The Expendables

Editorial

If The Expendables had been made a decade ago - and if Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme had answered Stallone's casting call, as the likes of Lundgren and Arnold Schwarzenegger did - the film could have been a poignant, life-imitates-art examination of a group of once-great action heroes, finding themselves washed up, out of step with the touchy-feely times.

The past decade has been good to the '80s action stars. Stallone has gone the distance, largely thanks to Rocky Balboa; Rourke parlayed an Oscar-nominated comeback (The Wrestler) into a meaty villain role in a hit franchise (Iron Man 2); and, Ah-nuld was elected, and then re-elected, Governor of Kah-lifornia - and is a constitutional amendment away from the White House.

But these blokes are, "getting too old for this shit". Perhaps that's why Stallone (64) has recruited young upstarts such as Jason Statham (38) and Jet Li (47) to accompany fellow fossils-with-muscles Lundgren (52), Bruce Willis (55), Rourke (57) and Arnie (63) to take down the bad guys. If only Sly had spent less time on the phone and more on the script.

It does what it says on the tin: deliver a super-size portion of bone-cracking, bullet-spraying, muscle-flexing, head-exploding action, thankfully with the kind of tongue-in-cheek ironic distance which was fatally absent from Stallone's last directorial outing, the ill-advised, ill-fated Rambo.

Genevieve Harrison