the expendables

I'm not sure quite what to say about The Expendables.  It seemed sort of like a bigger budget version of the cheesy action films that seemed to saturate cinema in the 1980s.

I can't ever really say I was a huge fan of these.  I mean, I've watched quite a few of them and they were okay, but very few were every really memorable.

The big problem is they were just too cheesy.  The action, gun-play and fighting would be good but then between those bits you'd get hackneyed plots and terrible dialogue and the whole thing would be saturated with homoeroticism.

I think I've mentioned this before, but why is it homoeroticism when it's men being presented as sexy / beefcake?  Unless I'm getting the wrong end of the stick the implication is that it's only designed to appeal to gay men, rather than hetero women.  I dunno, it just seems all the terminology is rather male-centric.

Anyway, I think my problem here was that I was expecting the film to be somewhat more self-aware than it was.

It's odd - there seemed to be something of an attempt at it, but it didn't really work.  The most obvious example of a bit of self-awareness was in the character names.  So, for example, Jason Statham's character has the rather daft name of Lee Christmas and others are called Toll Road and Hale Ceaser.

The trouble is it's not clear if these are their real names or if they are names they've picked in order to not be identifiable or as aliases or similar.  They also don't make anything of it in the film proper.

Another problem I had was that the bad guys don't really make sense.  The idea seems to essentially be that a rogue (well, I think he was rogue) CIA agent is manipulating a tin-pot dictator for the usual sorts of reasons.  The trouble is there doesn't seem to be any sort of hard and fast decision as to whether the dictator in question is really just a puppet being forced to do stuff or he's actually a really evil person himself.

So we end up with some contradictory scenes where he's shown to be total bastard himself but then others where he's seen to be controlled and manipulated by the CIA guy.  So are we meant to feel sorry for him?  But he's an arsehole too.

It's like we've got an arsehole buffet, where perhaps we should have had two separate arsehole courses.