Sly Stallone and The Expendables are muscling their way onto Channel 5 from 9pm this Sunday. Expect action, explosions, bad one-liners and even worse verse
"We are the shadows and the smoke, we rise. We are the ghosts that hide in the night" – Barney Ross
Do you like the basic idea of Ocean's Eleven, but not the showy finesse of its execution? Do you like big, old-fashioned action films, but not the way that sometimes they'd do a one-liner that accidentally made sense? Do you wish that, say, Schwarzenegger's Commando had been remade starring clones of the scary old zombie bathtub lady from The Shining? You do? Great news – The Expendables is on TV this weekend.
The Expendables is the holy grail for a certain type of film fan – a movie starring all of your favourite past-it action heroes. Sylvester Stallone! Dolph Lundgren! Jason Statham (who technically isn't past it)! Bruce Willis (for approximately five seconds)! Arnold Schwarzenegger (for less than that)! Jet Li (as the butt of a million racist jokes and hardly anything else)! Stone Cold Steve Austin (erm…)! That woman out of Buffy (Not Buffy, or the other one, or the other one. The other one)! If you like mindless violence and thinking about what The Avengers would be like if it was written by a remedial-level toddler with a preoccupation with arson – and I certainly do – then grab the popcorn. This is going to be a treat.
"I'd have paid you twice as much – to go fishing!" – Munroe
Admittedly, the plot of The Expendables is painfully slight. There's a baddie on an island, so the goodies go and kill him. It's light on characterisation and subtext. But that's not why anyone watches The Expendables. They watch it to see all their old favourites scream back onto the big screen, leaving as many dents in it as they can.
If that's why you're watching The Expendables again, you're not going to be disappointed. The casual loss of life in this film is staggering. Personally I think things peak with the very first death of the film, when a Somali pirate explodes and covers an entire interior with his guts, but you may think otherwise. And between all the murdering? Mindless yammer. Watching The Expendables is like listening to an army of Vince Vaughns trying to recite a three-week-old copy of Nuts after staying awake for 72 hours. It's charming, and then it gets tiresome, and by the end it just about makes it all the way back around to charming again.
The Expendables is a surprisingly democratic film, too. Everyone gets a moment. Stallone gets to run through the jungle with a machine gun again. Schwarzenegger gets to chomp on a cigar. Mickey Rourke gets a borderline incomprehensible monologue about a suicide he could have prevented. And Jason Statham gets a limerick. But, oh, what a limerick it is.
"I love poetry" – Barney Ross
No real discussion of The Expendables would be complete without a few words about its closing lines. Sylvester Stallone is clearly a man of three strong opinions: the opinion that all films would be better if they ended with a limerick; the opinion that the limerick's traditional A-A-B-B-A rhyme scheme is fundamentally flawed; and the opinion that all poems would be better if they ended with the words "Oh yeah". Because this, after all the quips and explosions and death, is how The Expendables ends. Jason Statham is having a knife-throwing contest with Mickey Rourke. He takes a deep breath, sucking in inspiration from all around him. And then he says it:
I once knew a man called Tool
To me, was the epitome of cool
He was good with a knife
Bad with a wife
But to think he could beat me
Dreaming he'd defeat me
Cool Tool
You gotta be a fool
Oh yeah!
A-A-B-B-C-C-A-A-D? That's not a limerick, you idiot. It's almost twice as long as it should be, has an unnecessary and frankly self-aggrandising midsection and ends with 'Oh yeah!'. The Expendables script must have been read by hundreds of people, all with their own individual system of checks and balances, and nobody thought to tell Sylvester Stallone that he'd buggered the climactic limerick up. That's poor form. "I once knew a man called Tool / To me, was the epitome of cool / He was good with a knife / Bad with a wife / And I don't think that he went to school". Now that's a limerick. That's how it should have gone. I should have written The Expendables.
However, I will begrudgingly admit that more films should end with limericks. Imagine how much better Requiem for a Dream would have been if Jennifer Connelly had turned to camera right at the end and said "Our lives are incredibly rough / I think that we've all had enough / His arm has gone bad / He misses his dad / And I've got to stick this up my chuff". Oh yeah!
Observations
• I wish I'd been in the casting session for this year's The Expendables 3, as Stallone checked off his big list of ageing action stars, realised someone was missing and yelled "Someone get me Dr Frasier Crane!"
• Although The Expendables played to Dolph Lundgren's strengths wonderfully, there remains a tiny part of me that wishes he got to sing Elvis Presley songs, drum and do karate simultaneously in it. He's incredibly good at that.
• Incidentally, if The Expendables 2 had ended with a limerick, it obviously would have been "'A great cameo' we said / And some happy tears were shed / You thought we'd booked Clint / But we were too skint / So we gave you Chuck Norris instead".
• Oh yeah!