FRESH FROM THE GRAVE: IT SEES "THE EXPENDABLES"!

A recent mini-trend in Hollywood cinema has been the resurrection of the "men on a mission" film, that brawny sub-class of the action genre in which a team of tough guys, each with their own macho-destructo specialty, join forces to defeat the evil dictator, save the indigenous people, rescue the damsel in distress, etc. Last spring's The Losers updated this genre with a winking pop-comics sensibility, and June gave us The A-Team, an over-the-top redo of a hairy-chested '80s TV classic. Now comes the biggest, burliest, and most explosive of the bunch, Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables, and what sets this picture apart from those others is that, true to its maker's sensibility, it doesn't have an ironic bone in its pumped-up, heavily muscled body. Rather than using its hyperbolic gun battles, bone-crushing fights and testosterone-drenched cast as a cheeky goof on action films, Stallone has chosen to do what, in these postmodern days, counts as an act of true filmmaking heroism. He gives it to us straight. Stallone's film is not commenting on '80s action cinema, on old-school machismo, indeed even on his own career. Instead, he is celebrating all three by serving up the biggest, grandest action spectacle he can muster. The Expendables is a film that, with virtually no tweaking, could very easily have been released at the height of Stallone's mid-'80s career. And as a child of the '80s who was weaned on the collected works of Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and their vein-popping brethren, I can say without hesitation that The Expendables was the most fun I've had in a theater all year, and the best pure action film I've seen in a long time.

Stallone, who in addition to directing the film co-wrote the screenplay with Doom's David Callaham, stars as Barney Ross, grizzled leader of a band of multi-talented guns for hire. These brothers in arms are bonded by their complementary combat skills and the age-old credo of teamwork, but after some bad craziness during a raid on a Somalian pirate ship, it's clear that the old gang is feeling the weight of their lives of violence. When Ross is approached by the mysterious, agency-connected Mr. Church (Bruce Willis in a crowd-pleasing cameo) about a new job checking out the troubles on an island down in the Caribbean, he's reluctant. But once he and his right-hand man, the knife-throwing Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), visit the island, which is being crushed under the iron fist of a psychotic Noriega-style dictator (David Zayas), it's not too long before the Expendables are ready to strap on the guns and bring the pain. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Ross forges a connection with the dictator's daughter (Giselle Itie), a beautiful firebrand sworn to bring down her father...or that the reputation of America itself is on the line, as the general's in cahoots with a rogue CIA operative (Eric Roberts) who's using the new regime to back his own covert cocaine empire.

Plotwise, The Expendables is '80s-action textbook, providing a suitable framework for violent set pieces that's neither too simplistic for a feature nor too convoluted to slow down the fireworks. Some critics have blasted the film's story as threadbare, but really, who goes to a Stallone picture for plot? If you queue up for a film like The Expendables, you're there for star power and action, and on both counts, Stallone delivers. For months prior to its release, the film made headlines as a sort of summit of action stars past, present and future. Speculative buzz built around planned cameos by action superstars, some accurate (Willis), some misinformation (despite the talk, Steven Seagal is nowhere to be found, and though Jean-Claude Van Damme was offered a role, he declined). Still, even with a few names missing, The Expendables is a veritable who's who of action beefcake. In classic men-on-a-mission style, each member of the team is given his own quirks and combat specialties, and the characters are embodied by the cast with all the presence and strength that has made them genre luminaries.

Stallone, of course, is the anchor, his rugged stoicism providing the strong center every great action team needs. Of course, it doesn't hurt that, at 64 years of age, he's still in damned impressive shape, steroids or no, and he handles himself in the action scenes with aplomb (in one great moment, he changes pistol magazines in the blink of an eye). Some have seen Stallone's pairing with Statham here as a sort of passing of the action-hero torch, and while a better case might be made for others being the true current mantle-bearers of the genre (truth be told, in their sly wit, Statham's action performances have always reminded me more of Willis than Stallone), the two of them make an excellent on-screen team, Statham's football-hooligan gruffness sparking nicely off Stallone's more mature authority. Statham is also given a nice showcase action moment, an apropos-of-nothing scene in which he takes on an entire basketball game in hand-to-hand combat. Also along for the ride is mammoth Scandinavian Dolph Lundgren, who memorably battled Stallone as the hulking Russian Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. Here, he's a drugged-out, wild-card Expendable who sells his team out to Roberts's villain, and it is great fun seeing this near-cartoonish behemoth plying his trade on the big screen again. UFC world champion Randy Couture, who I had never seen in anything prior to this, has a few funny moments as Toll Road, who counters his combat prowess with extreme neuroses (he's always trying to talk the other members of the team into going to therapy sessions with him), and Terry Crews, who handles both action and comedy with impressive ease, is a beautifully snarly presence as Hale Caesar, the team's resident ordnance expert. Of the main cast, perhaps only Jet Li is somewhat short-changed. The screenplay makes a few attempts to give him some interesting wrinkles, as when it turns out his constant demands for more money are largely due to his diminutive stature (he feels he deserves a bigger share of their scores because when they're running, it's harder for him to cover the ground), and he does deliver impressively in his few displays of high-kicking martial arts prowess, but somehow he, alone among the cast, seems a little lost amidst the cacophony of mayhem.

