The Expendables

The Expendables

• MPAA Rating: R
• Release Date:
• US (wide): August 13, 2010
• Genre: Action
• Other Genres: Adventure, Thriller
• Studio: Lionsgate
• Tag Line: Semper Fight.
• Language: English
• Filming Locations: Brazil, New Orleans

We've been waiting a long time for this one. In the 1980s you couldn't move for testosterone-fuelled action flicks that were light on plot but heavy on body count. These films made movie gods of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willisand the like while at the same time cleaning up at the box office and teaching the youth of the world that a grenade was the best way to solve any argument.

Then the celluloid landscape changed. Society embraced the modern man more in touch with his feminine side, and 9/11 and the shift in global geo-politics that followed demanded a more thoughtful approach to the genre, creating heroes with a conscience like Batman, Bourne and the rebooted Bond. 


There's therefore been a gap in the market for a film filled with guns, knives and explosions; a gap that Stallone looks to fill withThe Expendables, his big-budget action spectacular that immediately takes you back to those halcyon days of bad quips and mindless violence.

It helps that Stallone takes the lead role of Barney Ross, cigar-chomping leader of a ruthless team of mercenaries available for the most dangerous of missions should the price be right. Sly is just the right guy to lead this disparate band of brothers, allowing him to re-claim his action crown while at the same time gently sending up his former glories.

Jason Statham is also electric as his number two Lee Christmas, a former SAS man who's as quick with a knife as he is with a put-down. Statham is one of the most bankable action stars in the world right now, and it's a blast watching him banter with Stallone; a double act that's the perfect marriage of old and new. 


The rest of the crew similarly mixes the old guard with young pretenders, featuring Jet Li as master of close quarter combat Yin Yang, Randy Couture as demolitions expert Toll Road, Terry Crews as long-barrel weapons specialist Hale Caesar and last, but most certainly not least, precision sniper Gunnar Jensen, played with true menace by Dolph Lundgren.

Proceedings kick off in Somalia with the team taking on a gang of greedy pirates, and it immediately becomes clear that Lundgren is the liability in the group, a combination of drugs, combat stress and a worryingly short fuse causing the man mountain to violently erupt at the drop of a hat. So while they successfully complete the mission in bloody and uncompromising fashion, cracks are already appearing within the group.

Back home they visit the Expendables HQ - a tattoo parlour run byMickey Rourke of course - where the call comes in for a job that no one else wants to take. Intrigued by the mysterious offer, Stallone agrees to meet mysterious point man Mr. Church, so setting up the film's most heavily hyped sequence, in which Sly, Schwarzenegger and Willis finally share the screen.

Unfortunately, the scene fails to ignite, the banter between the titanic trio awkward and forced, the gags for the most part falling flat. The brief conversation does end with a great gag at the expense of the Governator, but having waited more than 20 years to see the three action legends tear up the screen together, the result is something of an anti-climax.

As is this early portion of the film. Stallone agrees to take the mission, which involves overthrowing the murderous dictator of the fictitious island of Vilena, but it takes an age to get to the next wedge of action.

When it does finally arrive it's a belter however, with Stallone and Statham's reconnaissance mission becoming compromised, forcing the pair to engage in a grandstanding attack on the island's port in a 1950s Albatross sea-plane. As ludicrous as it is marvellous to behold, it's the film's true stand-out moment, and really has to be seen to be believed. 


That said, from here-on-in it's pretty standard stuff, the team split over completing the mission, with Stallone determined to return for the standard 'one last shot' at redemption and the rest of the lads not quite as keen on the 'almost certain death' that entails.

There are a couple of twists and turns along the way involving the identity of the enemy, the motives of a beautiful local freedom fighter, and the loyalty of the Expendables themselves, but if you've watched even a handful of '80s action classics, you'll see them coming a mile off. 
But let's be honest, no one is watching The Expendables for plot, and in terms of murder and mayhem, the film delivers in spades.

The ultra-violence is of the cartoon variety, with our heroes snapping necks, smashing torsos, punching fire and defying logic at every turn. However, much of this carnage comes at the expense of action that's easy on the eye. In recent years the Bourne films have proved that a well-choreographed fight sequence can be as impressive as any explosion, and yet The Expendables fails to feature even one truly memorable punch-up.

