The Expendables 2

I enjoyed The Expendables.  It was a movie where past-their-prime action stars punched the faces off of some bad guys.  Sure, it wasted almost a third of the movie with inept attempts at character development, but it was gloriously dumb fun.  The success of that film made a sequel inevitable, and the debut trailer made it look like they were going to pack in more stars, which virtually guaranteed less plot, less development, and more boomsplosions, which is what The Expendables 2 should be about.

Aside from the returning cast (everybody but Stone Cold Steve Austin and Mickey Rourke), we get Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and...Liam Hemsworth?  Not even the Hemsworth that was in Thor?  The one they choose for the biggest, dumbest action movie ever is the guy who doesn't do anything in The Hunger Games?!?  He's obviously the least famous actor billed in this movie, but that was still an odd casting choice.  It makes you wonder what other odd decisions went into The Expendables 2... 

...like a dance scene, perhaps?

Barney's (Sylvester Stallone) crew of good-guy mercenaries is back to work.  This time,they find themselves in a tight spot.  Instead of picking their own missions, as is the norm, they are forced into doing the dirty work for Mr. Church (Bruce Willis), or else risk being thrown into double-secret probation CIA jail for the rest of their natural lives.  That means trying to recover a mysterious something from a plane wreckage site in Albania.  Correction: scenic Albania.  The team (Jason Statham, Terry Crews, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture and the new guy, Liam Hemsworth) accomplishes their mission, thanks to their chaperone, Maggie (Nan Yu), and is ready to extract, when they are ambushed by a bunch of villains.  The villains, led by the appropriately named Vilain (Jean-Claude Van Damme), murder poor, innocent, three-days-away-from-retirement Liam Hemsworth, and get away with their "Get Out of Jail Free" card.  That shit's personal.  Enter extreme violence and minimal plot.

Look, it's the one expendable member of The Expendables!

The Expendables 2 was directed by Simon West, which should be an improvement over Sylvester Stallone's direction in the first Expendables film.  The key words there are "should be."  West isn't bad, exactly, but his work here is uninspired.  West is no stranger to dumb action movies, but he doesn't quite make a successful transition from dumb to enjoyably stupid action films with this entry.  What's the difference?  An enjoyably stupid action movie keeps up a rapid pace and varies up the gratuitous violence enough to keep the audience entertained.  The Expendables 2 has some solid action in it, but there is also a hefty amount of downtime, where we are forced to watch Stallone emote; at this point in his career, the only emotion Stallone's face can convincingly portray is "lumpy."

"L" is for "Lumpy"

Overall, though, West makes sure there is action, and he makes sure the biggest names in the cast receive a few moments in the spotlight (for better or worse); in other words, his direction is less than I had hoped, but certainly within expectations.

So, how's the acting?

"Heh-heh.  The blogger made a funny."

Honestly, that just depends on your standards.  I went in with pretty low expectations, acting-wise, but I was still a little underwhelmed.  Stallone does his best to add some depth to his character --- and I think he does a decent job --- but the attempt is misguided in this movie and this role.  If he was just a little more gleefully destructive instead of angsty, The Expendables 2 would have been a hell of a lot more fun.  Liam Hemsworth probably did the best job acting, although his role was clearly designed to justify the extreme violence in the rest of the movie.

...which is, admittedly, a tall order

It felt like Jason Statham had a lot less screen time in this sequel, but I guess his character just didn't have much to contribute; Statham is present in every major action scene, but I thought his role was far less important this time around.  As for his acting, he did a pretty good Jason Statham impression.  Jet Li was barely in the movie, so we didn't have to suffer through the unintelligible banter between him and Dolph Lundgren.  Lundgren was particularly mush-mouthed, and I found it hard to believe he was ever an action star.  But then I re-discovered this little gem on the interwebs and my faith in Dolph was restored:

As for the other Expendables, Randy Couture and Terry Crews weren't given a whole lot to do, which I think was a poor choice, since they both seem to have a decent sense of action movie humor.  I wouldn't mind seeing Crews in a buddy action movie in the near future.  The big news in The Expendables 2 was not the main cast, though --- it was the featured cameos.  Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Chuck Norris all had scenes focused exclusively on them.  Norris' scenes were the funniest, if only because they lived up to his internet reputation; he actually came across fairly awkward, like he didn't get why his part was supposed to be funny.

If they had CGI-ed a fist under his beard, I would have given it a pass

Bruce Willis was okay at first, but as soon as he stumbled into catchphrase territory, he was pretty damn hammy.  Arnold was the worst, though; he looked awful and made his Conan-era acting look like Daniel Day-Lewis by comparison.  Perhaps the biggest surprise in this film was how fun it was to watch Jean-Claude Van Damme as a villain.  Van Damme has never been a very good actor (understatement!), but his accent and lack of charm plays surprisingly well as a bad guy.  This is easily his best work since he lost his mullet.

