I watched The Expendables tonight. As a whole package I don’t think it worked very well. The dialog was poor and they didn’t really do enough to make me give a crap about any of the characters, so it just decended into a bunch of fights and explosions with nothing to really string it all together.
Having said that, there were some elements that I thought had potential. It was quite cool to see fighters from different disciplines working together or fighting each other. I’m not talking about X could beat Y in a fight. I just mean the physical dynamic between the people. Seeing Jason Statham and Jet Li double team Gary Daniels was kinda fun. Seeing Steve Austin fighting Randy Couture was interesting too. The fight scenes weren’t executed as well as they could have been. There was some serious talent available but it wasn’t really made to work.
Statham is really fluid and always works nice angles. Jet Li is one of my favorite martial artists, but rarely gets to show what he’s capable of. Gary Daniels is very flexible and can do some really great techniques, but here he was involved in close-up stuff which doesn’t show him at his best. And of course, you know if Randy Couture, Dolph Lundgren, or Steve Austin hit you it’s going to hurt. 🙂
So all in all it wasn’t a great showing, but I hope they do another with better dialog and get someone in to sort out the fight scenes. It could very easily be awesome…
Cheers
Tim…
PS. Forgot to mention I saw Karate Kid recently. It was quite good fun from a nostalgia perspective.