But if it's simply kills you're after, there's death aplenty in the final few reels, as the cast breaks bones and spills blood with true gusto. As previously mentioned, Stallone and Stath make a fine central pairing, trading gags and insults as if they have been friends for years, lending credence to the history and mythology of the team.
Unfortunately, the rest of the Expendables don't fare quite as well, Li and Lundgren excelling on the action front but struggling when they actually have to act and emote.
Crews and Couture fare better, killing with the best of them and delivering their lines with mischievous twinkles in their eyes, but due to the ensemble nature of the project, the pair are relegated to supporting characters for much of the run-time.

On the villainous side, David Zyas is passable as the bloodthirsty despot, Eric Roberts is at his sleazy best as a rogue CIA operative, and Steve Austin fills the screen with bulk and menace as murderous henchman Paine.

Special mention should also go to Rourke as the pipe-smoking former expendable who now brokers their clandestine missions. Never one to knowingly under-act, he delivers a ridiculous speech mid-way though the film with such conviction and intensity that it could win him an Oscar and a Razzie all at once.

It's a definite highlight in a film that's filled with moments to make action geeks cheer. For while Stallone has taken the '80s formula and endeavoured to contemporise it, The Expendables is very much a throwback to a bygone era, when men were true men; ripping rivals apart with their bare hands.

It's just frustrating that it doesn't have more moments like the aforementioned sea-plane spectacular. Or a fight that pits Rocky IV rivals Stallone and Lundgren against each other. Or a sequence in which Bruce Willis kicks ass rather than just talking about it. These may be fan-boy fantasies, but having assembled such an amazing cast, Stallone seems to have missed as many opportunities as he has nailed in terms of crafting the ultimate action flick.

It's not that the film fails on any specific level, just that there seemed to be the potential for so much more with the talent involved and the master of action at the helm.

That said, perhaps he's saving all of the above for the sequel, so here's hoping we get further opportunities to spend time with The Expendables as they continue to kick ass, take names and do us all proud by setting the genre back 20 years.