Without having to smile and be likable, Van Damme actually looks cool here

His number two man, Scott Adkins, wasn't as entertaining, but his physical stunts helped make up for the fact that the rest of this cast is too old for stunts.  Nan Yu wasn't bad as the resident damsel in varying degrees of distress, but she wasn't terribly important and basically gave Stallone opportunities to brood.  Charisma Carpenter returned as Statham's girlfriend, but she didn't really do much except look age-appropriately attractive for a few minutes --- bonus points to the movie for giving Statham a love interest that is roughly his own age, a rarity in action movies.

Seriously, though, does anyone care about the acting in The Expendables 2?  Of course not.  This movie exists only for the action scenes, of which there are several. 

Not this one.  This is an exposition scene.

If you're fan of explosions and lots and lots of CGI blood, this is the movie for you.  Especially if you like the middle third of the film being filled with plot and poor attempts at drama.  That's really the problem I have with this movie --- it has action bookends, but the movie slows to a crawl when they try to make the audience actually care about the characters.  Of course, the attempt was hilariously inept, but the mere fact that it was attempted shows how misguided the filmmakers were.  There are eight action movie headliners in this movie, with a healthy supply of supporting action movie veterans, and yet the pace would have to speed up to earn being called "plodding."  There is no excuse for that.  Who the fuck wants a movie with all these action stars that spends any time whatsoever on Stallone's feelings?  Can I see a show of hands?

Exactly.

Here's the thing with The Expendables 2: it was meant to be a ridiculously stupid action movie, but the filmmakers misunderstood how to make that happen.  Instead of stuffing this movie with action heroes doing action stunts that couldn't be believed, like some sort of action movie turducken, they gave into Stallone's ego and let him try to emote.  And then they made the ill-advised decision to let Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Willis trade catch phrases, which made for possibly the most painful ten minutes I spent watching movies this year.  Even with those problems, it's still got enough action to satisfy most viewers.  Too bad it's kind of boring.

Killer Elite (2011)

When the first trailers for Killer Elite (not to be confused with The Killer Elite --- definite articles make a difference, you know) came out, I got a little excited.

Jason Statham, current king of the stupid action movie, co-starring with Clive Owen --- who I loved in the ridiculous Shoot 'Em Up --- and a latter-day Robert DeNiro in a non-comedic role; even if DeNiro mailed in his performance (likely), the other two should make for an awesome action movie, right?  After all, they got the rights to play The Scorpions in the trailer, so this flick should rawk!  At the very least, Killer Elite should be as awesome as this music video for "Rock You Like a Hurricane," right?



Okay, maybe that's a tall order --- after all, it's not like The Stath is going to look surprised while soloing on guitar in the movie --- but Killer Elite had enough good ingredients to make for a good old-fashioned dumb but fun action movie.

Maybe more than dumb, but still fun

For many years, Danny (Jason Statham) was a bad-ass-for-hire.  He worked all over the world, and he usually worked with the same crew: Meier (Aden Young), the tech guy; Davies (Dominic Purcell), the not particularly bright brawn; and Hunter (Robert DeNiro), the brains and Danny's mentor.  When a job went bad in 1980, Danny was wounded and was faced with the immorality of his chosen profession.  So he quit and started renovating a dilapidated property in his hometown in Australia.  There, he lives the simple life and attracts a local beauty, Anne (Yvonne Strahovski), because who wouldn't be attracted to a bald man with no apparent job, engaged in what appears to be a never-ending task?

Women want him, men want to give him firm embraces

A year later, Danny gets a call telling him that Hunter's life is in the balance; if Danny doesn't do a particular job, Hunter will die.  Every time he thinks he's out, they pull him back in, people.  Danny travels to Oman, where Sheikh Amr gives Danny the assignment --- he is to kill three former members of Britain's SAS, who Amr holds responsible for the deaths of three of his sons during the Dhofar Rebellion.  Danny doesn't like it, but he won't allow Hunter to die.  The SAS isn't exactly a bunch of sissies, so Danny has his work cut out for him; luckily, he is being offered millions of dollars for the job, which convinces Meier and Davies to join up on this difficult mission.  There is a catch, though.  The team's clumsy inquiries into the lives of their SAS targets garners the attention of the Feathermen, a group of clandestine former SAS members dedicated to protecting their own with a minimum of publicity.  The Feathermen send their enforcer, Spike (Clive Owen), to make this happen.  So, the stage is set: a group of mercenaries vs. a group of retired, but highly trained, military men.  It loos like a lot of people are going to die to save Robert DeNiro.

