The Expendables (2010)

Written at the time of the film's release....you can tell because it mentions Arnold Schwarzenegger having a political career...before we'd all heard of "Maid-gate."

Do I have to mention Saturday is "Take Out the Trash" Day?

"The Most Appropriately Titled Movie of the Year!!"
or
The Answer to Where All the hGH in Hollywood Went

First, to be fair, one does not walk into a movie like The Expendables to judge the line-readings. It's a good thing, as the only performance worth a damn is Mickey Rourke's beautifully played monologue in the middle of the movie, which stands out like an ice-swan at a spam-carving contest.  Everybody else, it's a crap-shoot (emphasis before the dash).

"Crap-Shoot" might have been a better title for the movie, as it's equal parts both. The latest in a series of 2010 "Dirty Dozen" knock-offs (after The Losers and The A-Team), this one takes its appeal in gathering so many testosteroasted hams, all of whom have seen better days. The main stars are Sylvester Stallone (who directed), Jet Li, and Jason Statham, with extended cameos from the rest of the cast (why, there's even a brief, unnecessary "Planet Hollywood" board meeting between Stallone, Bruce Willis, and the non-acting Gubernator of Kullyfarnyah, Mr. Schwarzenegger*—who seems to have forgotten how to act, along with all his campaign promises). The only stand-outs are the vascularity on the prominently displayed biceps, not that anyone would look good barking the inane juvenilia contained in the script.  

Okay, so let's forget "art," for a moment, and lower the squat bar to "execution" (*sigh*  "if only..."). The action scenes (supervised by 2nd Unit Director Terry Leonard, who has done good work in the past) are sloppy, jam-edited for intensity, and often laughable (I lost count of how many times they pulled the never-believable "guy-holds-a-knife-handle-to-his-throat-like-somebody-just-threw-it-at-him" trick), and that applies to whether the "E's" are fighting the bad guys, or amongst themselves. These guys can hold a gun—and maybe not blink when firing one, I didn't notice—grunt when they're hit, and simulate rough-necking (except for "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, who A) can't act, and B) broke Stallone's neck during a choke-hold), but anything else is far more taxing—like, you know, keeping an accent, or even a consistent personality, throughout the proceedings.

But, there are the numerous neck-twists, blood-spurts, and even the occasional spaghettification of an extra every few minutes, but one wonders why some of these guys, who made their reputations on better product in the 80's, would decide to come out of retirement (or exile) to appear in such a worthless piece of trash. There's a lot of Human Growth Hormone under the skin of these guys (Stallone, particularly, is starting to look like Robert Evans!), but any other growth—well, they haven't made a pill for that. After all, the phrase isn't "Better acting through chemistry." As it is, this film feels lame, and aged—like Wild Hogs with evisceration. 

* Stallone must have promised to wash their windows, or something. The novelty of seeing Schwarzenegger back on anything but a political stage has been heavily promoted in the ads, but he's there for four minutes, tops—hardly enough to get in shape for.  I'm sure there's SOME-one out there, outside of a day-care or the Democratic Party, that's been hoping for Schwarzenegger's screen return, but I think that may be a side-effect of extensive steroid use. 

2020 Hindsight Addition: There was a link to Arnold's Governor page under the "Kullyfarnia" but when I checked on it, it took me to a "This Page Has Moved" place-holder. Boy Howdy.

I wrapped up the review with this: "The Expendables" is a Waste of Time, Money and an army of Ballistic Gel Dummies!

The thing has generated a few sequels, though. Something to be said for that.

Terminator: Dark Fate

Re-Writing History Re-Writing the Future
or
"Saved Three Billion Lives. Enough of a Resumé For You?"

James Cameron is back to the Terminator franchise, the one he started way back in 1984, now credited as Executive Producer and Story-Author of Terminator: Dark Fate, which basically ignores the other franchise movies after Terminator 2: Judgement Day no matter how much or how little they featured Arnold Schwarzenegger and serves as a direct sequel to Cameron's Judgment Day—rubbing out all of the three movies that have come in-between.

Which makes Cameron a Terminator of sorts behind the camera.

Basically, he's spiffing up the timeline because it WAS getting a little confusing—now is it Linda Hamilton or Emilia Clarke as Sarah Connor?; and fer pity's sake, how many JOHN Connors have there been—Christian Bale or Jason Clarke or Nick Stahl or Ad Infinitum? The series has had more reboots than any other for such a short expanse of existence, and for all of that, the future still looks the same in all the movies—it's only the present that keeps changing.

