The Expendables: Critic Reviews

Stallone and crew deliver a hard-hitting, unrepentant action extravaganza.

As for Stallone, he grimaces purposefully in his El Greco beard, and he keeps the body count coming so that it sates you like a junk-food craving fulfilled.

As a whole, the movie, whose title dimly evokes "They Were Expendable," a 1945 John Ford combat picture starring John Wayne and Robert Montgomery, might more aptly be described as Bad Kurosawa, Bad Peckinpah or Bad Leone.

It's not particularly well made, but the patchiness only adds to the considerable goodwill and charm the movie carries.

This is truly a movie that nobody needs -- gratuitously savage, implausible and sometimes incoherent.

Bullets, knives and bare hands fly in an incomprehensible vortex as arms and heads and body parts get thrown into the melee.

Expendables is the closest thing to movie Viagra yet invented. It's reprehensible. It's stoopid violent. It's a lot of unholy fun.

This is action as timeless as the reptilian brain.

While Stallone's film won't win any Oscars, it gives off a dopey genre high that's hard not to catch.

Sylvester Stallone's gun-emptying, blade-tossing, clandestine action flick "The Expendables" is great fun. Sure, this declaration comes with caveats, but do you really need to hear them?

... what winds up in the picture's largely lazy grasp is largely evidence of the influence of, well, any number of cheap and often straight-to-video testosterone fests.

The Expendables is savage yet inert, and breathtakingly sleazy in its lack of imagination.

Is it fun? Sort of. But it shoulda coulda been a ton of fun.

Borrows liberally from such male-bonding classics as Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, but offers not a whiff of the tragic fatalism and astute critique of machismo that inform those superior dramas.

Stallone! Willis! Schwarzenegger! They're lovin' it, so I guess we have to, too.

I's a bit like a trip to the gym on a flat tire.

Sure, it's fun, after a fashion, to see them all in the same place, kicking and creaking. But that's about all it is.

Take the cast away, and there's not much more here than the straight-to-DVD schlock that has kept conspicuously absent rivals Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme busy of late.

The brain-dead male equivalent of Sex and the City 2.

The shootouts are epic, but the stuff leading up to them is lame.

It yawningly snaps into place as yet another series of explosions that are dressed up with no place to blow.

The world has changed since Rambo and Arnold held sway, which isn't the film's fault. But it's going to be held accountable anyway.

The Expendables isn't as much fun as it should be.

Rather than reviving the actors' 80s heyday, The Expendables only demonstrates how much action films have changed in recent years.

The body count is high and the personalities click in this old-school testosterone fest.