They're both getting too old for this shit

Killer Elite seemed to promise that all-too-elusive cinematic beast: the action movie with multiple stars.  When it comes to movies that attempt to balance their action star power, they usually fall into three types: the hopelessly inept in every way (Van Helsing, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever), the "about what you expected because you've seen the primary star's other films" (The Expendables), and --- rarest of all --- the action movie that blends the styles of its lead actors to make something better (or at least dumber) than the sum of their abilities (Tango & Cash, Demolition Man).  Unfortunately, this isn't a movie that makes use of DeNiro's grittiness (or acting ability, for that matter), Statham's physical stunts, and Owen's bastard charm.  No, this is the second type, a typical Jason Statham vehicle with a better supporting cast than he's used to and/or deserves.

The acting, such as it is, isn't bad.  The Stath scowls and does cool things in situations where you or I would probably die.  While the rest of the cast (or at least their costume designers) strove to look like they were from 1981, Stath looked as he always does, just with aviator sunglasses this time.  I think my favorite insight into Stath's character was when he disguised himself to get some information; he put on a lab coat to get some medical info, but didn't wear a wig, or glasses, or a fake nose, or a tie, or a suit, and he certainly didn't shave --- he just put a lab coat on over his street clothes, grabbed some files, and was done.  Who needs a script disguise?  It's only privileged information!  Clive Owen was a decent enemy for Statham at first, but the plot forces his character to start taking things far more personally than would make sense in the circumstances. 

Maybe Stath mentioned the turd on his lip?

Robert DeNiro isn't in a whole lot of the movie, but he's a welcome addition.  He's certainly not great here, but DeNiro can still turn on the charm when he wants to.  Yvonne Strahovski essentially played the personification of Stath's motives, but I thought she was fine.  She certainly could have been far more annoying, anyway.  There are a number of minor supporting cast members, but Dominic Purcell played the largest part.  Purcell isn't the most articulate actor in the world, but what held my fascination with him in Killer Elite was his facial hair; either he has some bizarre beard issues, or his makeup artist had difficulty knowing what sideburns and mustaches should look like.

The description shouldn't begin and end with "greasy"

Killer Elite is the first feature-length film by Gary McKendry; he was nominated for an Oscar for his only other movie, a short film.  McKendry didn't make a bad pic with Killer Elite, it just disappointed me.  I thought the story was told decently and the acting was damn good for what amounts to a typical action movie.  The character relationships were handled far better than most films of this ilk, too.  McKendry didn't do anything too spectacular with this movie, but he was certainly competent.  I really wish he had figured out a better way to explain the Feathermen organization --- he opted to having them explain the purpose of their secret club aloud to each other, because that's what clandestine groups do --- but that's really as dumb as the movie gets.  Unless you count the chair scene, which also falls into the category of as awesome as this movie gets.

Killer Elite isn't a great action movie, but it's a nice change from the last few Statham vehicles I have seen.  It actually has characters and some limited character development!  Shock!  I was hoping for something a little more goofy and fun, but this isn't bad.  But don't buy into that "true story" crap that's tacked on the beginning and end; the book this is based on A) makes the Feathermen the heroes B) was called "factional" by its author and C) has (depending on who you ask) been admitted as a complete fabrication.  So if you see something dumb in this movie, don't rationalize it as "well, it must have happened, because this is a true story."

Blitz

Killer cops wear...cardigans?

I went into this one fairly blind.  Yes, it's a Jason Statham movie, so I know he will scowl his way through a few action scenes, but Blitz never hit theaters in the US, so I was not privy to the basic plot.  According to the DVD cover shown on the Amazon.co.uk page, "The Stath has never been better."  Um..."The Stath"?  Please please please let's all agree that this is what Statham should be called from this point forward.  Is it a good or clever nickname?  Of course not, but what are we comparing it to?  The Italian Stallion?  The Muscles From Brussels?  At least this nickname is based, you know, on his name.  Plus, it's awesomely bad.  Anyway, the more traditional movie poster/US DVD cover for Blitz pushes this slogan: "It's cop killer versus killer cop."  That sounds pretty self-explanatory, doesn't it?

...and then you realize that THIS is the villain, and you sigh

Blitz, based on Irish crime author Ken Bruen's book of the same name, opens with Detective Sergeant Tom Brant (Jason Statham) showing just what a bad-ass he is.  Three random dudes are breaking into cars as Brant was walking home with his hurley stick, presumably because he had been hurling (as in the sport) earlier.  Or possibly playing midget hockey.  What's an off-duty officer of the law to do in this circumstance?  If you answered "beat the living hell out of the nogoodnicks," then you would wind up with disciplinary action looking like a bad-ass, like Brant.  This was nothing, though; his tacitly approved violent attacks on hoodlums are the stuff of legend in London.

