Armor (2024)

This is one Ty and I covered on a past episode of the podcast, number 214 in the archives. A Stallone Randall Scandal was too good to pass up, and as such, it needed a review on the site as well.

Armor takes place in Mississippi, where disgraced, alcoholic former cop Jason Patric drives an armored car with his son Casey (Josh Wiggins), whom he also makes fun of in front of Casey's spouse when they're nice enough to invite him over for dinner. With a likeable hero like Patric, we have an equally likeable baddie in Stallone (his character name is "Rook"), and the two are on a collision course to wackiness when Rook plans to rob Patric's armored car. They end up in a standoff on a bridge, where Patric and his son try to hold off Stallone and his bad of ne'er-do-wells. That's pretty much it, standoff on a bridge, with maybe a flashback mixed in, and some of the fakest CGI water you've ever seen.

This is as lazy a Randall Scandal as you'll see. One location for the most part, Stallone showing up to be Stallone, Patric wishing he could be anywhere else--you can almost hear him yelling "I was in The Lost Boys damn it!" And that's the thing, if we liked Patric's character, this might matter some, but he's a jerk to his son, he's leading AA meetings while drinking, why am I rooting for him? And while Stallone's character is pretty cool, he has a lot of jerks in his team, like Dash Mihok's character. So this ends up being like an AITA ("Am I the Asshole") post on Reddit, where someone responds "ESH" ("Everyone Sucks Here"). And the thing is with a Randall Scandal, do they really care that we care? Not really, right? Did you stream it? I did. Then that's all that counts.

Speaking of counts, this is our sixth Stallone film on the site, but his first ever DTV movie. Not a bad deal to make it this far without one of these. And the moment I heard his voice, that unmistakable Stallone voice, it felt completely out of place here. What is that voice doing in this Randall Scandal? I don't think I'm alone in that either, because this movie has 29 critic reviews on IMDb, which used to be the going number for an earlier Willis Randall Scandal, but the later ones didn't quite hit those numbers. Like Fortress and Fortress: Sniper's Eye, which did 18 and 15 critic reviews respectively (though the first one also had an astounding 135 user reviews!), people had kind of had enough of these, but I think the novelty of Stallone in one was a big enough draw. He does have another one that was released this year, Alarum, so when that makes it to a free streamer we'll probably make it happen. He just turned 79 a few weeks ago, so the fact that he's pumping these out at all is fantastic. We'll take what we can get at this point.

When it comes to CGI, I'm not as much of a stickler on it, and especially when we're talking about DTV movies being made on a budget, I tend to let it slide--in fact, in some cases, like when it comes to depicting large animals, or really any animals at all, I prefer CGI. Leave the animals alone, I'll take a poorly CGI'd tiger over a real one in a movie any day. All that said, the CGI in this when the "water" is rushing into the armored car was a bit much. The CGI water in Black Dawn thought this looked ridiculous. I mean, I don't know how well you can tell from that picture, but it was like a low-budget effect from a cheap local TV show that's doing a silly bit between segments. Again, it just speaks to the overall lazy vibe these Randall Scandals give off. Do we pay a company a little but more to make it look better, or do we just go with this? And then Randall, from his poker game off-set, just waves at them to get them to leave him alone, before he gets bluffed into folding pocket kings and loses $2000, followed by him throwing a temper tantrum, which all leads to us seeing that cheap CGI water above.

This may be a bit of a spoiler, but if you've seen enough of these Randall Scandals, you won't be surprised by what I'm about to say. Rook, our baddie, turns kind of good, and then escapes with no repercussions for what he's done. Emmett, being the kind of person he is, I think he likes it when the bad guys win, which maybe can work if you make the baddie fun enough, but he seldom does that, so we get this awkward "we're letting the bad guy off" construct that doesn't exactly work. Look at A Day to Die, which we haven't reviewed yet but did do on a podcast episode. Leon as the baddie, kidnaps Kevin Dillon's pregnant wife, keeps her tied up, and menaces her, but in the end after they fight the crooked cops together, Leon joins Dillon and his wife in Caribbean or wherever they escape to. How could you spend any time with that guy after he did that to you? Or Cash Out, where 12 people are held hostage in a bank robbery and treated roughly by Travolta and his gang, but then because he gave them each $1 million after he escaped with all the cash it's okay? If you watch the Randall Scandal documentary you can see the psychology behind this, he treats people poorly all the time and feels like it's his right to get away with it, and movies like this are just a reflection of that.