Except, of course, for Arnold. It seems you can't make a "Terminator" movie without him, even though it's becoming increasingly clear and inevitable—like sand through the hour-glass—that maybe they should...IF they're going to keep making them. And unless they start doing something fresh with the concept besides merely a rock'em-sock'em robots display, there is no reason to.

Dark Fate starts with a reprise of a video of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton, this time) from Judgement Day recounting her vision of the nuclear holocaust that will destroy humanity, ending with her freaking out about "anybody not wearing two million sunblock is going to have a bad day." Cut to 1998. It's three years after the events of Judgement Day, Skynet and Cyberdyne Systems have been eliminated and the future is safe (despite what the other three films say). Sarah Connor and her son John are living a peaceful life in Guatamala...when suddenly a T-800 (Schwarzenegger model) appears and shoots John, killing him. Guess there were some left-over T's hanging around. Well, if the other three movies weren't irrelevant before, they certainly are at this point.

Cut forward and a new terminator shows up from the future—this is Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a cybernetically enhanced soldier, who seeks out Daniella Ramos (Natalia Reyes) because...plot. Grace is teleported to protect "Dani" who will become a resistance fighter against the new future threat to humanity—LEGION—which will be a part of an AI defense system that has gone out of control. At the same time, another terminator (Diego Luna) has been sent to kill her, and this terminator, the REV-9, is a hybrid construct made of a liquid metal metal body supported by cyber-endoskeleton, allowing it to separate and attack from two fronts. Not sure why they didn't start out with those, instead of with the T2 T-1000's.

The REV manages to wipe out Dani's family (as is the norm for terminator movies, it seems), oozing himself into the form of Dani's father in order to invade her work-place in Mexico City, where the security must be a little lax. Why? Because Grace manages to get there, too—NO METAL DETECTORS✅—to stop the evil cyborg from taking the kid out and making it a 30 minute movie.  Just one more reason to hate terminators.

Grace and Dani escape from the Rev and there ensues a chase across one of Mexico's more empty highways where enough mayhem happens that you'd think there'd be some sort of traffic-jam that would halt travel for miles. I mean, that's how it usually happens. But, instead, there are long expanses of open asphalt for there to be a lot of kineticism with relatively little impedance to momentum or contained property damage.

And, just when things look bad for our heroes, they unleash the deus ex machina, with the exception that she's not a machine, it's Sarah Connor—who's about as anti-machine as one could get—bad-assing her way out of an Land Rover and packing a lot of heavy heat. Ratta-tatta-BOOM. Bye-bye, terminator. Hasta la vista, ba-bies.

Ratta

Tatta

Uh-huh...

How the hell does Sarah Connor show up just in the nick of time-travel? Well, since the death of her son and the inevitable nervous breakdown (I assume if we want to inject some reality into this movie), Sarah has been a one-woman terminator-terminator, tracking down T's that have been teleported in the interim (although with John dead one wonders...why?), directed by mysterious text messages with the coordinates of each arrival and a haunting signature—"For John".

In their brief down-time (while the Rev repairs itself—and a brief aside here, how do they expect to kill them?), Grace and Sarah compare futures—between the deposed Skynet and the up-coming LEGION—and Grace does some finagling with Sarah's text messages, tracing them to a location in Laredo, Texas. They go off the grid, and hop a freight-train carrying a large number of immigre's crossing the border to Laredo to the source of the texts.

There, they find Carl (played by Schwarzenegger), who is a drapery and interior specialist with a wife and son and a whole lot of of weaponry stashed in the shed. Carl turns out to be the T-800 who killed John Connor.

Let's take a moment to look at some distracting pictures while you ponder that concept.

Still with us? Okay. Carl's a terminator. He's also kinda crusty-looking, losing his hair, has a gray beard and a bit of a gut. Bear in mind, he's a robot, kids. Is the T-800 artificially aging him/itself to fit in and to not draw suspicion (he's Schwarzenegger, so, of course, he's always going to draw suspicion). Then, why is he out in the public as an interior designer? Does his wife wonder about his lack of expression and modulated emotional range—not to mention the occasional clanking, grinding sounds he makes? Does this make any sense whatsoever, except as comic relief?