The Stath: too tough for uniforms, umbrellas, and rain

The bulk of the story follows the investigation of a murderer (Aidan Gillen) who is targeting police officers and is boasting of his exploits to the newspapers.  Brant finds himself paired with Sgt. Porter Nash (Paddy Considine), who is a by-the-books, intellectual type of cop.  Boy, what an odd couple!  They butt heads a little bit, but the reality of their friends and colleagues getting murdered forces them to move on with the investigation despite their differences.

They don't even have hair in common!  What a comic mismatch!

As the plot synopsis might suggest, Blitz isn't anything special in the plot department.  Since the writer and the cast are from the UK, you'll hear "piss" and "mickey" more than usual, but the dialogue isn't going to wow you, either.  This is a movie for people who want to see Jason Statham kick some ass in a plausible story (in other words, it's not Crank 3).  It covers most of the bases you might expect from a movie about a tough cop, and it covers them adequately.  Police giving each other grief?  Yes.  A tough guy that isn't up to date on those new-fangled contraptions, computers?  Cliche, but present.  Cops overcoming their differences to take on a common threat?  Obviously.  Police willing to ignore red tape/blatantly break the law to better suit justice?  Definitely.  And don't forget that oh-so-Statham constant, running without a shirt.

Shockingly, Statham stays pretty clothed

The cast of Blitz is mostly adequate.  The Stath does his thing.  He's tough, he's cool, and he's likable.  What do you expect?  This entire film is a showcase for him being cooler and tougher than everybody else in the movie!  Paddy Considine is pleasant enough and is a bit more believable as a smart cop than Statham.  Still, he's capable of a hell of a lot more than this.  Their chemistry is fine, but nothing memorable.  I found Aidan Gillen to be somewhat annoying as the villain, and his character's shtick has been done many times before by better actors.  Zawe Ashton provides an unnecessary subplot as a former undercover cop who picked up a naughty drug habit. 

...and limited acting range

The uninspired acting would have been fine if this film was wound a little tighter by the director, Elliott Lester.  At its core, Blitz is about a bad guy killing cops.  Unfortunately, we are given a couple of detours within the story that don't pay off according to the amount of time invested in them.  Personally, I don't give a rat's ass about supporting characters who are new to the department or stealing drugs from criminals or are grieving, unless it directly impacts the main story.  Lester spends way too much time on these supplementary bits, and only the grief bit adds anything to The Stath's character.  The camerawork and editing are all pretty standard issue, so if Lester was going to differentiate Blitz from any other movie about a cop on the edge, you would think he would do it in the subplots.  He does not.  At the very least, Lester could have trimmed the movie down and made it feel as fast-paced as the title implies.  Again, unfortunately, he does not.

My biggest problem with Blitz is how groundbreaking it isn't.  The characters are surprisingly shallow, considering that the source of the story was a novel.  The Stath does his best, but I've seen tough guy cop characters before; I immediately knew that the film was going to point out a) he doesn't get touchy-feely b) he doesn't like computers c) he will respect colleagues for their work and not their lives.  Sgt. Nash is homosexual, and he takes a lot of crap for it, despite being a superior officer; that might have flown in the 90s, but it just seemed outdated and unlikely today.  That's not because people are more enlightened now (sadly), but due to the power of seniority within the police force and the existence of anti-discrimination laws within the workplace.  Maybe there's more homophobia amongst British police than I assume, or maybe it was just a poorly scripted subplot.

Oh, and there's the slight problem that you've probably seen this movie before.  Blitz takes a shocking amount of its plot from Dirty Harry, and it doesn't even give us a wink or a nudge.  Well, Blitz wishes it was a Clint Eastwood movie; it's a lot closer in style to Cobra.  Now, I happen to like Dirty Harry and Cobra, but Blitz is just a poor copy.  It's not that this is a bad or inept movie, so much as it is over-familiar.  If you like Jason Statham, it's decent enough.  If not, just dig up a movie with Callahan in it and you'll be better off.

The Mechanic (2011)

Being a dumb action movie star is a double-edged sword.  Sure, you're pretty much guaranteed to have one scene with a topless actress per film and the Spike network will probably run your films in three movie blocks on weekends, but the fun doesn't go on forever.  Just ask Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, or even Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.  By including Statham in his over-the-hill action star vehicle The Expendables, Stallone seemed to pass the torch onto this generation's only career dumb action hero, but is that a good thing?

This could be a scene from any Jason Statham movie.

The Mechanic is a remake of the 1972 Charles Bronson movie of the same name.  Remaking a Bronson film actually isn't a bad idea; it's not like anyone is going to have their acting compare unfavorably to him.  Anyway, Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham) is an assassin-for-hire.  He's not an ordinary assassin, though.  He's so good at his job that he can make death look like an accident, or he can implicate a specific person in a murder, or he can make a hell of a lot of things go boom --- it just depends on what the job calls for.  His handler and mentor, Harry (Donald Sutherland), is his next target.  Bishop doesn't want to kill his (basically only) friend, but his boss, Dean (Tony Goldwyn), gives him some files and information that are quite damning.  Does Bishop kill Harry?  That's actually not very important or, surprisingly, very interesting.  What is important is that Harry dies and his son, Steve (Ben Foster), wants Bishop to teach him how to be a Statham-level assassin.