Finally, Stallone's character's name, "Rook," reminded me of a famous post-NBA game press conference by former Memphis Grizzlies head coach David Fizdale. He was upset that his team was on the bad end of a lop-sided officiating performance, with more calls going in favor of the San Antonio Spurs, a veteran team that had won multiple championships in the past. At one point he said "they're not gon' rook us," meaning "they're not going to treat us like rookies," and every time someone in this movie called Stallone by his character name, "Rook," my first thought was "they not gon' rook us." He also famously finished the press conference with "take that for data!" Here's the link to it, it's a thing of beauty.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi here in the States. If you're that curious to see what a Stallone Randall Scandal looks like, Tubi is the place to watch it. And if you haven't yet, you can check out the podcast Ty and I did on this, episode 214 in the archives.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29252358

Pick up my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

The Expendables 2 (2012)

When I saw The Expendables over two years ago, I loved it. I don't know exactly what I was expecting with this second installment, but considering how much I liked the first, and looking at the names they had for part 2, I knew I had to give it a look, so let's see how it went. Also, some of our friends have already hit this one: Ty at Comeuppance Reviews, Explosive Action, The Video Vacuum, and Freddie at Full Moon Reviews.

The Expendables 2 has Sly Stallone and his band of merry mercenary men, on a mission in Eastern Europe to get something out of a safe in a plane that went down over Albania. They have a woman with them working as their safe cracker, and while Stallone doesn't like this idea, it's really more baddie Jean-Claude Van Damme he should be worried about, because it's Van Damme who has stolen this merchandise from them after they got it out of the safe. The merchandise: the a location of some weapons grade Soviet plutonium, which Van Damme hopes to sell on the black market. Can Stallone and his crew stop him?

In the initial scene, as the marauding Expendables were blasting their way to the base of some Nepalese separatists who had some Chinese businessman hostage, I thought to myself "What am I doing here? Didn't I already do this two years ago?" The film does get better though; it has tons of inside jokes for us action fans, it has some nice big action scenes and solid pitched battles, and Van Damme was excellent as the head baddie. I also loved Nan Yu's Maggie character, and Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Willis all have fun small supporting roles. While not the novelty that the first one was, it was still a fun time, and I'm not sure you can ask for anything more than that from your action movie.

For me, Jean-Claude Van Damme won this movie. It probably hurt his soul to have to lose that last fight to Stallone, but let me tell you JCVD, you had me when you roundhouse kicked that knife into The Kid's heart. Was that not one of the best baddie kills ever? Scott Adkins holds it up so the point is facing The Kid's heart, and Van Damme roundhouse kicks the butt end. See, here's the thing Mr. Van Damme, while the fights in the movie are fake, the performances are real, so while you fake lost your fight with Stallone, you beat him by turning in the best performance. 

And then there's the film's other Hall of Famer, Dolph Lundgren. He seems to be more comic relief, right? I loved the inside joke about his history in getting into the film biz. On the other hand, he didn't have the big role he had in the first one. The story didn't revolve around him in any way, he didn't have any big fights, he just cracked some jokes and carried some big guns. It was almost like he was there to be the butt of the jokes too. I don't know how I feel about that. Yes, it's good that he can laugh at himself and not take himself so seriously, but damn it, I don't want him to be Stallone's Harpo Marx.

This gets me to a main problem The Expendables series has. Because we have so many stars, their overall star contributions are severely diluted. Even our baddie, Van Damme, wasn't in the film that much. But let's look at it by the numbers: Scott Adkins, 1 fight, and that was with Jason Statham; Statham only had 2, that one with Adkins and another, and though both were really sweet, it was still only two in a 110-minute film; Dolph had none; Van Damme just had his one with Stallone; and Jet Li was in and out so fast he also had none. It felt like this kind of thing was mitigated better in the first one, and who knows what will happen in the third--at the very least I'd like more Charisma Carpenter.

