The Expendables

The Expendables is not great fun, but it is fun, all the same—bad-movie fun. The very idea of Sylvester Stallone dragging himself and a host of slightly tattered action-movie guys back for another ramshackle round of explosions, muscle flexing, and over-hyped adventure has an exuberant ridiculousness to it that’s kind of appealing—in a half-cracked kind of a way, of course. The title characters are a scruffy band of no-longer-young mercenaries who specialize in special-ops dirty work that the government can’t or won’t send its own special-ops guys in to deal with. They enter the film settling accounts with some Somali pirates, and then are sent on to do battle with a Latin American dictator and the rogue CIA agent who’s twisting his political tail. That cartoonish political intrigue is only a pretext, of course, for some utterly predictable displays of macho movie action. And those obligatory action routines are the least interesting thing in this boyishly boisterous film. Feather River Cinemas, Paradise Cinema 7 and Tinseltown. Rated R