Step one: walk slowly away from explosions.

I don't think anyone is going to be surprised by the acting in this movie.  Jason Statham is, as always, a scowling bad-ass.  He still has his accent, and he undresses with little provocation.  He's a little less convincing as the guy who thinks six moves ahead in this movie, but whatever.  I have no real complaints about his work.  Ben Foster, on the other hand, has been better.  I usually enjoy Foster, but he doesn't really add anything to the movie, aside from receiving a reasonably realistic beat-down.  Donald Sutherland is in the movie for about five minutes, and he stopped challenging himself years ago, so he's fine.  Perennial bad guy Tony Goldwyn is, not surprisingly, unsympathetic.  Both men fill their roles adequately, but neither is particularly memorable.  And, for fans of gratuitous nudity, Swedish model Mini Anden is very convincing as she shows off her dislike of clothing.

Director Simon West is not known for introspective think pieces --- he directed Con Air, ferchrissakes --- so you pretty much know what you're getting when his name appears on the credits.  There are some pretty sweet murders in this movie, and it has some solid action sequences, but I felt the pace in this movie was all wrong.  I wasn't expecting a Jason Statham/Simon West collaboration to have fancy camera angles or interesting characters, but I was hoping to be consistently entertained.  The problem isn't with the story, which requires Bishop to train Steve.  The problem is that the movie drags between assassination jobs.  Go figure, movie that focuses on action isn't as good at dialogue, right?  While that's certainly true, I just didn't have fun watching this movie; the script was deadly serious and the filmmakers didn't have any fun with some of the more ridiculous moments in the movie.  When you add that to the characterization of Steve as a complete idiot in life-or-death situations, you get an annoying action movie.

They're probably hiding from critics.

I went into this with pretty reasonable expectations, I think.  I was hoping for an awesome action movie, or at least for something dumb and fun.  I got an action movie that was dumb and serious.  Not the most satisfying mix.  I actually consider myself somewhat of a Statham fan, but if he keeps making movies like this, we're going to start seeing him on the direct-to-DVD market with his dumb action forebearers soon.

Snatch

Most of the time, when there is a heist in a film, it is the focus of the plot.  That makes sense, after all; most normal people don't commit high-stakes armed robbery, so it provides a little escapism for audiences.  Of course, there have been notable films where the robbery was not the focal point, but still an important part of the script.  In the case of Reservoir Dogs, the heist isn't in the movie, but the plot focuses on the aftermath of a robbery gone wrong.  Snatch is a little different, though.  Yes, there is a robbery.  Technically, the same item is stolen several times.  But this is a movie that is more about the awesomeness of incoherent gypsies than it is about any heist.

Snatch is one of those ensemble movies where a dozen or more characters have intersecting plot lines that twist and turn all over the place, so summarizing the plot is perhaps not the best way to describe this movie.  There are only two constants in this plot.  First, New York gangster Avi (Dennis Farina) wants to get his hands on the diamond he hired Frankie Four Fingers (Benicio del Toro) to steal from Antwerp, but he's not the only one who knows that the jewel is in Frankie's possession.  Second, local crime lord Brick Top (Alan Ford) needs competition for his illegal (and known to be crooked) underground boxing matches; he sets his sights on an honest local manager, Turkish (Jason Statham), who needs to deliver a good fight for Brick Top, or quite possibly die a gruesome death.  Everything else feeds into those two seemingly separate plots.

While that actually sums up the plot decently well, I can't review Snatch and not mention the myriad colorful characters sprinkled throughout.  While I wouldn't say that any of these characters are well-developed or sympathetic, most of them are entertaining.  The highlight of the film definitely comes from the "fookin' pikeys," which is a rude British term for Irish Travelers (you know...gypsies); Mickey (Brad Pitt) leads the group of dirty, swindling, and heavy-drinking gamblers, with Jason Flemyng playing his number two.  The pikeys are almost impossible to understand, which adds to their unwashed charm.

The next best characters are probably the duo of Bullet Tooth Tony (Vinnie Jones) and Boris the Blade, AKA Boris the Bullet Dodger (Rade Serbedzija); both are notoriously hard to kill, both are pretty bad-ass, and they each have several memorable moments in the movie.  Beyond them, there is an assortment of lesser characters, like the group of inept criminals hired to rob Frankie Four Fingers (including Robbie Gee and Lennie James), Turkish's partner Tommy (Stephen Graham) and a snitch (Ewen Bremner).