When I watched the first one with some friends a couple years ago, my buddy's wife commented: "Why does the girl always have to be kidnapped?" I don't know if Stallone's botox and HGH gave him supersonic hearing, but he answered her complaint just the same, because, not only do we not have the damsel in distress construct, but we have a woman in the crew who is equal parts feminine and powerful in Nan Yu. One could make the complaint though that there was still an element of chauvinism in the fact that all the other guys in the cast--other than Adkins, and Liam Hemsworth of course--were much older, while the one female was in her early thirties. But hey Stallone, you wanna go James Woods, it's whatever floats your boat.

And with that, let's wrap this up.  The Expendables 2 is a very fun movie. It doesn't do anything so horrible to turn me off, the action is there and big, and there were plenty of humorous moments. On the other hand, you've been on this road before, you know what you're going to see, no wheels being reinvented, which isn't exactly a bad thing, but for something that's supposed to be bigger and badder than the original, it's not a good thing either.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1764651/

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Rocky IV (1985)

This is our 800th post, which isn't the biggest milestone, but it is on an even hundred, and worth celebrating I think. And what better flick to look at than one that, while it wasn't itself a DTV flick, launched the career of the man we've come to know of as the Babe Ruth of DTV, Dolph Lundgren. Even today, when most people think of Dolph, they think Ivan Drago-- though they often get the famous line wrong. For the record, it's "I must break you", which I imagine Stallone wrote in to drive home the point that Drago didn't have any free will under the Soviet Union-- no "will", all "must".

Rocky IV has Sylvester Stallone back as his iconic sports hero, this time taking a break after beating Clubber Lang. A Soviet heavy weight named Ivan Drago has been making news, and Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) sees this as a last chance at glory. Drago ends up beating him to death in the ring, so Stallone goes on a one-man crusade to take down Drago, and maybe end the Cold War while he's at it.



While this was the highest grossing of Stallone's Rocky films, there's definitely a feeling of shark jumping, especially considering how over the top (no pun intended) so much of it is. Stallone incorporates a montage of clips from the previous films as Rocky reflects on how far he's come, and I think we can't help doing the same. Everything the first one was-- real, compelling, and not out of proportion with what we associate with the real world, while still being big and theatrical-- this one wasn't-- it was always out of proportion and overly theatrical, so by the time we get to the end and Rocky is essentially ending the Cold War in his post fight interview, we aren't surprised by the ridiculousity. But it did have enough of what made the first Rocky so endearing and so successful, in particular Stallone's down-to-Earth working class hero that we can't help but root for, even if we're surrounded by jingoism and silly larger-than-life dramatizations. In the end, shark jumping or no, this is a fun flick in the Rocky series.

No, he wasn't the star, far from it, and no, this wasn't his first big screen role, he had a small part in A View to a Kill, but this is the one that put Dolph on the map. Unfortunately his next film, Masters of the Universe, was a colossal flop, and the one two after that The Punisher, was stuck in limbo and didn't get a US theatrical release (Red Scorpion was in between those two). So began his journey into DTV-dom, with only a blip coming with Universal Soldier, though that film was more a Van Damme vehicle than it was a Dolph flick. We always talk about movies as gems that fell through the cracks when Hollywood ignored them, and here we have the same thing, only with an actor-- their loss is our gain. Who'd'a thunk that a role in a Stallone flick would lead to the greatest DTV action career in history? Here's to you Dolph Lundgren, you're one of the great ones.



It's hard for me to go back to when I was six and get a good grasp on what Stallone and Rocky meant at the time in 1985. I remember the Cold War scare. Though it was near the end, it was still very palpable, and I remember fearing that the Soviets would invade and take my neighborhood hostage. But it's also important to remember that the 80s was Stallone's decade. Schwarzenegger had some good ones then too, but he really came on in the 90s and replaced Stallone then. With that in mind, this is a Stallone at the height of his popularity, revisiting the character that made him most famous. I had this sense as I watched the scene where Rocky looked back on where he came from, and thought about how he needed to get back down to Earth, that his character was trying to speak to Stallone, telling him that this ride won't go on forever, but in his hubris he didn't listen, and in just five short years Rocky V came out, and two years after that Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. I think the difference between Stallone and Rocky, is that Rocky never felt comfortable as a star, while Stallone craved it.

