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THE EXPENDABLES 2010
Written by David Callaham and Sylvester Stallone.
Directed by Sylvester Stallone.
Starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Let Li, Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, David Zayas, Giselle Itie, Charisma Carpenter, Terry Crews, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
This cartoonish combo platter of action stars from the last three decades blows stuff up real good…and that’s almost all you can ask of something like this, isn’t it?
Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) and his right hand man Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) head up a mercenary band made up of predictably colorful characters named Ying Yang (Jet Li), Toll Road (Randy Couture), Hale Caesar (Terry Crews) and the normally named but abnormally huge Gunner Jensen (Dolph Lundgren). After saving a ship from some Somali pirates, Barney and company are hired to kill a geographically dubious dictator. General Garza (David Zayas) is styled like a Central American strongman, yet lords over a Caribbean-style island in the Gulf of Mexico.
Barney and Christmas head to the island and check it out, where they meet Garza’s daughter Sandra (Giselle Itie). She’s sort of a cross between rebel leader and Nicole Richie. Sandra is captured by the evil ex-CIA agent who is the power behind Garza’s throne, leading Barney and company to storm the island and free her with a combination of mixed martial arts, bullets and a ludicrously unlimited supply of explosives. Assed are kicked. Bodies are blown apart. Stuff is set on fire. The bad guy gets the hell killed out of him in the end.
The 80s action movie is one of the more maligned modern genres and The Expendables is a good reminder of why that is. It’s all fairly dumb, unsophisticated and macho almost, but not quite, to the point of being homoerotic. When the punches and knives are flying; when Stallone is pretending to be the fastest gun on Earth; when Randy Couture and Steve Austin hook up in the ultimate UFC vs. WWE battle; basically anytime a good guy is doing something extremely violent to a bad guy, The Expendables is also fun. There’s a way too long lull between the opening action sequence and when things finally get going on Garza’s island and the quality of one-liners in the script is pretty bad, but The Expendables is a solid B as 80s action flicks go and gets bumped up to B+ for putting a bunch of genre legends on screen at the same time.
There are a few things in this film I really don’t understand. There’s a scene that explains Couture’s cauliflower ears and another where Li complains about being short that seem like inside jokes where I’m on the outside. I also can’t figure out why Charisma Carpenter is in this film. She plays Lee Christmas’ girlfriend and that role exists just to give Statham a little more screen time, but it doesn’t make sense for that role to be played by a 40 year old actress who doesn’t take her clothes off. Don’t get me wrong. Carpenter is the personification of Milfy goodness, but I don’t know why such a slight and mechanical part didn’t go to some 20something babe who was willing to get nude.
In fact, there are no naked chicks at all in The Expendables. Not even a gratuitous scene where somebody goes to a strip club. I really don’t get the point of making a testosterone-fueled festival of violence without having a few chicks take their tops off. While it’s true that nudity was more the province of 1980s horror movies than 80s action flicks, this is 2010 and a bare boob or two is the least this film could have given us.
The reality of The Expendables isn’t nearly as good as the idea of it. That reality is good enough to make this something all action fans, 80s variety or otherwise, should see.
EXTRACT 2009
Written and Directed by Mike Judge.
Starring Jason Bateman, Mila Kunis, Ben Affleck, Kristen Wiig. J.K. Simmons, Clifton Collins Jr., Dustin Milligan, David Koechner, Beth Grant, T.J. Miller and Gene Simmons.
Mike Judge is a really funny storyteller. Extract is not a really funny story. I think that’s because when Judge now makes a movie, he’s more concerned with making a point than being funny.
Joel (Jason Bateman) is the owner of a successful food-flavoring plant whose life seems beset with problems. His wife Suzie (Kristin Wiig) never wants to have sex with him. His employees plague him with the selfish idiocy. His neighbor Nathan (David Koechner) is a boor who won’t leave him alone. He’s worried that an employee who lost a testicle in a workplace accident is going to sue him and spoil his plan to sellout to a major corporation. And he finds himself wanting to have an affair with a pretty girl named Cindy (Mila Kunis) who just started working at the plant, so under the influence of pharmaceuticals and his free spirited friend Dean (Ben Affleck), Joel hires a guy to seduce his wife so he won’t feel guilty having sex with Cindy. Oh, and Cindy is a criminal drifter who steals anything she can get her hands on.
Sounds like rich comedic fodder, doesn’t it? Surely the creator of the classic Office Space could take all that potential and turn out something hilarious, right? Wrong. There are shockingly few laughs in Extract and it’s for the same reason that Judge’s previous film, Idiocracy, also failed as a comedy. Judge is so focused on telling one sort of joke that it’s like his funny bone is wrapped in a straight jacket. With Idiocracy, he railed against everyone who wasn’t as smart as Mike Judge. With Extract, he self-pityingly asks the audience to feel sympathy for the daily trials and tribulations faced by a rich man. With both movies, almost every single joke is built around those two premises, with the result being far more tiresome than entertaining.
