The Expendables

If you go to this movie, either you've been living in an isolated monastery or you know what you're signing up for. You want men to beat up each other, things to go boom--in quantity and loudly--and ammunition to hit the ground like rain in a summer storm. So, the only reasonable question about this movie is, how well did it deliver what it promised?

Pretty well. I wasn't disappointed, which is saying something these days.

On the other hand, it is a B movie (at best), and it has all the flaws you'd expect: action so improbable you can never for an instant see anything as real, weak acting (Jason Statham and Mickey Rourke, shine, if that tells you anything), and dialog that frequently overloads the trite meter. It also suffers from the director (Stallone) and editor deciding to cut the fight sequences so fast that you frequently can't tell what's going on.

But who gives a hoot? You get to see Statham standing up in the nose of a plane shooting up an entire pier, Stallone fighting Stone Cold Steve Austin, Randy Couture launching a flying Superman punch at a flaming Austin, Jet Li and Dolph Lundgren going at it, the loudest automatic weapon I've heard on screen in a long time, and much, much more.

Across the hall from our theater was the one showing Eat Pray Love. The women coming out of it looked contemplative, while the few guys wore "shoot me now" on their foreheads. The crowd emerging from our theater was smiling and laughing and saying things like, "Did you see that shit?"

I was in the right theater for my mood tonight.

And, The Expendables beat Eat Pray Love by $10M at the box office. 'Nuff said.