Getting back to Rocky, the first film, I noticed on Tumblr recently that a kid (like 21 or 22) was talking about the travesty that was the 1977 Oscars, because Rocky won for best picture over Taxi Driver. It's interesting how perceptions of both films have changed over time, especially for kids born in the late 80s early 90s. They've essentially only grown up with Rocky as a cliched sports film paradigm, and have had so many "inspired by a true story" sentimentality porn fests shoved down their throats, that they can't conceive of Rocky as an original and endearing concept, let alone comprehend the film's social and artistic significance at the time. It's kind of hard for us Gen X-ers to comprehend it too, because Taxi Driver just seems so much more sui generis, but at least we have some perspective, we remember when both Rocky as a character, and Stallone as a person, were much more relevant in Hollywood, and that's something kids today can't conceive of. Rocky will always be The Blind Side or Seabiscuit to them, while Taxi Driver will always be Travis Bickle kicking ass.



The soundtrack on this is amazing. First and foremost, you have Survivor's "Burning Heart". I'm not ashamed to admit that that's on my iPod in my exercise mix alongside Loverboy's "Turn Me Loose". Just a fantastic montage song, the kind that makes you wish by the end of it that you'd just done 6 months worth of exercise in 3 minutes. Then John Cafferty has "Hearts On Fire". You can never go wrong with John Cafferty. Also we have some Go West, with "One Way Street", and 80s soundtrack mainstay Kenny Loggins, who teams up with Gladys Knight for "Double or Nothing". One of my personal favorites was "No Easy Way Out", which was performed by Robert Tepper-- There's no easy way out/there's no short cut home! Finally, I can't go over the Rocky IV soundtrack without mentioning James Brown's "Living with a Hernia"-- er, I mean "Living in America"-- which was written by Dan Hartman of "I Can Dream About You" fame.

I don't know why I included a shot of Stallone in that Hugo Boss sweatshirt above, I just thought it was so cool. I wish they made sweatshirts like that today, I'd totally buy them. Anyway, I wanted to talk about the sport of boxing, because Stallone was recently inducted into the boxing hall of fame for his work in making boxing films, in particular the first one. In this one, he bends the rules of what's allowed in boxing, especially in the Creed/Drago fight. He went for the element of Creed wanting to die like a warrior in the fight instead of growing old and deteriorating, but the way the whole thing went down, with no ringside doctors, the press surrounding him after he hit the canvas, the ref not stopping the fight when it was obvious Drago had won. For me as a boxing fan it was a little hard to watch, and I wanted scream at the TV when Rocky yells "Can somebody get a doctor!", because every fight has a doctor at it, and he'd have been in the ring before Rocky was.



The boxing thing wasn't nearly as bad as this here. The training scenes were shot in Jackson Hole, Wyoming with the Grand Tetons in the background. If you don't know, the Tetons are over 13,000 feet in elevation, and require, at the very least, rock climbing at a 5.4 difficulty. I get that in the film these were supposed to be fake mountains in Siberia, but anyone looking at them can see that they aren't hills, they have some serious altitude and some serious rock climbing associated with them, so to see Rocky on a whim in just some snow boots and a leather jacket run up to the summit of one was ridiculous. It was also very silly, because they obviously just dropped a stuntman off near the top of one of the peaks and had him run around, then cut to Stallone somewhere else. It was that kind of thing that added to the shark jumping effect.

