorable grandson he can’t relate to! It’s all clumsy sitcom fodder, and no surprise there, since Kelleher and Rothman cut their teeth as writers for Arsenio Hall and David Letterman’s late-night chat shows, and later worked on TV comedies such as Two and a Half Men and Undeclared.

Point being, these are not guys who understand the finer elements of dramatic restraint. Or even gentle comedy.

Escape Plan: A breakout surprise

Escape Plan (2013) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rating: R, for violence and profanity
By Derrick Bang

Sometimes it pays to approach a film with diminished expectations.

After the comic book nonsense of both Expendables flicks, not to mention January’s distastefully trashy Bullet to the Head, I held out little hope for Sylvester Stallone’s recent return to the big screen.

Although trapped in a maximum-security prison that offers little hope for any sort of
escape plan, Ray Breslin (Sylvester Stallone, left) and Emil Rottmayer (Arnold
Schwarzenegger) have a few ideas ... all of them highly dangerous, of course, and
with little chance of success. But it's not like they have anything else to do...

And although Arnold Schwarzenegger cleverly parodied his advancing age in The Last Stand, also released in January, box-office disinterest made that little action flick’s title seem prophetic, with respect to his career.

I therefore haven’t been surprised by the disinterest in Escape Plan, which arrives in theaters today after a rather lackluster publicity campaign.

Which just goes to show the folly of jumping to conclusions. Swedish-born director Mikael Håfström has uncorked a tidy little thriller, which gets much of its juice from a clever script by Miles Chapman and Jason Keller. The premise is intriguing, the execution is engaging — if occasionally burdened by exploitation flick clichés — and, yes, Stallone and Schwarzenegger acquit themselves honorably.

Indeed, they’re perfectly cast in this twisty prison saga, which seems to have been shaped with their strengths — and acting limitations — in mind. Håfström allows them to do what they do best, and they do it well; the result certainly won’t be more than a footnote in cinema history, but it’s a reasonably entertaining way to spend a night at the movies.

Ray Breslin (Stallone) has a most unusual career: He’s a structural engineer who specializes in prison design, or — more precisely — the weaknesses of such institutions. As the “field agent” half of the Los Angeles-based security firm Breslin-Clark, he allows himself to be incarcerated into various prisons as an apparent felon, in order to escape and thus expose design and (more frequently) staffing weaknesses.

Although ostensibly on his own, Breslin always is monitored by his operational partners: handler Abigail Ross (Amy Ryan) and genius hacker Hush (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson). Partner Lester Clark (Vincent D’Onofrio) acts as the company “face,” securing the assignments and managing the tidy sums that Breslin charges for his talents.

Following the completion of yet another routine assignment, Breslin is offered a tantalizing challenge by CIA operative Jessica Miller (Caitriona Balfe). Wanting to remove the political stink left by a decade’s worth of nasty headlines concerning Guantanamo Bay and extraordinary rendition, shadowy U.S. black-ops agencies have collaborated to construct a top-secret über-prison at an undisclosed location, well away from prying media eyes. The goal is to keep its dangerous occupants locked up, no matter how clever — or desperate — they might be.

That’s where Breslin comes in: If he can’t break out, then All Concerned will be satisfied that their “detention center” lives up to its promise.

Bullet to the Head: Somebody stop this guy, before he "acts" again...

Bullet to the Head (2013) • View trailer
1.5 stars. Rating: R, for profanity, nudity and constant violence
By Derrick Bang

The surprise success of 2010’s The Expendables had an unpleasant side effect: It gave Sylvester Stallone the impression that he had a career to revive, and now we’re stuck with vulgar trash such as Bullet to the Head.

Real men don't settle their differences with guns; they use axes. Apparently having
decided that his film isn't violent enough, director Walter Hill tries for the gold when
professional assassin Jimmy Bonomo (Sylvester Stallone) goes one-on-one with
the towering Keegan (Jason Momoa).

The other depressing surprise is the depth to which director Walter Hill’s career has sunk. The once-promising young stylist — who, back in the day, impressed us with The Warriors, The Long Riders and 48 Hrs. — has been reduced to exploitative sleaze that I’d normally expect to debut as a late-Friday-night Cinemax original.

But while Stallone and Hill bring nothing worthwhile to this dumb crime thriller, the lion’s share of blame belongs to so-called screenwriter Alessandro Camon, whose efforts here don’t even qualify as creative typing. He has adapted French writer Alexis Nolent’s three-part graphic novel series, Headshot (aka Du plomb dans la tête), with a complete absence of grace, wit and plot logic.

Nothing — and I mean absolutely nothing — in Camon’s narrative makes sense. Various low-level characters are introduced solely so Stallone’s James “Jimmy” Bonomo can blow them away. The pattern is repeated ad nauseum: Some guy is found, he blusters profanely before giving up the name of the some other guy; he takes a bullet to the head. And then on to the next one.

And I won’t even attempt to describe the plot “surprise” that occupies the blood-soaked climax, at which point Camon’s scribblings truly enter cloud cuckoo-land.