Inception Movie Review

Christopher Nolan is one of the most visionary filmmakers working today and his new film, Inception, is a stunning achievement that raises the bar for original filmmaking. It challenges the boundaries of cinematic language and expands the conceptual and thematic dimensions of the narrative art form. Nolan, who has always been fascinated with the subject of dreams and the extraordinary potential of the imagination, wrote Inception over a decade ago but was only able to make it after the success of Dark Knight propelled him to the forefront of A-list directors.
Inception is a highly entertaining, complex and cerebral thriller about a surreal world where technology exists to enter the human mind through dream invasion and a single idea within one's mind can be the most dangerous weapon or the most valuable asset. Despite its outlandish premise, the central theme of the story is both personal and universal. At its emotional core is the tragic story of one man’s quest to uncover a long-buried truth and get back home to what he loves most.
Leonardo DiCaprio anchors the film with a low key, intense performance as Dom Cobb, a skilled thief and coveted player in the dangerous world of high stakes corporate espionage. With a reputation for being the best “extractor” in the business, he is the “go to” guy if you’re in the market for stealing valuable secrets. His rare talent for extracting information from deep within the subconscious during the dream state, when the mind is at its most vulnerable, has also turned him into an international fugitive and cost him everything he has ever loved. He is filled with regret, plagued by unresolved guilt and haunted by the memory of his late wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), who invades his subconscious and messes with his mind in dangerous ways.
A wealthy businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) offers Cobb a chance at redemption when he hires him – not to steal an idea but to plant one in the mind of a wealthy rival (Cillian Murphy) – a process known as inception. To get his former life back, Cobb must accomplish the impossible. Instead of the perfect heist, Cobb and his dream team of specialists must pull off the reverse. If they succeed, it could be the perfect crime. But despite their careful planning, a dangerous enemy seems to predict their every move.
For Cobb, something very real is at stake. All his choices, his reactions, and how he deals with the people he’s working with are grounded in that knowledge and are a means to an end:  getting back his life. Like Teddy Daniels, DiCaprio’s character in Shutter Island, Cobb is a man with a dark past. He’s an unreliable character who proves unreliable to those around him. He is also the guiding thread of a very complicated story that at one point follows four parallel lines of action as one elaborate dream is layered upon another and then another and another. Nolan helms with intelligence and an architect’s eye for emotional detail. He relies on Cobb to draw the audience through the story’s increasing levels of complexity in a very clear fashion. Nolan never leaves his audience stranded or confused but rather stimulated, engaged and reaching out for greater comprehension as they delve through multiple layers of reality or unreality as the case may be.
Nolan has assembled a top notch international ensemble cast with a remarkable level of talent to play the characters in his story. In addition to DiCaprio, they include Academy Award nominees Ken Watanabe, Ellen Page and Tom Berenger; Oscar winners Marion Cotillard and Michael Caine; and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy and Dileep Rao. The production team is equally impressive and includes three-time Oscar-nominated director of photography Wally Pfister, production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas, two-time Oscar-nominated editor Lee Smith, Oscar-nominated costume designer Jeffrey Kurland, and Oscar-nominated special effects supervisor Chris Corbould. Editor Lee Smith does an impressive job interweaving the multiple realities. The music is by Academy Award-winning composer Hans Zimmer.
Inception would be a daunting film for any filmmaker to direct, but Nolan has acquired a lot of experience over the years in terms of making big movies and all of it comes into play here as he skillfully blurs the line between perception and reality and explores the insidious nature of ideas and self-delusion. He places high priority on the integrity of the acting and does not allow the large scale approach that the material demands overwhelm the performances. Instead, he pushes the boundaries of what can be achieved practically to lend more plausibility to the proceedings, as opposed to relying heavily on computer effects and green screen. He has created a film with mind-bending visual effects, such as when Paris folds in on itself or a fight sequence takes place in zero gravity. He allows the audience to experience the limitless realities that can only be realized in dream by blending the intimacy and emotion of what might take place in a dream with the massive scope of what our brains can conceive.
The film was shot on location in six countries on four separate continents. It includes enormous sets and impressive sequences, among them a multi-vehicle action sequence complete with a freight train plowing down the middle of the street, gravity-defying sets that were designed to revolve a full 360 degrees, and a set constructed on a giant gimbal that puts everything and everyone on tilt. There’s even an action-packed sequence in the snow that rivals the best Bond film. Zimmer’s haunting, moving score is seamlessly integrated into the overall sound design of the film driving the action relentlessly forward while conveying the strong emotional undercurrent that informs every character’s action across multiple levels of reality.
Inception is an intelligent, imaginative and highly original sci-fi actioner that’s hugely entertaining and proves there are no rules for what the mind can create. Christopher Nolan demonstrates once again that he is an extraordinary filmmaker and delivers a compelling film that is very fresh, very different and also quite personal. Inception promises to be one of the hottest tickets this summer.

After.Life (2010)

When watching movies, I like to be adventurous every once in a while.  So in my ventures to the Redbox machine yesterday for what I call “new movie Tuesday”, I spotted a film that I had not heard of, After.Life.  It stars Liam Neeson, Christina Ricci, and Justin Long.  A promising cast if there ever was one.

Directed by first timer Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, After.Life is one of those weird thriller/dramas where you never quite know what’s going on and yet you’re still compelled to watch.  The movie is centered around a funeral director, Eliot Deacon (Neeson) who has a strange gift (curse?) as he’s able to talk to the dead that come into his mortuary.  One day, a young woman, Anna (Ricci), comes into the funeral home after dying in a car accident.  Being able to talk to Eliot, Anna thinks she is still alive but she’s confined to the lab where Deacon prepares the bodies for funerals.  The movie shifts back and forth between Anna thinking she’s dead and then trying to escape the mortuary because she subsequently thinks she’s still alive.  As the viewer, you’re never quite sure if Anna is alive or dead until the final scene and even then it’s still a little hazy.  Justin Long plays Anna’s would-be fiance who has commitment issues only until he finds out that Anna was supposedly killed in a car accident.  The movie goes down the alley of is Eliot burying people alive or is he really tasked with taking people into the afterlife.

