The Expendables
Director: Sylvester Stallone
With: Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Giselle Itie, Dolph Lundgren, David Zayas, Eric Roberts, Steve Austin, etc.
This movie is the love child of The Dirty Dozen and Mission Impossible. It is nothing more than dumb fun, but it is fun. A classic brainless summer popcorn movie, and don’t expect more.
The expendables of the title are a group of ridiculously over-muscled middle-aged men led by Barney Ross (Stallone) who do contract jobs for big money. The movie opens with a rescue of hostages from Somali pirates, and we get a glimpse of the weaponry and group dynamics that drive the flick.
The plot involves CIA rogues (Roberts), a dictator (Zayas) on a mythical island who agrees to grow cocaine for them, his daughter Sandra (Itie) who works to bring her father down, and a disgruntled former associate of Ross’s group (Lundgren) who sells them out. To show that the group is motivated by more than cash and revenge, rescuing Sandra becomes the reason to invade and destroy.
Oh, how the corpses pile up. Oh, the gasoline burned. Oh, fooey.
The ex-wrestlers and older action heroes do what they do best, and Stallone’s direction is no better than it needs to be. Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger do a funny cameo, with the best line in the movie, and the whole thing is an overripe mess, but it was fun. Of the dumb variety.
C-
Get Low (2009)
Director: Aaron Schneider
With: Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Bill Murray, Lucas Black, Gerald McRaney, Bill Cobbs
An indie film with few of the cliches that bring down many of these little movies. Not that it escapes cliches entirely, but the strong performances and sympathetic vibe carry the day.
Felix Bush (Duvall) is a backwoods recluse in 1930s Tennessee and he wants to arrange his funeral, but while he is still alive. He has a hidden agenda that emerges as the plot unfolds, to reveal a deep, dark secret he has been carrying for 40 years.
The funeral director, Frank (Murray), and his assistant Buddy (Black) don’t know what to make of the man or his request, but the money gets them involved.
Along the way, Felix’s story fills in like a jigsaw puzzle, with pieces supplied by a black country preacher (Cobbs), and an old friend, Mattie (Spacek), who has recently returned to town. The whole enterprise changes the town, and especially those who interact directly with Felix.
Murray plays with his typical snarky irony, which sometimes makes the character sound like he dropped in on a time machine from the 1970s, but that is a quibble. It’s funny.
A nice little movie, with good acting and no ex-wrestlers.
B+
OSS 117 - Lost in Rio (French 2009)
Director: Michel Hazanavicius
With: Jean Dujardin, Louise Monot, Rudiger Vogler, etc.
Back in 2006, a film entitled OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies played in Portland, a dumb parody of James Bond films featuring a bumbling and idiotic master spy, Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath (Dujardin), code name OSS 117. It was stupid and about 40 years too late to be interesting.
Some said that it was a brilliant spoof. I didn’t, although I admitted that Dujardin was a classic French film comic. The story though was so dumb I could barely stand it.
Comes now this sequel. Dujardin is still funny, and this is even worse than the first one. OSS 117 is a self-centered, racist, anti-Semitic, brain-dead imbecile. If this were an American movie, think Rob Schneider or Will Ferrell in the role. That bad.
It is 1967, and he is sent to Rio to buy a microfilm with compromising information about French collaborators from an ex-Nazi (Vogler), and is forced to work with a woman Mossad agent (Monot) who wants to arrest the old creep. (Humor in Nazi war criminals? Maybe not.)
The Jew jokes compete with misogynist remarks for most of his dialogue, and he proceeds to throw the whole operation into chaos. On the good side, the French government, including old Nazi sympathizers, comes in for some vicious satire. That is all.
Because it is 1967, there is the inevitable taking-LSD-with-hippies scene, which is no funnier than similar scenes in the real 1967.
Not the worst film of the year, but not by much. I wonder what Dujardin would do with a good script?
D-