I’ll tell you a secret. It’s a bit like Habakkuk. Your eyes shall see, but they shall not believe:
In the heart of Sylvester Stallone, the king of the testosterone flick, there lurks a wheezy French bloke in an existentialist‘s beret who writes poetry and has a dog called Baudrillard.
And see that? That’s you not believing me. But stay with me: I’m not kidding.
Remember The Specialist? Or is that just me? The thing about that movie is that it was pretty ghastly as an action flick – way too much chat, solitude, and angst – but as a black and white French thriller it would have been absolutely awesome. Consider: lonely ronin/explosives expert has rules about never meeting anyone face to face, falls in love with his untouchable female client who is herself obsessed with punishing a man who ruined her life as a child. Immense telephonic sexual tension, weird dynamics, voice over, lust, disaster, and bombs. Seriously solid film noir. Not so great in colour and in English, where those pauses don’t get written off as sighs of the soul.
Stallone also created Rocky and starred in First Blood – both films in the older heroic tradition. Rocky, after all, doesn’t always win, and Rambo is a damaged man who just wants to be left alone. The sequels, yes, were the usual ragtag of tougher and tougher asskickings – until Rocky Balboa. But this guys knows his John Wayne. He knows that sometimes it’s more heroic to lose right than to win wrong. That’s not really a position which has a lot of popularity at the US Box Office right now, because the application to contemporary US life is glaring. The whole thrust of the Bush-Cheney Administration was victory at all costs, even if the cost was the abdication of America’s moral position in the world. Waterboarding is practically the definition of winning wrong (even if it helps, which there’s a lot of evidence to say is not the case.) And in The Expendables, waterboarding is back where it belongs in the cinematic playbook: as a defining tool of bastards and villains.
In fact, The Expendables is more than just the continuation of this tenuous thread: it’s the moment at which it becomes definitive. This movie is not in love with violence. It wants to be. God, how it wants to be. It’s like watching the guy who isn’t going to make the finals of the weightlifting try one more time. But in the end, it just can’t believe. The characters kill – and kill and kill and kill – and nothing changes. They’re all older men. They’re a bit mad, if we’re honest. Their relationships don’t work out, or they choose not to have them. They don’t really trust one another. They don’t make a lot of money doing these jobs. They don’t see a lot of good. And in the end, they don’t make a difference, and they know it. Their weapons are huge, and they do huge damage. Torsos evaporate. Men explode. Armies can be mown down with one incredibly loud gun. Knives fly almost as fast as bullets (a nod to the Magnificent Seven) and a pair of pistols in the hands of Sly’s character work faster than a submachine gun for anyone else. In the final sequence – and I suppose this is technically a spoiler, although how you could imagine it would ever be any different eludes me – in the final sequence, they follow the villain through the grounds of an island palace, killing his minions in their hundreds, and finally taking him down before he can hurt the girl. The motivation is obscure on both sides. Why, given that Eric Roberts is the source of evil, did they not start out by taking him down? They have no problem with assassination. Why does Roberts take the girl, when in fact by that point they might well leave him alone if he didn’t? Death everywhere: a castle – perhaps a city, hell, perhaps the entire island – in flames and ruin… and then they leave. They don’t stick around. And why not? Well, maybe because that would be too difficult. Stallone goes to kiss the girl and thinks better of it. He’s old enough to be her dad, after all. Or maybe it’s the gunfighter’s paradox: if he stays, he’ll just take the place of the man he has killed and become the problem, the enforcer. Or maybe it’s even worse: that everywhere he goes, he destroys. He’s toxic. And if that’s so, what does it say about the only place where he can apparently live without laying waste to the neighbourhood?
With cameos from Bruce Willis (bald bastard CIA dude) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (smug waddling alternative mercenary dude), with Dolph Lundgren hulking away as a drug-using liability and Jason Statham as the young buck (he’s my age, fercrissakes), with Jet Li as a family man, this movie isn’t young. The action flick itself, the big budget boomfest, was born in the 80s and is starting to look a bit long in the tooth. The original Kurosawa flick, of course, the Seven Samurai, had a strong sense of ennui and sorrow, but it’s surprising to find it surfacing so powerfully here. Midway through the movie – it’s actually the tipping point scene for Stallone and hence for all of them – Mickey Rourke’s tubby tattooist delivers himself of a gut-wrenching soliloquy on the vileness of the world and the aloneness of a man in their profession which turns the tide. Shot straight into his downturned face, the take is longer than any other speech in the movie by a mile. It’s about exhaustion and futility and he nails it to the wall. Into Stallone’s carefully constructed architecture of denial comes Rourke like a wrecking ball, telling him to do just one thing right with his life or die pointless and sad. It’s sober and without a fleck of irony. It’s riveting. A good actor can turn you on a dime and make you go ‘oh, shit’ half way through a discussion about the cheeseboard, and Rourke is a very good actor.
This isn’t exactly an action flick. I mean, clearly, it is. But it’s not a movie which ‘goes beyond’. It’s a movie which somehow falls short because there’s no belief any more. These actors, this story, maybe Hollywood, and for sure America… they have war fatigue. I swear, the first thing in my mind leaving the cinema was William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. Not because of the verse, but because of the transition. If films like Commando were the song of innocence, this is surely out the other side. In this film, shock and awe delivers exactly that, and nothing else. The guys come in to save the day, and the consequence is a mass grave and scorched earth. The equivalence between our heros and the villains is almost complete – except that the Bruce Willis character they’re working for stays home, while Eric Roberts is on site. Which makes Sly the equivalent not of Roberts but of Stone Cold Steve Austin, Roberts’ torturer. Whatever, they’re all from the same towns. So what’s the point of it all?
There’s the hope that the beautiful girl will put everything right, but how can she? Surely the next bastard to come along will just kill her. The sequel – if there is one – must surely be the inevitable return to rescue or avenge her, or – worse yet – unseat her if she becomes a monster. The only refuge from this is the bromance; the pathological brotherhood of the group – but even that is fragmenting. We leave them as we found them; a group of emotional toddlers with guns, slowly deliquescing while still alive. The weird innocence of Stallone’s face contrasts with those around him: he appears to be a permanent cherub now, frozen and recarved to match an earlier moment he himself no longer really believes in. It’s the whole story in miniature: the attempt to stay somewhere comfortable and simple failing under the assault of adulthood. The same desire is at the heart of some eating disorders. It’s not fashionable now to draw conclusions about a whole society from a single film, nor even to claim to know what a given artwork represents or intends, but Robert Warshow, writing in the 50s, had much to say about Superman and Batman, and about cowboys and gangsters, and what they represented in the American soul. I wish he was still around to parse this movie. In his absence, though, I’m prepared to venture this: The Expendables is a coming of age movie. Exactly who is coming of age – or trying not to – I’m not sure. But to find this depth of futility in a movie like this is weird, alarming, and curiously heartening. The most depressing feelgood movie about violence ever – or maybe the most unlikely important film of 2010.