While it is billed as a crime picture, this is really more of a comedy than anything else.  Sure, there's some action, but it is not the focus; the initial diamond heist took about two minutes of film time and even the final boxing match is only about five minutes long.  The characters flash across the screen quickly, as does the plot, with everything slowing down only for jokes.  Unfortunately, many of those jokes aren't very good.  Well, to be fair, they're not real jokes; they're regular dialogue that is supposed to stick out and be funny.  Sometimes, this works out great.  Anything with Brad Pitt speaking is great.  Most of Vinnie Jones' lines are good, especially his explanation for how Boris the Bullet Dodger got his nickname.  Dennis Farina was also very entertaining whenever he got to be overly rude.  But for every great moment, there is at least one joke that truly fails.  They fall into a category that I like to call "repeater jokes."  You have one character saying the same thing (maybe with slight variations) several times, with other characters reacting to it with increasing exasperation; you can inverse the gag, but it's even worse.  Here's an example: Jason Statham asks a guy when the sausages will be done cooking, he is told two minutes; he asks again, and is told two minutes; he asks again and is told five minutes; Jason, frustrated, explains that it was two minutes five minutes ago.  If you're not on the floor with tears in your eyes after reading that, then you agree with me: not funny, guys.  I also found the inept criminals annoying, too, but the repeater jokes are just awful.  They're not funny and they slow the flow of an otherwise fast-paced film.

This was the second film Guy Ritchie directed, and he throws everything he has at the screen.  Slow motion, freeze frames, fast motion, a weird underwater effect, all while moving the camera all over the place.  It makes for a pretty kinetic movie, even when not much is going on, plot-wise.  You can justly critique his style as resembling Attention Deficit Disorder, but as long as the plot is chugging along, his style fits the film.  I'm not quite sure about Ritchie and his handling of actors, though.  He is probably a fun guy to be around, judging from all the actors that recur in his films, but he doesn't have much sense for timing anything but action, as we see when he slows down to tell unfunny jokes.

The acting is mostly entertaining, although nobody is really great in their part.  Brad Pitt is the film's shining performance, managing to be very likable despite being greasy, bearded, and speaking gibberish.  Aside from Pitt, I particularly enjoyed Vinnie Jones, Dennis Farina, and Rade Serbedzija; all of them played well within their comfort zones (criminals), but they were all darned good at it.  I'm not terribly familiar with Alan Ford, but I've liked him quite a bit in both of his Guy Ritchie movies, even if a large part of that like comes solely from his vulgar dialogue.  Oh, and Benicio del Toro was good is his bit role, but I was disappointed by just how small his part ended up being.  I was surprised to see Jason Statham play such an inconsequential part of the story; despite narrating the film, his character doesn't really do much to propel the plot.  In retrospect, it is also shocking that he doesn't fight a single person in this, his big American film debut, and he even manages to keep his shirt on for the whole movie.

So far, I think I can justly sum up Snatch as being a fast-paced crime caper with a focus on humor and eccentric characters.  It's not a deep film, but it's fun, even when it sabotages its momentum with repeater jokes.  On its own merits, this is kind of like the movie equivalent of junk food; it is enjoyable, but ultimately full of empty calories.  When you take a broader look at this film, though, you will see striking similarities to Ritchie's first film, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.  I'm not talking about having Vinnie Jones, Jason Statham, Jason Flemyng, and Alan Ford in both movies, Matthew Vaughn as a producer, or even the fact that John Murphy did the score for both films.  The look and feel of both movies is nearly identical.  The way things end in both films is pretty similar, too.  Even the basic premise of a slightly crooked, but good, guy getting in over his head with a violent gangster is repeated.  Heck, Vinnie Jones' first scenes in both movies are barely distinguishable.  Snatch feels like an attempt to recreate Ritchie's breakthrough picture, but with Hollywood actors.  As such, most people like whichever movie they saw first, which is a shame; Snatch is funnier, but less consistent and less focused.

Having gotten that off my chest, I must admit that I still enjoy Snatch.  Yes, it's basically a repeat of a movie I really like.  Yes, it is all over the place, in terms of plot and characters.  No, I don't really care about any of the characters as anything other than props for action and foul-mouthed jokes.  But it is a damned good time, and it makes me laugh every time.

 This review was done by request.  So, there...service with a smile!

The Expendables

What you get out of The Expendables depends entirely on what you expect to get out of it.  If you watch this, expecting it to be drenched in testosterone and blood (ugh), to have awful dialogue with worse delivery, then you're absolutely right.  On the other hand, if you're expecting it to be drenched in testosterone and blood (woo!), to have awesome action and ridiculous amounts of violence, you're still absolutely right.  As long as you're not expecting an Academy Award-winning period piece romantic comedy, you pretty much know how much you'll like this movie before the opening credits.