Of course, a great action film needs a great villain, and fortunately, The Expendables boasts several. By now, Eric Roberts can play these sorts of duplicitous company men in his sleep...but that doesn't mean he does so, and here he relishes his character's violent ways and sharp dialogue (in the film's best line, he dismisses the antagonistic relationship between the general and his daughter as "bad Shakespeare"). Zayas is surprisingly commanding as the general, proving himself in the end to be more than Roberts's pawn. Former WWE superstar Steve Austin is impressively menacing as the CIA spook's henchman, and, in arguably the film's best bit of "hey, it's that guy!" casting, direct-to-video kickboxing legend Gary Daniels turns up as another of Roberts's thugs. Naturally, in a cinematic pissing contest like The Expendables, the ladies of the cast are bound to get short-changed, and while Itie brings true conviction to her role, her character is nothing more than a device to get the boys back into action. Angel's Charisma Carpenter is even more extraneous to the plot, her checkered relationship with Statham serving mainly to set up that basketball-court smackdown. Also more or less inessential to the story, but absolutely crucial to the film's theme and overall effect, is Mickey Rourke. A fellow relic of the '80s who has experienced a Stallone-like late-career resurgence, Rourke portrays Tool, a former Expendable who now runs the tattoo parlor that serves as the team's de facto headquarters. Rourke commands the screen in his few scenes with effortless movie-star panache, and his big showcase, a teary-eyed monologue in which he recalls his personal experiences of the horrors of war, serve to fill in the backstory for pretty much the entire Expendables team with a minimum of fuss. Rourke reminds us of the serious psychological cost for men who do violence for a living, something that has often been a buried sub-theme of Stallone's films, and the actor's contributions help to keep The Expendables from being just a mindless action-fest.

But when it's time for that action, holy smokes. The Expendables boasts some of the toughest and most furious set pieces I've seen in a movie in years. An opening shootout on the Somali pirate freighter left my ears ringing, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. The film features a spectacular aerial escape in which Statham lays waste with machine guns to an island dockside, a car-chase crunchfest with Stallone behind the wheel of a vintage pickup and Li raining bullets from the flatbed, and, in one of the most literally explosive climactic battles of all time, a raid on the Caribbean general's hideout that must set a record for sheer number of explosions per minute of screen time. Every character gets their moment in the action spotlight, and the actors all step up admirably. In addition to Statham's basketball-battle showcase, Li has a well-staged beatdown that pits him, cleverly, against the gargantuan Lundgren. Couture, inevitably, goes toe to to toe with Austin in a skirmish that shows why they call it ultimate fighting. Crews, in a moment that got some of the biggest cheers I heard in a theater all year, saves his boys' bacon with liberal application of lead from the loudest goddamn gun I've ever heard. And of course, it comes down to a three-way Mexican standoff between Stallone's gun, Statham's blade, and Roberts's ego.

As a product of '70s and '80s action cinema, Stallone understands the basic pleasures of the genre, and while the film does boast some dubiously realistic computer-generated blood sprays, The Expendables is, for the most part, a salute to old-school classic action. The film is packed with crushing hand-to-hand combat, beautifully performed by a phalanx of skilled stuntmen. There's no wire fu here, no CGI stunts, just men bashing men while the crowd goes wild. Call me a meathead, but I personally am a sucker for a good old-fashioned well-staged shootout, and The Expendables's finale serves up one of the best I've seen in a while, a symphony of blazing gunfire that literally shook the seats. Some have complained about a possible excess of shaky-cam close-ups during the film's combat and fights, and while there are perhaps more jittery hand-held shots that I normally like here, the action is so crisply lit by cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball and so skillfully edited by Ken Blackwell and Paul Harb that the film never descends into sheer incoherence in the manner of last fall's near-unwatchable Ninja Assassin. Also deserving of major kudos are composer Brian Tyler, who provides a stirring and muscular action score, and the film's talented team of sound designers, who made me feel the crack of every punch and the bang of every bullet in arguably the loudest film I've ever seen in a theater.

Stallone is seldom given the credit he deserves as a filmmaker with truly strong populist instincts. That gift failed him for a time in the '90s, when his straightforward, might-makes-right cinematic philosophy was unable to properly adapt to the Age of Irony, but when Stallone is firing on all cylinders, there are few filmmakers in Hollywood who can so deftly tap into an audience's most basic cinematic desires and just flat-out deliver. He did it in the Rocky pictures, which started out as feel-good paeans to American can-do spirit in a post-Vietnam era when the country sorely needed a boost, and he did it again with the Rambo films, allowing Americans to vicariously resolve the Vietnam conflict. It should come as no surprise, then, that in another traumatic age in which Americans again find themselves wondering who they are and what it all means, Stallone has come back to the forefront as a maker of films that revisit those themes in a darker, more mature way. 2006's Rocky Balboa was an examination of an American hero's sad, lonely twilight, and 2008's Rambo was a raw, ugly look at the true mental cost of war. While The Expendables is not freighted with nearly that kind of thematic baggage, it nevertheless serves as a reclamation of pride in America's warrior spirit, while still acknowledging, in the character of the corrupt CIA agent, that in many ways, the war truly begins at home. But all of this is secondary to the fact that at his best, Stallone can flat-out please a crowd like nobody's business. As a director, he knows exactly what his audience has come to see and he delivers, from the brawny star-power performances to the explosive action, not to mention a showstopping cameo by the Governator, his first onscreen appearance in six years. (When Willis asks Stallone what Schwarzenegger's problem is, Stallone's answer got the biggest cheer in the movie.) There seemed to be a bit of skepticism within the industry about whether Stallone's film would connect with today's videogame-raised action crowd. But the crowds did come, giving The Expendables a $35 million opening weekend, the biggest of Stallone's career. If you build it, they will come. And Stallone has built the best pure entertainment of 2010.