I keep reminding myself that well-paid executives at Warner Bros. apparently found merit in this swill. What were they smoking that day?

Hill signals his tawdry sensibilities with the opening scene, as some insignificant goon inhales dollops of cocaine, chases it down with a pint or so of vodka, and heads toward the naked Russian hooker waiting perkily in the shower. (It should be mentioned that only two significant female characters inhabit this story, both apparently present so they can flash their boobs.)

This wholesome scene is interrupted by Jimmy and partner Louis Blanchard (Jon Seda), who wave badges and stride into the hotel room, as their unhappy host babbles about warrants and lawyers. Ah, but Jimmy and Louis aren’t cops; they’re professional killers. One dead scumbag later, they’re on their way, Jimmy rather inexplicably having failed to kill the witnessing hooker as well.

Could this have been a mistake? Moments later, while chilling at a bar, Louis is killed by Keegan (Jason Momoa), a towering mercenary who tries — but fails — to off Jimmy as well.

Elsewhere across town, visiting detective Taylor Kwon (Sung Kang) checks in with New Orleans cops Lebreton (Dane Rhodes) and Towne (Marcus Lyle Brown). Kwon is pursuing a lead that got his partner killed back in Washington, D.C.; Lebreton and Towne aren’t inclined to be helpful, but they don’t object when the newcomer expresses interest in this hot-off-the-griddle hotel killing.

Thanks to frequent phone chats with an amazing departmental researcher (never shown) back in D.C., who always gets results in seconds, Kwon quickly hooks up with Jimmy and proposes an uneasy alliance: They both lost partners, so how ’bout teaming up to defeat the common enemy? Jimmy makes a great show of declining — Stallone’s granite-faced scowl struggling mightily to express anything resembling a flicker of actual emotion — but of course they immediately become allies.

And start up the criminal food chain, in the manner previously described, to Kwon’s ongoing horror.

“You can’t just shoot a guy like that!” he protests, the first time (or was it the third?).

“I just did,” Jimmy replies, in what passes for banter in this numbnuts script.

The final link in said chain is Robert Nkomo Morel (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a ruthless financier who fled some African country (!) in order to become a shady developer in New Orleans. He’s assisted by Baptiste (Christian Slater), a crooked lawyer who fancies himself an Old World aristocrat and loves to throw hedonistic parties.

Jimmy and Kwon catch up with Baptiste at the latter’s lavish masked ball, where — wouldn’t you know it — many of the women apparently forgot their costumes.

Kwon manages to take a bullet in the shoulder (no, not in the head) somewhere along the way, at which point Jimmy brings him to a low-rent tattoo parlor, where sexy needle artist Lisa (Sarah Shahi) patches up the poor boy, employing the skills she learned during her single year at medical school. Turns out Lisa is Jimmy’s daughter — goodness, what a surprise! — and of course she’s the one thing in this world that he truly cares about, blah, blah, blah.

Cue Lisa’s abduction by Keegan. Normally, you’d be able to write the rest of this silly story the way a 5-year-old connects the dots, but an unexpected — nay, deranged — impulse on Keegan’s part changes the dynamic a bit. Not for the better. Maybe that plot hiccup played well in Nolent’s graphic novel, but it sure is stupid here.

Stallone’s “performance” in this flick is a joke, the few acting chops he possessed, eons ago, obviously have abandoned him. One has to wonder if cosmetic surgery has left him with nothing but the brooding, sleepy-eyed glower that is his sole expression throughout this entire film.

Kang, probably recognized from the Fast and Furious franchise, has plenty of presence and acting talent; in a better project, he’d obviously shine. But this script makes Kwon a walking joke who repeatedly behaves like a moron; there simply isn’t any reason Jimmy wouldn’t whack this interloper and be done with him. Try as he might, Kang can’t earn any sympathy or respect here.

Momoa, the former Baywatch hunk who recently failed to re-ignite the Conan franchise, comes off a bit better as Keegan. He makes a pretty good hovering menace: the sort of secondary baddie sent off to do all the dirty work at the behest of a James Bondian megalomaniac. (Indeed, Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s Morel has that cartoonish aspect.)

Shahi shows some resourceful spunk as Lisa, but it’s another thankless role; she functions mainly as a Woman In Peril. Slater simply wastes his time in, yes, yet another under-developed part.

Nobody else remains on camera long enough to worry about.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent attempt to revive his career — The Last Stand — at least had the good sense not to take itself seriously; Arnie also was smart enough to surround himself with reasonably well-drawn supporting characters and Johnny Knoxville’s comic skills. Bullet to the Head, in great contrast, is as humorless and unwaveringly tedious as Stallone’s frozen-faced mug.

Rubbish this incompetent will serve only to stoke the fires of publicity-minded politicians eager to castigate the rising levels of violence in cinema. This flick is bound to make the top of such lists ... with a bullet.

The Expendables 2: More mindless mayhem

The Expendables 2 (2012) • View trailer
Three stars. Rating: R, for strong bloody violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.24.12

It’s time once again to buy stock in ordnance manufacturers; Sylvester Stallone and his geezer squad are back to wreak more havoc and shoot up fresh landscapes.