This is available on a really nice DVD from MGM video. Don't let my screenshots fool you, the DVD is two-sided, with one in widescreen and the other full screen, and I only decided to use the full screen side because I think they look better on the blog. It's a beautiful widescreen transfer on the other side, worth watching on a nice TV. If you see it used or on sale at a big chain, I'd scoop it up. This is a fun film and full of nostalgia-- plus it's the movie that introduced us to Dolph, and for that we're forever grateful.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089927/

Cobra (1986)

700 is an interesting milestone number. It's not as big as 750, which is huge, because it's three-quarters to 1000, but it is something worth noting, and I figured I'd take the opportunity it affords to review a movie that has a very DTV pedigree, but did extremely well at the box office. Produced by DTVC Hall of Famers Golan-Globus for Cannon films, it was then picked up and distributed by Warner Bros., where it went onto gross almost $50 million domestically, and much more worldwide and through video rentals and sales. A big part of that was the star power of Sly Stallone, who also penned this, but it was a pretty sweet actioner too. Of the many reviews of this on the Internet, our friends Ty at Comeuppance Reviews, Simon at Explosive Action, and Kenner at Movies in the Attic (in his Stallone Binge) are three worth checking out. (And if anyone else has done this, by all means, drop the link in the comments section.)

Cobra has Stallone as Marion Cobretti, aka Cobra, a badass who wants to clean the streets, but feels like bleeding heart liberals are getting in his way-- or not. Anyway, a serial killer is slashing up women, scaring the people of LA, and causing all kinds of panic. Turns out it's a whole army of people doing the killing, and supermodel Brigitte Nielsen catches leader Brian Thompson and co. in the act of cleaning up after a murder. Now they want her dead, and will stop at nothing to do that. Only Cobra has the skills it takes to take them down, and that's just what he plans to do.



I hadn't seen this in years, but I gotta say, I think I like it even more now than I did as a kid. It's way over the top (I know, another Stallone/Cannon collaboration) in it's action, with massive explosions, gun fights, and car chases. It's a sweet case of 80s excess. Yes, it has some misguided political overtones that I'll get into later, but overall, this delivers everything we want from a bad action movie, from the hero, the baddie, the distressed damsel, the one-liners, the fantastic 80s soundtrack, and the balls to the wall excitement. This is what you came for, and Stallone and Golan-Globus don't disappoint. Also, love Cobra's car-- too bad it had to go in a too sweet chase scene!

As you've probably heard me say multiple times on here, mixing politics with action movies is often a losing proposition. I put it behind letting the plot get in the way and casting annoying kids as the worst bad action movie offenses. Here we had some really misguided, misinformed statements about the state of the justice system in 1980s America, from the idea that judges undermine police officers by being too lenient on criminals-- ask all the people who were wrongly convicted at that time that were exonerated by DNA evidence later how they feel about that--, to the media wants to turn criminals into victims-- including an absurd and implausible scene where a reporter berates Stallone for killing a guy who held the patrons of a supermarket at gunpoint and had killed hostages himself; no one has sympathy for that kind of criminal, and the media always vilifies perpetrators like that and has no qualms with the cops killing them--, to finishing with the classic "Brian Thompson will just be found insane and get away with all this"-- which is so dumb I can't even imagine Stallone himself believed that crap when he wrote it. The thing is, this is one of the rare cases where the bad action is so good it transcends these shortcomings. It's like dating the crazy girl that's hot and good in the sack-- you can handle a little psycho texting and stalking when everything else is so hot.



One thing I didn't notice when I was younger that I see now is how great the cinematographer and director infused these Hitchcockian suspense shots. This is the kind of stuff we want from a good horror movie, and it's here in Cobra for Christ's sake! Really amped up the tension for me, and made Brian Thompson that much better a baddie. A good bad action flick is only as good as its baddie, and Thompson is one of the best, but it's always cool to see a film maker taking it that extra mile, and not leaning on his or her actors so much. Modern DTV, with its penchant for using former actors and stuntmen as directors, could learn from casting directors and DPs that know what they're doing, and can add that extra layer, like we see here.