All around, the acting is pretty good and Long even sheds some tears in his first uber serious role in his career,  but its the back and forth that Wojtowicz-Vosloo plays with the viewer that pretty much distorts the movie into being really good into “meh” territory.  If there’s one incentive to watch After.Lfeit’s to see Christina Ricci naked in 3/4’s of the movie.  She spends just about all of her screen time on a table naked, which is never a bad thing.  There is one question I have to ask however, is does anyone else think Ricci looks like sleep-deprived crackhead in all of her movies?  Neeson is spot on as the tormented funeral director who is tasked with transitioning the corpses that come into his funeral home to the “after life.”  There is one particular scene in the movie that involves Ricci’s character and a burial ritual with some old women in which maggots start coming out of her mouth.  It’s not that it was disturbing, because it was, it was just extremely out of place.

If you’re searching for an odd movie that features A-list actors, a promising story, and tits look no further than After.Life.  It ultimately falls short of what it could have been but it’s still entertaining for the most part.

Shutter Island

Shutter Island | rated R (A, L) | starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Jackie Earle Haley, Ted Levine, John Carol Lynch, Patricia Clarkson, Michelle Williams | directed by Martin Scorcesse | 2:18 mins | the following is a review from an advanced screening of the film

Two duely appointed federal marshalls, Teddy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), venture into Shutter Island, a secluded psychiatric facility where a psychologist (Ben Kingsley) experiments with new forms of therapy in 1954, to help them track down a particularly ill patient who has disappeared seemingly out of her cell.

If you hooked me up to a heart monitor during a screening of Martin Scorcesse’s genre picture Shutter Island it would be beating a mile a minute with excitement in the first act, slow to cautious sporatic beats in the 2nd and then flatline in the third. The movie starts out beautifully, a leasurely paced, meticulously constructed film noir mystery with potential supernatural elements, but it starts to unravel as Scorcesse or the screenwriters don’t seem to know how to fit their ending with the established tone and Scorcesse has a hard time weaving in the more surreal elements of the story, then the movie comes to an abrupt deflating hault when the truth comes out. Not since Alejandre Aja’s High Tension have I seen a movie with such a masterful set-up, turn around and destroy everything its built in the final minutes for the sake of a gimmicky ending twist.

When the experienced marshall Teddy and green Chuck arrive at Shutter Island, Scorcesse takes us through the gates and gives us a tour of the institute so rich with detail that it creates for the movie it’s own universe, one of secrets around every corner and potential conspiracies. It takes a look at psychological practices of the 50s with Kingsley as a doctor who seeks more experimental social therapies then the barbaric practices of the past. Shutter Island itself is a living breathing entity and a potentially massive threat.

Scorcesse is visually at the top of his game with this movie. In addition to the lavish reality, Shutter Island has some of the best dream sequences I’ve seen recently. The dreams in the movie actually seem like dreams instead of scenes that just didn’t really happen. They have a surrealism. Scorcesse brilliantly meshes together Teddy’s memory of liberating a Nazi concentration camp in World War II, memories of his wife (Michelle Williams) dying in an apartment fire with what he is learning of Rachael Solando - the mysterious mental patient he is there to find. It beautifully realizes the quality of dreams where you see someone and recognize them as someone else.

But almost as soon as it has begun the principle mystery is over and the movie, having written itself into a corner, makes several contortions to keep it afloat. In the 2nd act it starts to unravel and things start to not make sense. It’s here where it becomes obvious what the ending will be and that Scorcesse doesn’t have enough meat and drive in the set-up story to distract us from the increasingly obvious nature of what is really going on. By the time Teddy and Chuck sneak into Ward C to interrogate the arsonist responsible for his wife’s death, the movie has lost all narrative drive, quietly floating around rutter-less in an empty ocean. From there it gets more and more contrived.

Scorcesse does have guts with an unflinching camera set on horrific sights of dead children and atrocities. And DiCaprio is terribly great in this. He’s the kind of actor whose delivery of pain trascends the usual Oscar bait melodrama we usually see. He doesn’t express loss with sobs, but shows it as physical pain. It’s gut wrenching to watch.

