The Expendables is the mother of all action movies! Cast wise anyway. Stallone, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundren, Bruce Willis and Schwarzenegger (in cameos) and few “new” action stars to fill out the rest.

Stallon built a movie around a team of bad ass dudes with a tip of the hat to 80’s action movies. These guys are mercs, ready to take off and bust shit up with the right amount of pay behind it. Off to South America where a dictator with a US FBI agent gone rogue cohort is kick starting a drug ring. Seeing a good reason to fight, Sly brings his team in.

It’s an easy action movie to digest, with some really cool moments. Everyone does their parts well, with some guys getting ignored more than others. But for the action pedigree behind it, how did this movie come out with such terrible direction and editing in the action scenes? The old crutch of “shoot close and cut as fast as possible” is out of control. Jet Li might have some fantastic choreography in his fight scenes but it’s cut so fast you don’t know what’s going on. The finale is a good 15 minutes of mayhem, but the scenes are shot so dark, close and fast that I couldn’t tell who was who. Doesn’t help that everyone is wearing the exact same thing. I was confusing Jet Li with dudes who are at least a foot taller than him. It just turns into a mess of people running around, with no sense of where are what anyone is doing.

Worth a rental and not much more. A sequel could (and should) be made a lot better.