It doesn't get much bigger than Stallone in 1986. Arnold Schwarzenegger was right there with him, and then maybe Bruce Willis after Die Hard in '88, but after that there's some drop off. I have a feeling Van Damme didn't do The Expendables in part because he's always seen himself as on Stallone's level, but we all know that's not really accurate, and taking a bit part in Stallone's movie would have been a not-so-tacit recognition of that fact. The thing with both Stallone and Schwarzenegger was that they felt like they had to not only top each other, but top their own previous work. Everything had to be bigger, badder, more explosive, and eventually the kind of action movie they did imploded under its own weight. But now we've had 15 to 20 years to get that out of our system, and Stallone has come back to us with the kind of stuff from the late 80s/early 90s that we loved, with both The Expendables and Rambo. What I like about something like Cobra though, is that we get to experience 80s excess as it's happening, and guys like Stallone and Schwarzenegger are still in their prime.



This movie was brought to you by Pepsi. This movie was paid for by Pepsi. In this shot you have some Coors too, but mostly this was brought to you by Pepsi. The volume of Pepsi product placement is astounding-- it's like a frickin' football stadium here. I gotta say, though, if Pepsi advertised like this and got rid of their dumb commercials-- and they have some of the dumbest on TV-- I'd buy their shit in a heartbeat, and I don't even drink soda anymore. Same goes for Coors. Get rid of the stupid cans that tell me when they're cold, and the even dumber commercials advertising them; or worse, those annoying ones with the sanctimonious Sam Elliot voice overs; and replace them strictly with DTV action movie product placement, and I'll be a Coors drinker for life. Alas, none of this will ever happen, and so I'm left with water, coffee, and PBR.

All right, before this turns into free adverts for Pepsi and Coors, I better wrap this up. This is a classic bad actioner, and despite some shortcomings, it's a blast. Currently you can check it out on Watch Instantly, but this is one that's worth having in the collection, even if it's only a cheap used DVD or VHS. Also, I'll be saying this again in 50 posts, but I just want to thank everyone for supporting the DTVC, 700 posts and counting!

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090859/

The Expendables (2010)

Had this film come out before we started the DTVC in May of 2007, it would have been saved for a milestone post, like 100 or 500 or something. Because it's a new release on DVD, I wanted to get the review in on the day it was out-- especially since we're far off from the next milestone number-- so even though this is post number 558, we're going to treat it like a milestone post, suspending our usual 8 paragraph 3 image format for a 10 paragraph 4 image special edition. Luckily, I don't sell issues of this like comic books, because you'd be paying ten bucks for the reverse hologram cover-- or not, and I'd be stuck with a stack of them collecting dust and not going up in value.

The Expendables stars Sly Stallone as the leader of the eponymous mercenary group, experts at taking care of business and selling their talents to the highest bidder. When Bruce Willis comes knocking, wanting a crew to go into a Latin American island to take out the general in control there, Arnold Schwarzenegger thinks the idea is madness, so his merc group won't take the job. Sly likes the idea of the $5 mill Willis is willing to pay them, so he agrees. On a reconnaissance mission, he and Jason Statham realize things are pretty rough, that there's not just a general, but an evil Eric Roberts and a lot of soldiers, so they initially decide they want no part. Then Stallone thinks about the girl they left behind, who wanted to stay and fight for her people, and he decides he wants to stand for something too, and go back in there. His crew agrees, leading to one of the greatest finales in action movie history.



I considered using a metaphor to describe this, like how I said Righteous Kill was like the old timers game with Pacino and De Niro, I was thinking maybe The Expendables was the fantasy camp. But then I realized that that would be selling this film short. Selling short a film that punches you in the face with awesomeness. Selling short Sly Stallone, who said "hey, the shit we did back in the 80s and 90s, a lot of people really liked that shit. Fuck Matt Damon and Toby McGuire, let's get some motherfuckers that people really want to see kicking ass, and let's show them kicking ass!" He took the great films we love from the 80s and 90s, and he made one that was faster, louder, and more powerful, yet without losing what made those movies so awesome. This was Commando on steroids-- or HGH-- and a middle finger to everyone who thumbed their nose at the shit we grew up with.