The Expendables are a group of mercenaries that handle the dirtiest jobs.  Barney (Sylvester Stallone) is the group leader, with Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) and Ying Yang (Jet Li) as his trusted confidantes; the other members of the group include Gunner (Dolph Lungren), Hale Caesar (Terry Crews) and Toll Bridge (Randy Couture).  While those names aren't quite descriptive enough to be GI Joe names, they're amusing nonetheless.  The film opens with the Expendables on a mission to save hostages from pirates.  Obviously, that doesn't end well for the pirates.  In fact, Gunner blows the torso off a guy --- he doesn't cut the guy in half, he blows the torso off the rest of his body.  Gunner later decides to hang a pirate for fun, but that is crossing the line for the rest of the group, so Gunner is stopped and kicked off the team.  So, keep that in mind: blowing people to bits is a job well done, but hanging pirates is taboo.

Barney is later approached by a mysterious Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) for a dangerous mission; actually, Barney's group isn't the only group being considered, but the other group, led by Trench (Arnold Schwarzenegger), is allegedly too busy.  The mission is to kill a drug despot, General Garza (David Zayas, of Dexter fame), on the Gulf island of Vilena.  Barney and Christmas go to the island to do some reconnaissance and discover that General Garza is obviously a puppet dictator, with former CIA operative James Munroe (Eric Roberts) pulling the strings and Paine (Steve Austin) providing the muscle.

The film takes a slight detour to add emotional depth and (probably) earn its weight in Academy Award nominations.  Apparently, mercenaries don't have rich family lives.  **PSSST!!!**  Pick your jaw up off the floor!  Christmas stops by his girlfriend's (Charisma Carpenter) house, only to find that, after being gone for an entire month without warning or communication, she has gotten a new boyfriend.  What a tramp!  The boyfriend is a prick and beats her up, so we get to see Statham beat the jerk up and then tell his ex-girlfriend that he was worth waiting for.  That, Charisma Carpenter, is the sound of you being served!  Tool (Mickey Rourke), the group's resident tattoo artist/bar owner/pretty boy is a former member of the team who now spends his time surrounded by slutty young women; he actually is required to cry while giving a monologue about being alone.  For his part, Barney has become obsessed with his contact on Vilena (Giselle Itie), a woman who opted to risk her life on that island hell hole instead of coming to the US with him.  Barney's is not a romantic obsession, but and idealistic one.  He hasn't cared about anything in so long that the notion is incomprehensible to him.  To be fair, the word "incomprehensible" is probably also incomprehensible to him, so it might just be a vocabulary issue.

After the recon mission, Barney and friends (Why didn't they call the movie that?) were going to pass on the offer, but Barney's obsession drives him to take out Munroe, General Vargas, and anyone else that might threaten his idealistic contact.  The rest of the team agrees to go with, because the bond of brotherhood that is formed when bathing in the blood of a common enemy is stronger than any other.  Or, you could just say that they all have a major bromance going on.  After a brief battle against the angry Gunner, the team decides to topple an island dictatorship by blowing the whole island to hell and shooting whatever is still breathing.  Whoops, did that need a spoiler alert?

This film was directed and co-written by Sylvester Stallone, with all the subtlety you would expect from him.  As in any of his action movies, Stallone's direction is hard to gauge.  The action sequences are awesome, particularly the hand-to-hand stuff.  The acting...well, what do you expect?  The top three billed actors are Stallone, Statham and Li; only Statham can speak English fluently.  Actually, Statham's acting was much better than it needed to be in such a dumb movie, and Stallone was correct to give him one of the more emotionally complex roles.  Judging from the rest of the movie, though, it is clear that Stallone can't direct (or write) witty dialogue to save his life.  The plot is (mostly) perfect for a big, dumb action movie, but the dialogue is often awkward.  Do we really need to put up with Stallone, Couture, and Jet Li trying to deliver funny lines?  They couldn't get the timing right for a joke if they had a DeLorean.  That is forgivable, since action movies require poorly executed one-liners, but there is a glaring flaw with the plot.  Why does Stallone bother with the attempt at depth?  Look, I don't give a flaming crap about how these guys feel.   Aww...the elite murderers for hire are lonely when they go home!  >:-[  Did we ever need to understand Schwarzenegger's backstory in Predator?  No!  That is just 40 minutes that could have been better spent shooting people's faces off.  Or they could have had Arnold's team try the mission and die!  That would have been awesome!  Or they could have added a Predator on the island!  Or...well, pretty much anything would have made more sense in this movie than talking about feelings.