Determined to rescue a lone American trapped by gun-toting
mercenaries, our heroes — from left, Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone),
Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) and Hale Caesar (Terry Crews) — blast
their way into a fortified compound, and then prepare to eliminate any
two-legged signs of resistance. It's just another day at the office for
these guys...

Really, even by the already crazed standards of Hollywood’s exaggerated action flicks, I’ve rarely seen so much gunfire. Or so many blood squibs spurting from the chests, limbs and heads of obligingly posed victims. Particularly the goons shot by long-range, high-power sniper rifle, whose heads explode in a spray of viscera.

It’s almost enough to harsh the laughably ludicrous vibe of this otherwise mindless live-action cartoon.

The Expendables 2 is even sillier than its 2010 predecessor, an AARP spin on The Seven Samurai, The Dirty Dozen and all sorts of other gang-of-losers-against-insurmountable-odds epics. Ironically enough, "sillier" means better, in this case; thanks to the lighter tone, this sequel is quite a bit more entertaining. The notion that Stallone and his old coot buddies still can raise hell, definitely raises smiles ... and, yeah, it's a kick to see so many familiar faces.

With tongue even more firmly in cheek, Stallone once again shares screenwriting credit, but this time hands the directing chores to Simon West, a veteran of similar high-octane action fare such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, last year’s remake of The Mechanic and TV’s much-loved (if woefully short-lived) 2003 cop series, Keen Eddie.

The first Expendables at least made an effort to blend some actual character drama with its grim doings, with Dolph Lundgren’s Gunnar Jensen failing to play nice with the rest of the crew, most particularly Jet Li’s Yin Yang. Lundgren is sweetness and light this time — and has inherited a college-educated science background (!) — but Li makes little more than a token appearance in an audacious pre-credits rescue mission, which pretty much sets the tone for what follows.

Indeed, West errs slightly with this prologue; it’s far better staged than most of what follows. The folks who make these sorts of films really need to stop front-loading their best stuff; the rest of the film invariably feels anti-climactic.

But back to basics.

Any trace of squabbling has vanished, with Barney Ross (Stallone) and the rest of his crew — Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), Hale Caesar (Terry Crews) and Toll Road (Randy Couture) — joking and tossing brewskies like seasoned best buds. They’ve also taken on a rookie, a talented sharpshooter dubbed Billy the Kid (Liam Hemsworth), who seems to fit right in with the gang.

The Expendables: Flush This Mush

The Expendables (2010) • View trailer for The Expendables
Two stars (out of five). Rating: R, for violence, profanity and gobs o' gore
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.19.10
Buy DVD: The Expendables • Buy Blu-Ray: The Expendables (Three-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo + Digital Copy)

They certainly are. 

On paper, the concept of The Expendables must have seemed like a sure thing: a testosterone-fueled mash-up of The Magnificent Seven and The Wild Bunch, populated by a dream team of fresh and fading cinema action stars. 

On the big screen, the results are dark, dismal and sniggeringly stupid: a clumsy, ludicrous exercise that can't even fulfill the basic requirements of a grade-C action epic. 

Oh, and it's loud. Very loud. Excessively loud. Between supercharged gunfire, bombs and gasoline-enhanced explosions, this flick may be responsible for viewer hearing loss. 

When Gunner Jensen (Dolph Lundgren, center) loses his cool and seems poised
to kill his fellow mercenary, Yin Yang (Jet Li, left), team leader Barney Ross
(Sylvester Stallone) has to get equally serious while trying to defuse the
situation. The Expendables is filled with hilariously improbable scenes just
like this one, and they only get sillier as the film unspools.

As noisy as all the pyrotechniques are, though, they don't drown out the tin-eared dialogue. 

More's the pity. 

For once in his life, the egomaniacal Sylvester Stallone should have stepped back and allowed input from other, more talented hands. Sly's participation should have been limited to his starring role; he has gotten pretty good at playing his one-note self. He's a hack writer at best — he shares screen credit here with David Callaham — but he's a truly deplorable director without the slightest idea of where to place the camera, how to light a scene, or how to orchestrate a fight sequence or vehicular chase. 

What is the sense of casting martial-arts fan favorites such as Jet Li and Jason Statham, if their considerable skills are lost amid badly lit scenes and smash-cut editing, which make it impossible to enjoy their work? 

And it's not just Li and Statham. Much (most?) of the hare-brained action is handled by the actors or stunt doubles, rather than being "sweetened" by computer enhancements, and it's vexing to miss the details. This film's sizable stunt team clearly put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into this flick, and a lot of their effort goes unappreciated. 

That's the frustrating part: the realization that, all other elements being equal, The Expendables could have been a decent action flick, given a better director and a savvy script doctor. 

As it is ... little more than bumbling junk. 

Stallone stars as Barney Ross, head of a squad of seasoned mercenaries who've retained enough humanity to accept only good-guy assignments. We meet them during a confrontation with Somali pirates; needless the say, the pirates get wasted while our heroes — and all the hostages — apparently suffer nary a scratch. 

Neat trick, that, with so many bullets flying all over the place.