Lots of trailers seem to be kicking around this morning, and what better way to start your week off than with the noisy German-language trailer for Sylvester Stallone’s “The Expendables,” which features an all-star cast of action heroes, including Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke and Terry Crews, doing to a series of indeterminately ethnic bad guys what the German football team spent yesterday afternoon doing to England; soundly kicking their arses.
Presumably because of stricter EU laws regarding false advertising, there’s no sign of the one-scene Planet Hollywood reunion featuring Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis, which has featured heavily in the domestic clips so far.
Other than that, and the fact that Statham’s character has the amazing name of Lee Christmas, we haven’t seen anything from this film that makes it look anything other than deeply generic; it doesn’t even have the ludicrous OTT gore from the last “Rambo,” and even the film’s most articulate advocates haven’t been able to do much but breathlessly use the word ‘badass’ five times in the same sentence before passing out in a testosterone-fuelled frenzy. Regardless, “The Expendables” starts rolling out in August, whether we want it to or not.