I guess Cameron insisted Schwarzenegger be in this, but...wow...there's a lot of lame explanations piling up to explain his presence, and a serious lack of owning up to his appearance. Replacing the real guy with a CGI replica would have been more expensive—although one is used in the earlier sequence—but it might have spared a lot of stupidity that would need to be explained away or, as this movie does, just ignores.

And for me, this is where Terminator: Dark Fate goes completely off the metal rails on multiple levels. We are expected to believe that the well-armed Sarah Connor would work alongside the very terminator that assassinated her son in the coldest blood without being constantly tempted to direct it to the nearest compactor. We are also expected to believe that one of these future killing machines would be capable of developing a conscience—don't talk to me about T2, as that model was programmed to PROTECT John Connor. On top of the issues of a terminator leading a quiet life of retirement after completing its mission, these issues make the story just too difficult to digest. 

Add to this, Tim Miller's directing style. One would think, after his work on Deadpool, that the man was a natural for action movies. But, the work he did on Deadpool 2 was pretty clunky. Still, one would think that given good material under the auspices of James Cameron, you could expect a bit more expertise. After all, Robert Rodriguez, who is no slouch in the action department, did some good work with Cameron on Alita: Battle Angel. But, Terminator: Dark Fate looks sloppy and slap-dash, especially in comparison to Cameron's films. Cameron is an engineer, as well as a director, and he has a way of putting together set-pieces that are large and operatic, and by that I mean, his presentation is to piece together big moments, setting them up and paying them off in spectacular, memorable fashion. You remember key moments in Cameron's movies because you were prepared for them by the director, that support buttressing the pay-off moments, making them for more satisfying when they occurred. 

The action is bombastic and over-the-top in Terminator: Dark Fate, designed to occur at regular intervals over the course of the movie, but they hammer away with no sense of rhythm and no sense of relationship or place; what should have been an amazing donnybrook in the hold of a transport-plane has you trying to keep track of the characters while they're being thrown around a fairly simple cylindrical structure. The trouble is it's staged, shot and edited in such a way that you don't know who's doing what in what sequence and you lose track of individual characters and what they might be doing in the situation to get out of it. There's no suspense and there's no integration—there's no story-telling, just effects, and ultimately, it's that constant thrumming of consequence without the modulation of character that makes this entry feel less like what Cameron intended—a continuation of his work from T2—and more like the weaker entries in between that he was trying to erase.

There's a terminator-like lesson in there somewhere amidst all the twisted metal and drone-like hammering. Something about repeating history...even if it comes from the future.

Terminator Genisys

For Sale on Craigslist: "Vintage" Android: Recycled Parts, Slightly Worn and Rusty, Old Programming, Not Very Expressive—Would Make a Credible Republican Presidential Candidate.
or
Artificial Un-intelligence

As if one needed another reason not to visit San Francisco this movie summer, Terminator Genisys tears up the Golden City that has been already been flattened by the Mother of All Earthquakes, invasions by apes, Godzilla and kaiju, dropping star ships, and everything from A (an atom bomb in A View to a Kill) to X (X-men: Last Stand). 

This time the threat that San Francisco faces is from a movie that seems hell-bent on imploding itself out of existence through that most feared Weapon of Mass Destruction to movie-geeks: continuity errors.

We know the story already, as they've told it every—single—movie:*  a miltary-designed artificial intelligence named "Skynet" goes a little "off-program" and takes the "deterrent-idea" a little too far by destroying the one thing that causes all the wars in the first place—us pesky humans. "Skynet" launches a planet-wide nuclear attack, and after the conflagration of "Judgment Day," hunts the non-crispy humans into extinction. The humans' only hope is their rebel leader John Connor (he's been played by Edward Furlong as a kid and Michael Edwards, Nick Stahl, and Christian Bale as an adult), who, after the machines invent a way to time-travel, sends one of his operatives Kyle Reese (used to be: Michael Biehn, now is: Jai Courtney) back in time to protect Connor's mother, Sarah (then: Linda Hamilton; now Emilia Clarke) who is under threat from a "Terminator" (the once and future Arnold Schwarzenegger) missioned to kill Connor before he is even conceived. Ironically (HEDGED SPOILER) the plan ensures that John Connor is born, despite the death of Reese while defending Sarah. Silly robots.

