The Expendables (2010)

The Expendables arrives as a monument to an older order, a film so deliberately committed to the action cinema of the 1980s and early 90s that it feels almost archaeological in its devotion to that era's aesthetics and sensibilities. Director and star Sylvester Stallone has assembled a roster of aging action heroes not to interrogate masculinity or examine the nature of violence, but to celebrate both with the reverence of a curator preserving artifacts in amber. The film asks nothing of its audience except to appreciate the presence of its cast and the competence of its set pieces. It is, in this sense, a film of remarkable purity, untouched by any impulse toward self-reflection.

The cast composition is notable primarily for its homogeneity. While Jet Li appears as a martial artist and Giselle Itié plays a minor supporting role, the film makes no apparent effort to examine or interrogate representation. The female presence is minimal and decorative. The narrative concerns itself entirely with the operations of a mercenary team, their codes, their loyalties, and their aging bodies still capable of violence. There is no moment where the film pauses to consider the ethics of its premise or the implications of its plot, which involves the overthrow of a Latin American government. These elements simply exist as backdrop.

The Expendables exists in a space where entertainment and politics can remain entirely separate concerns. It is pure genre exercise, unmarked by irony, untouched by progressive sensibility, and seemingly unburdened by any awareness that such sensibilities might exist at all. In this regard, it achieves a kind of innocence that later films, regardless of their politics, could never reclaim.