The contrast with Office Space couldn’t be more stark. While that movie is largely thought of as a satire on corporate America, it’s far more than that. If you pay attention, Office Space makes fun of everything. It mocks the employees just as much as the employers. The “hero” of Office Space, Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston), is just as big a maladjusted loser as his office nemesis Lumberg (Gary Cole). Peter isn’t unhappy in the story because he works a pointless job for idiot bosses. He’s unhappy because he’s a lazy bastard who puts no effort into anything in his life. The humorous contempt of Office Space is generous. There’s plenty of it for everyone. The contempt of Extract (and Idiocracy) is petty, and pettiness is only funny when it’s so exaggerated that the person being petty becomes the butt of the joke. The funniest character in Extract is Joel’s plant manager Brian, played by J.K. Simmons. His disgust with the employees is so profound that he refuses to remember their real names, referring to them generically as “dinkus”. Too much of the rest of the humor in the film is focused on how pathetic everyone else is while putting Joel up on a pedestal as the “good guy” we’re supposed to empathize with. It’s not a comedy so much as it’s a pity party.
Extract is essentially about a rich guy making fun of working class people and not letting anyone make fun of him. I’m not sure what that says about the effect success has had on Mike Judge. I just know it’s a pretty unfunny movie.
EXTRAMARITAL 1998
Written by Dan O’Melveny.
Directed by Yael Russcol.
Starring Traci Lords, Jeff Fahey, Jack Kerrigan, Maria Diaz, Brian Bloom and Natalie Karp.
Traci Lords began her career in the movies as an underage porn star. I’m pretty sure she considered going back into that business while making this film, because nothing in the world of XXX could be more embarrassing or degrading than watching her stink her way through this turkey. Seriously, even doing porn with midgets and donkeys in it would be more ennobling than starring in Extramarital.
Elizabeth Barton (Traci Lords) is a woman who’s left her career in corporate America to try and become a journalist, much to the chagrin of her husband Eric (Jack Kerrigan). He thinks she’s just wasting her time while he has to pay all the bills. Elizabeth is working an internship at WE@R magazine, where her lordly editor Griffin (Jeff Fahey) is like a slicked back, heterosexual version of Tennessee Williams. The upcoming issue of the magazine is all about sex and Elizabeth is inspired to do a story about a woman she recently met on a plane trip that is having an affair. Anne (Maria Diaz) is perfectly happy to tell Elizabeth all about her adulterous liaisons with her lover Bob (Brian Bloom). But when Anne disappears, Elizabeth investigates and uncovers some shocking revelations. Well, the guy who wrote this crap thought they were shocking revelations. They’re actually painfully obvious plot twists, stuff that doesn’t really make any sense and exposition so clunky a character practically stares directly into the camera and slowly reads off a list of story details to the audience.
It’s hard to know where to begin with this movie. The script is awful. It’s a story about journalism and sex apparently written by a virgin who doesn’t know what a journalist does or how they do it. The direction would be considered below average for an industrial training video. The dialog sounds like it was transcribed from an extended improv session by a troupe of deaf-mutes. The acting is massively uneven. Jeff Fahey is giving a rather stupid and silly performance, but he does it quite well. Brian Bloom as Bob and Natalie Karp as Lori, a friend of Elizabeth’s the script manufactures to serve the Almighty Plot Hammer, are basically competent. Jack Kerrigan is terrible, however. He sports a shaggy pompadour hairdo that’s a more talented thespian than he is. Maria Diaz is as stiff as a man whose Viagra-powered erection has lasted longer than 4 hours. And Traci Lords is…good grief. She’s like robot whose emotion chip is malfunctioning. She randomly slides from one expression to another, never finding the appropriate one for the moment. When she and Fahey are on screen together, it’s like a scene from a David Mamet play featuring a man and a very smart chimp.
This allegedly erotic thriller is about 90 minutes long and has two sex scenes in it. In one, Diaz gets naked but you only see her nudity from the side or at an angle, as though director Yael Russcol was afraid to look directly at her because he’d be turned to stone. In the other, Lords is nude yet her nipples remain covered at all times. So unlike other low-rent garbage that gets run in the middle of the night on Cinemax, Extramarital doesn’t even offer up a satisfying amount of skin. Oh, and in Diaz’ sex scene, the guy she’s with is wearing what looks like a spare Michael Myers mask from Halloween 4. That pretty much kills off any prurient interest you might have.
Extramarital’s only value as a movie is as an object of mockery. If you’re looking for anything else, put this DVD back on the shelf and keep looking.
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