We spend so much time on here ruing newer films for not getting it. Not getting what we want as an audience. Look at Jean-Claude Van Damme, who brags in JCVD about how he turned down a role in The Expendables because he didn't like what Stallone was offering him. Are you kidding? Your fans wanted your ass in this, kicking ass with all the rest of these bad asses. We don't care about what kind of role you get, or about how much Stallone didn't stroke your ego, we want to see you in this enormous pile of awesomeness. Stallone has come through, and he got everyone on board to understand his vision. He made this movie as much for us as he did for them, and I'm stoked about that. Thank you, we all appreciate it.



As always, we need to look at the Hall of Famers, and out of all the names, we only have two: Dolph Lundgren and Gary Daniels. Lundgren, as he does in almost every big screen film, plays something of a baddie. He actually hits Gary Daniels in one scene, reminding us of what we didn't get in Retrograde. The best part was his fight with Jet Li, because he was able to let rip with his Olympic-class martial arts talent, probably one of the best scenes we've ever seen him in. Do you see him telling us, his fans "I didn't do the film because I didn't like the role Sly had for me"? Hell no! He delivers. Gary Daniels is interesting, because we'd been doing some of his early roles here recently, and this was reminiscent of those. Very small part as Eric Roberts' hachetman-- second in command to Stone Cold Steve Austin-- but yet, he also has a great fight, with Jet Li and Jason Statham at the same time.

I commonly have a gripe with a movie, especially an action movie, that suspends the action in order to get melodramatic on us, so you're probably wondering what I thought of Mickey Rourke's tear-filled tale of an incident in Bosnia he witnessed. That's one of the benefits to having such a large and diverse cast, you get guys like Mickey Rourke, who was an amazing Sean Penn performance in Milk away from a best actor Oscar. Mickey Rourke can make a scene like that compelling, and more importantly, make it work. Not every movie has the advantage of such a deep cast, which is why I'm often annoyed when they try to do what Mickey Rourke did here, because it seldom comes off.



If I have any complaint with The Expendables-- and can I really have any complaint?-- it's that we don't have more Charisma Carpenter. Isn't any movie better for having more Charisma Carpenter? Exactly, she's awesome. She turned forty a few months ago, which is just crazy to me, because she doesn't look nearly that old. She plays Statham's ex-girlfriend, and when he finds out her new boyfriend hit her, he goes down to where the guy is playing basketball, and destroys him and all his buddies. Amazing scene, and one I think all these TapOut/punchfighting movie makers should look at that for how to make their fight scenes in their films. Anyway, I'm getting off track, this paragraph was meant to be about how much I like Charisma Carpenter. Hopefully, if Stallone makes a sequel to this, he'll put more of her in it.

Speaking of the abusive boyfriend, this movie adds an element that not every action films includes, and that's a strong statement about violence against women. In every case that a male character does something to physically attack a female character, that character is dealt with harshly, which is as it should be. People always focus on the violence in a film like this as a bad example for kids, but it's so extreme and so (almost) cartoonish to be taken seriously. On the other hand, how many action films or old gangster and Film Noir pictures show women being dominated or treated violently, without immediately denouncing such behavior. This movie does that, and does it in a very powerful way. Kudos for that.



On top of the great action, all of the characters were in other great scenes where there was no action at all. All of this could have easily been about them, they could have used those scenes to revel in each other's stardom, but they didn't. They made those scenes about us, their fans, and as such, they were tons of fun to watch. It just gets back to what made this movie so great, that Stallone understood what he was doing and what we wanted, and he made it all happen.

Plain and simple, The Expendables delivered on what it promised. If you saw it in the theater, see it again. Put it on your Christmas list, or run out to the store to buy it because you can't wait. I'm curious to check it out on my buddy's Blu-ray player myself. This was the movie we were hoping for, and seldom do any films ever give us what we're hoping for.

(As an aside, for the first time ever I got an error message for having too many tags. I didn't even know there was a limit!)

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1320253/

Judge Dredd (1995)

It's crazy to think this came out almost 15 years ago. I was never very familiar with the comic, and just found out by looking it up on Wikipedia that it's not a Dark Horse publication like I always thought, but rather an independent UK publication that has been running since 1977, and it was in a comic book entitled 2000 AD, not Judge Dredd. I never really read it, not because I was a Big Publication snob-- I read some Valiant titles like Turok and Magnus: Robot Fighter-- but because I just never saw it around a lot for purchase. When I saw the movie in 1995, there was no Wikipedia to go to get all this info, so I just went in blind.