The acting is a lot like the writing and directing: not too surprising.  Bruce Willis is good in his cameo, Arnold gives us a reminder that English is not his first language, and Mickey Rourke cries to remind us that he has a Best Actor Oscar.  Randy Couture shouldn't have been given the "smart guy" role, but everyone else is as good as you expect them to be.  Statham is obviously the best actor out of the bunch, Terry Crews is amusing, and Stallone and Li are both pretty bad.  Fulbright scholar Dolph Lungren, while not a good actor, was much better than I remember him from the 90s, so that was a pleasant surprise.

I feel the same way about The Expendables that I feel about Transformers: I paid to see giant robots fighting, and I got my money's worth.  I wanted to see a bunch of action heroes kill the faces off of some bad guys, and The Expendables delivered.  As usual, Stallone tries to give his characters emotional layers, but does it in his typically inept way.  The violence was great, even though the blood was clearly CGI at times.  If Stallone had cut the emotional crap and just blown stuff up and garroted butts off, this movie would be perfect for what it is.  Since he tries to reach for something more than a stupid action movie --- nay, the stupid action movie --- it ends up falling a little short of perfection.  Still, this is a great example of the brainless fun that action and explosions can provide.  I would like to offer one more bit of criticism, though: in a movie called The Expendables, how many team members should die?

The Bank Job

I love that this movie poster states that this film is based on a true story.  Most of the time, when a movie makes that claim, the story is fairly well known.  Apollo 13, for instance, told a well publicized story.  Other times, the story is less well known, but still based on fact.  Tom Horn tells the story of...well, Tom Horn, an old West gunman/assassin.  He's not very famous, but when the movie claimed to be based on his life, the veracity of the claim could be researched.  The Bank Job, though, is something else entirely.  Supposedly based on the 1971 Baker Street robbery in London, the reality/fiction ratio of this film seems to be skewed toward the latter.  Aside from the bare bones facts of the case (there was a bank robbery), just about everything else about this movie appears to be fictionalized.  Not that that's a bad thing, mind you.

As the title suggests, this is a heist flick.  I usually enjoy heist movies because they make you root for the bad guys and the thieves are usually very clever and charismatic.  The heist movie often takes one of two forms; it either focuses on the heist itself (the preparation and execution, a la The Italian Job (2003) and Inside Man) or it focuses on the escape (like Heist, Quick Change, and The Killing).  However, this is an unusual heist flick because its focus is less on those aspects of the crime and instead focuses on the trouble the loot will bring these characters.

Jason Statham stars as a small-time thug that has gone (more or less) legit as a husband, father, and car salesman.  He is approached by an old flame, Martine (Saffron Burrows), with a fully researched criminal proposition.  All Statham needs to do is put together a crew and actually go through with the plot.  Wanting to get ahead of life for a change, Statham accepts.  Burrows and Statham recruit two of their childhood friends, played by Stephen Campbell Moore and Daniel Mays, to help with the heist.  A few others play important roles to the plot, but the story is primarily about this group of friends.

There are a lot of secondary stories in play, though. Martine was apparently busted smuggling heroin into England.  She was working with MI5 (the British Secret Service) to set up Statham and company.  Why would MI5 want a low-level group of crooks to break into a bank?  Good question.  A paparazzi had taken pictures of Britain's Princess Margaret involved in a threesome.  Okay, that's kind of awkward for the Crown.  The photographer did not, however, publish the picture for profit.  Instead, the pictures found their way to the militant black revolutionary Michael X (whose appearance is uncannily reproduced by Peter de Jersey), who used the pictures as a "Get Out of Jail Free" card.  Michael X kept his photos in a safety deposit box in the bank in question.  Unfortunately, other important people kept important things in the same bank.  The madame of a prestigious S & M club had secretly been photographing several members of Parliament and other high ranking officials getting the whips and chains treatment; she kept her photos safe in a safety deposit box at the bank.  A local gangster kept a ledger of his payoffs to corrupt police officials in the same bank in --- you guessed it --- a safety deposit box.  So, MI5 wants the naughty pictures of their Princess, but does not want to break the law to get them.  Instead, they facilitate a crime on behalf of the royal character, planning to allow local police to capture the criminals that MI5 put up to the job.

Wow.  It's just that easy!  If I ever need to over-complicate a smash-and-grab heist, I now have a blueprint to show me how.  Despite the ridiculousness of the plot, this movie is still entertaining.  It is so customary for heist movie criminals to be smarter than the viewer that having amateurs do the work in this film is refreshing.  Statham proves once again that he does his best acting in ensemble casts and the rest of the cast doesn't screw up.  Really, the star of this film is the interwoven plot and director Roger Donaldson does a good job of tying itself together.  There is the issue of the film's truthiness, though; if you research the actual robbery, you will find a lot of assumptions being made with this script, as well as some outright inventions (like Martine's character).  Does that make this a bad movie?  No, but learning that takes some of the fun out of it.