The Expendables (2010)

Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Stratham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, Terry Crews, Mickey Rourke

Director: Sylvester Stallone

Genre: Action, Adventure, Thriller

Rating: C

This was not a good movie.  The plot was lame, the acting was mediocre, the…. Really, the everything was not good.  The thing that I liked about The Expendables, however, is that it is exactly what it presents itself as.  This movie is little more than a mindless action flick filled with a bunch of old action stars.  It’s not trying to be anything more than that, it’s not pretending to be anything more than that.  Consequently, while the movie itself is definitely bad it’s also fun.

Because the plot technically is important, I’ll summarize the premise.  The Expendables are a group of bikers and elite mercenaries, lead by Barney Ross (Stallone), and composed of a ragtag group of fighters, many of whom look like they’re dangerously close to overdosing on steroids.      Ross is given a contract to overthrow a dictator in an island in the Gulf of Mexico, where things all go to shit.

This movie is unbelievably predictable and ridiculous and tried and tested and true.  And it’s awesome because despite all that it’s fun.  It’s totally the movie that you watch after a long day when you just want to see stuff blow up.  To be fair, though, that’s what most of Stallone’s movies are like, along with most of the rest of the cast.  This isn’t good, but it’s fun.

 

Domino (2005)

Starring: Keira Knightley, Mickey Rourke, Édgar Ramírez, Jacqueline Bisset, Delroy Lindo, Mo'Nique, Mena Suvari, Dabney Coleman, Lucy Liu, Christopher Walken

Director: Tony Scott

Genre: Action, Crime, Drama,

Rating: C

This might be the worst movie I've ever seen Kiera Knightley in - which says a lot, because she's been in movies like Phantom Menace, Bend it Like Beckham, and King Arthur.  Actually, I'll take that back; this isn't the worst Knightley movie I've seen, but it might be the worst Tony Scott one - I've seen fewer Tony Scott movies.

Domino claims that it's the true story, mostly, of real life actress turned bounty hunter Domino Harvey (played by Knightley), although having watched it I suspect that's as legit as saying that Pearl Harbor is based on the true story of the attack of Pearl Harbor.  It tells the story of an angry girl who never really fit in until she became a badass bounty hunter.  The film alternates between being flashbacks, telling her journey into being a bounty hunter and the incident that got her arrested, and her interrogation by FBI agent Taryn Mills (Liu), to which she is all too willing to tell her story.  Not that you really believe her story.  The whole thing comes across as this ridiculous concoction, which is made worse by the fact that the movie pretends like it's based on a true story.  I think had it dropped that premise - had it simply said that the character of Domino was base on the person of Domino but that the story was a complete fabrication, it would have been better.  The entire film is really rather ridiculous, requiring viewers to suspend their disbelief - which is hard to do when it's pretending to be based on truth.

That's the biggest problem with this movie.  It's not the acting or the script or the shooting choices - all of which vary between good and not so good, but none of which alone make the movie a bad one.  It's the fact that it asks the viewer to suspend too much of their disbelief.  It's important to not ask too much of your viewers.  I can suspend a lot of disbelief in a science fiction or fantasy movie - I love being sucked into some sort of alternate reality, a world which is the result of the imagination of its creators.  At the same time, however, I hate it when someone pretends that something is set within the real world, pretends that this is even a real story.

Despite that, however, I don't really dislike Domino.  It's not a good movie, but it's kind of fun.  There's action and there's some funny bits - thanks largely to the likes of people like Mo'Nique.  The plot could have been hugely simplified, the story cleaned up a lot, and the script tightened.  But the biggest problem is definitely going to remain the fact that this film pretends like it's real when anyone can see that it isn't.