Then there is the ending, literally explained to us with charts and graphs, in which the movie’s reality is redefined. I always try to look at a movie for what it is and chastize people who knock something for not being what they wanted it to be. Yes, I wanted to see a psychological horror movie or a classically styled film noir mystery. In the case of Shutter Island the movie that it sets up and ultimately isn’t is far more interesting and compelling than what it actually is. It’s a case of the red herring being better than the reality (also see this year’s Whiteout). Your ending reveal should either knock us off our seats with shock or elevate the story. Shutter does neither instead shrinking it to a more easily resolvable solution. The end of Shutter Island feels like a cheat.

For a brief scene toward the end Teddy meets Patricia Clarkson in a cave outlying the island and what they talk about is fascinating - absurd but theatrically interesting. The idea that once branded insane, everything you do is then called insane is more compelling than the tale of someone coping with loss Scorcesse is telling.

Shutter Island is visually beautiful and a technical wonder. It is well acted. It depicts the dream state better than any movie I’ve seen so far. And yet it completely and utterly collapses in the 2nd and third acts, jettisoning every interesting theatrical idea it had for a gimmicky ending more fitting of a (very grim) TV drama - the logistics of which are idiotic to impossible. It’s even more dissapointing than a movie that was bad to begin with.

Ip Man

Mandarin Title: Ye Wen
Cantonese Title: Yat doi chung si Yip Man

Ip Man tells the story of one of China’s greatest martial artists. Yip Man was born in 1893 and passed away in 1972. He was a master of the martial arts style known as Wing Chun. His most well-known student would go on to become one of cinema’s greatest icons. His name was Bruce Lee. 

Ip Man was released in Hong Kong in 2008 and became an instant success. It won 2 Hong Kong film awards for Best Film and Best Action Choreography and was nominated for 10 other awards including Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for 2 different roles.

A sequel, Ip Man 2,has already been made and released in Hong Kong this past April. There are already talks of a third Ip Man movie to be made in the future.

Ip Man is the fourth movie that the film’s star Donnie Yen (Shanghai Knights) and director Wilson Yip have worked on together.

In the city of Foshan during the 1930’s, the most famous kung fu fighter is Ip Man (Yen). He easily defeats the other kung fu “masters” in the city when they challenge him. When a country bumpkin (Siu-Wong Fan) comes to Foshan and beats everyone up, it is Ip Man that kicks and punches him out of town.

Ip Man’s life is very good until Japan invades and takes over China. Ip Man loses everything and he, along with his wife ( Lynn Hung) and son (Li Chak), struggle to survive. 

When Ip Man’s friend (Xing Yu, Kung Fu Hustle) disappears after agreeing to share skills in a martial arts “exhibition” with the Japanese in exchange for a bag of rice, he begins to suspect something is not right.

The next time the Japanese are looking for fighters, Ip Man volunteers to go. After he sees one of his fellow masters brutally killed by a sadistic Japanese colonel (Shibuya Tenma), Ip Man rolls up his selves and decides its time to start kicking some Japanese butt. This leads to a final showdown between Ip Man and a Japanese general (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi), who is a master of karate, for the pride of their beloved countries.

China vs. Japan is not a new concept in Hong Kong cinema. If you know a little bit of history about either country, you’ll know that these two Asian powerhouses have been battling each other for centuries.

The classic film, Fist of Fury (1972) starring Bruce Lee, was an anti-Japanese film. 20 years later, Jet Li would star in a very similar movie called Fist of Legend (1994).

Wilson Yip and writer Edmond Wong do a wonderful job of conjuring up national pride, if you’re Chinese. For an American, they’re equally successful in making a lighting-quick kung fu flick that packs quite a wallop.

The action is “fast and furious” thanks to action director Sammo Hung Kam-Bo and martial arts coordinator Tony Leung Siu Hung. You may remember Sammo from his Rush Hour-like TV series Martial Law that ran during the late ’90’s.

Donnie Yen does a fine job as the sometimes stoic, sometimes fierce, kung fu master, but he is still far away from joining Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li on the Mount Rushmore of Hong Kong action heroes.

Ip Man is a high-energy, jaw-dropping kung fu film that Hollywood wishes it could make, but can’t.

Ip Man is now available on DVD.