The Predictables
| Rating: | ★ |
| Category: | Movies |
| Genre: | Action & Adventure |
The film features perhaps all the biggest action stars who came and went in your lifetime: Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwazenegger (most probably in cameo roles); British Jason Statham, Asian Jet Li, Russian Dolph Lundgren, American wrestler Steve Austin, et.al., but it hugely, hugely fails to deliver the right punches.
Putting too many action stars in one movie is the stupidest thing to do because each of them is a master(piece) in his own right that he needs ample airtime to deliver sensible action entertainment, and because the action star is no less than himself.
It is a sorry movie with a highly worn-out storyline. Like any action flick, the film’s main characters are called to mission to save the world before the day ends. So what else can we expect?
Here it is as if Sly’s character Barney Ross leads a band of "elite mercenaries" [read: tambay or jobless bystanders] named The Expendables sporting in their Harley-Davidsons a Guns&Roses logo, but who were only made to appear they just needed money from working in the movie and in the story in the movie. It’s funny the actors’ characters’ themselves belabor the issue of paychecks for quite a while in the film.
Stallone then contracts Bruce Willis’s Mr. Church to give him and his men a project, very much like a regional research proposal in dire need of funding from the national office. Barney Ross's rival, Schwazenegger’s character Trench, refuses any involvement as he goes out of the church with Stallone saying maybe he wants to be president. Cameo.
The men then go to the island of Vilena where Eric Roberts' Monroe terrorizes and blackmails a despotic general ruling a Latin-American village a la Castro. The once-idyllic Vilena is where the action starts and ends.
End of story.
While the movie is hackneyed it doesn’t offer anything new but a reworking of cassava (read: staple) roles, it also rendered interesting insights on the action stars themselves. Hahaha.
First, the movie made Stallone’s face look like a great waxwork that one more Vicky Belo job would make his face legendary as Michael Jackson [and his face]. Second, Willis and Schwazenegger’s less than two-minute exposure will not win them any Oscars like Judy Dench’s Queen Elizabeth did in "Shakespeare in Love" as it does not do anything to save the movie. At best, they’re reduced to phantoms and additional utility workers in the movie’s line-item budget. In the Philippine film glossary, they will surely be top-billed as "with the special participation of." Such waste of talent, or more aptly, such wasted talents.
It is as if Stallone only assembled the stars in one barangay meeting so as to make the sensible Mickey Rourke a tattoo beautician tinkering with paints and needles in the Expendables’ talyer [a neighborhood machine shop], waste the precious time of Jet Li and Dolph Lundgren to stage an awfully funny mismatch. Another one: it also made Steve Austin’s brawny physique dumber than dumb as the worst alalay [sidekick] for the aging Eric Roberts.
Saving grace? Here it is. While the Asian success named Jet Li is given a limited role he virtually wasted his time waiting for action to happen, and it did not, and while his shortness is berated in the entire script, he used it to his advantage when he fights the gigantic Dolph Lundgren in a restaging of the David and Goliath story. Wuhuhu. More interestingly enough, his character’s constant desire to earn more money so he could provide for his family saves [and very well speaks for] this Asian sensibility.
On the whole, watching this movie is like buying fresh oranges from the sidewalk vendor. The fruit looks too tangy as it is very, very orange. But when you then remove the fresh-looking rind, the rind covers a dried-up membrane inside.
Nowadays, imported movies are like imported fruits. It’s the same experience. These days, it’s only appearances [that are made to] matter. [You don’t even know where the ponkan fruit came from. Reading further information on these cheap imports, you may learn that the fruit is a genetically modified treat stuffed with all chemicals needed to grow it.] Substance is secondary, relegated to the side. You are conned however you’d like to see it.
Watching the movie in the mall is worth more than a hundred pesos, but its real value should even be cheaper than a 20-peso DVD which you can perhaps haggle in the Delgado sidewalk.
Not only that it is not worth your money, it will also make you puke in the movie house because of the dizzying action scenes which are virtually a hodgepodge of computer generated images (CGIs). Here you cannot ignore the gore just because it reminds you of Counterstrike matches your nephew loves to play some six years ago. But you would not see real (meaning: simulated) action in the movie.
You will be forced to watch, but you will not be entertained. Because movies today are only computer generated stuff, you need not fret to catch its last run in the next three days. Better watch your son kill his character’s enemies with finesse and genius in DotA (Defense of the Ancients) on your PC at home. That, for sure, is a real-time live action at best.
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