Judge Dredd takes place in the 22nd century (I think), in a place called Mega City 1, where order is kept through a law enforcement system where patrolling officers are cop, judge, jury, and in some cases executioner, all rolled into one. Sly Stallone plays Judge Dredd, one of the best, who is framed for murder by Rico, played by Armand Assante. Now he must prove his innocence, in a world where guilt is already decided, and mistakes in the system are never considered.



I'm not going to try and discuss whether or not Judge Dredd was in any way faithful to the comic, because I don't know enough about it to say. As far as the movie went, it represented a place in time, where action was big and violent, but had an element of the cartoonish in it. I don't really know how to place it with a film like, say The Dark Knight. I imagine if it were made today, with our modern movie making technology, and with someone like Vin Diesel cast as Dredd, it would probably be as much of a flop as this one was. The best way to describe it is it was pretty much like every other Sly Stallone action film coming out at that time, which one: isn't what you want when you're adapting a comic book; but two: you can see in Sly's imdb bio that 1995 was that time when the wave crested and his popularity was waning. Had it starred Arnold, which was the original plan, it probably would've fared better, and not been any better a movie.

In trying to draw an analogy, I thought of someone making a Captain America movie in 1995 starring Arnold Schwarzenegger that played out like Commando. I realize that's not a proper analogy, though, because the thought of that sounds awesome, no? This was Demolition Man only not as much fun because we'd seen it before. According to imdb, the director, Danny Cannon, who is himself a Brit, said it was impossible to work with Stallone, and he constantly had to change things to Sly's liking. Now you can kind of see where the movie went bad. The thing too was in 1995, we were tiring of these kinds of films, and though we were tired of Stallone before we were tired of Arnold, as I said above, the wave was still cresting, and the lack of success of this film relative to its budget was a sign of a bigger sea change to come.



I don't want to come off as bashing Stallone here, because Rambo 2008 was amazing, as was his stuff from the 80s and early 90s. In making the fuss he made, he was doing what he thought was right, because it had worked only two years before with Demolition Man. I'm curious to see what The Expendables is like, just based on how good Rambo 2008 was. I will say, after seeing The Dark Knight, if I had a choice between the cartoonish violence of the 80s and 90s, and the deranged Saw-like violence of something like that, I'll take the 80s and 90s any day. A villain that gives people and was given a Bloody Smile just doesn't appeal to me. Hans Gruber on the other hand is the man.

All of us I'm sure were assigned 1984 at some time during our middle school or high school days-- or both. It's interesting the way we and the Brits look at that book. We just take for granted we have a democracy, coming from that background, and also not having the Nazi threat directly on our shore, and as such, a book like that only influences our thinking so much. That's not such a good thing, though. How often do we forfeit various rights because we're told it's for our own safety. How long did it take for the drinking age to go back up to 21? If you tried to pull that in Europe the people would lose their minds. Now, we've not only submitted to a higher drinking age, but in order to buy beer we have to be even older before we can purchase without showing proof our age with a valid form of ID. Here we were railing against a universal ID system, but on a lot of levels we already have it, because being without our IDs means we aren't granted a number of legal rights we're due by virtue of our age. And all of this is done in the name of our protection, or for our own good.



I considered omitting this next paragraph because it would mean admitting that I haven't seen Shutter Island yet, ie, I suck as a human being; but I figured it would be good to shame myself into getting around to it. In my defense, I was going to go last Friday, but the movie theater had no power. Anyway, what I'm getting at, if you haven't already guessed, is one of my all time favorite actors, Max von Sydow, is in this. Though it didn't happen, I would've loved a scene where Max played chess against Stallone as Death.

Okay final thoughts. In 1995, this sucked, but now, fifteen years later, it's a fun time, so if you haven't seen it, you may enjoy it. It may have failed as a solid comic book movie, but I'm not sure how much that matters anymore. At the very least, you can still say, in your best Sly Stallone voice: "I am tha' law!"

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113492/