Good Idea for a Movie. Bad Idea for a sequel, which are variations of the same theme as Skynet sends ever better, sleeker and less Austrian robots to do the job, and the rebels send their own increasingly aging "terminators" to stop them. Surprisingly the films were not called "Try, Try Again" and "The Robots Don't Realize if You Do the Same Thing Over and Over Expecting a Different Outcome, You Have a Screw Loose," or even "Another Waste of Time-Travel." But, if Skynet is dumb, the humans are even dumber: every time they fix it so that Skynet doesn't come about, it still manages to come about.

As it does here. We go over the same Skynet story for the fourth time, and then, again, Kyle Reese is sent back in time by John Connor to save his mother...again. We even get a reprise of the first film where "The Terminator" (a CGI-zenegger) confronts the same 1984 vintage heavy-metalers and tells them he "vahnts" their clothes. Then something different actually happens: he is confronted by a figure in a hoodie carrying a gun. Low and behold it's an old Arnold Schwarzenegger, who blasts away at his earlier version, and they get into a knock-down-dragged-on fight between "new" terminator and "old" terminator, with the grayer version getting the worst of it, until he/it is rescued by...Sarah Connor?  Huh?

With Terminator: Genysis, Arnold Schwarzenegger again announces he'll be back (and it's never sounded more like a threat). The former California Governor—who can't credibly run for President as a Republican because The Terminator always enters this country illegally—is looking a little worse for wear. It seems he's been around for a bit longer than the movie-going audience has previously suspected....approximately since 1973 as he's seen rescuing Sarah as a child in a flashback (the whole thing is a flashback, really, if your perspective is from the movie's starting point). And ever since, has been giving her a crash-course in bad-assery. So, things have actually changed from the original "Terminator" movie. Why, Sarah Connor never even goes through the "big hair" period of the first film.

So far, so odd. Let us file away the original movie's notion that time-travel is limited in the future and that if Skynet is ultimately defeated, who or what sent this "Olde Arnold" back to the past (earlier than the ones already sent) should be a mystery, if not an impossibility. Skynet wouldn't have the ability to send it as their precious time-travel gear has been captured, and the rebels would have no reason to because the war is over. File this, because it will become irrelevant and minor compared with the whoppers to come.

Eventually, Reese hooks up with Connor and "Olde Arnold" just in time to defeat another blast from the future—one of the liquid metal terminators from T2 (played by Byung-hun Lee) that seemed unstoppable in that film but is pretty much dispatched fairly early here. At which point, "Olde Arnold"—called "The Protector" or as Sarah Connor calls him "Pops" (yeesh!)—reveals that he has also built a time-machine in 1987 (evidently because he was too busy in the other movies to think of creating one then). Reese and Connor decide to hop forward in time—which, mind you, doesn't exist yet—to right before "Judgment Day" to stop Skynet from launching its missiles. "Pops" says he can't travel in time, only meat-people can (Oh, yeah? How'd he get there in the first place?), but he'll just live for the 30 years or so to catch up with them.**

They jump in time to 2017 and make plans to destroy Skynet, which is now called "Genysis"—and it's no longer a military brain-hive, it's an inter-connectivity system for cell-phones, tablets, and the next thing in your junk-drawer. And...funny thing...one of the technical developers for Genysis is...John Connor. Yup, seems that John Connor went back in ti-.......

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH!!

Wait, wait, wait. Rewind. Remember, the original Terminator movie? (I'm not talking to you kids—you haven't seen it because there's no CGI in it and the FX look "stoopid"). The whole thing about it was that it had that delicious irony that by sending a terminator back in time to kill John Connor's mother ultimately led to John Connor being born. Reese and Connor have the inevitable "fleeing-unstoppable-killing-machines-makes-us-really-horny-moment" and, as a result, John Connor, rebel leader, is conceived. 

Unless, I missed something (and I have to admit, this movie made me want to nod off several places), there was no FUKMMURH moment in this movie, and so as a result, the conception of John Connor in 1987 did not occur. At which point (for anyone who has seen the original) this movie...should be over. O-ver.

"I'm John Connor. These are not scars. These are gaps in logic."

No John Connor. So, then no war with the machines (because as this movie would have it, no Genisys). No resistance. No time-travel. No Connor sending Kyle Reese back in time. Nothing. There's no John Connor, so what the hell is he doing in 2017 (SPOILER ONLY IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE TRAILERS), having been sent back in time as a killer-cyborg/technical engineer? The movie sets him up as the bad guy, but if the movie were to follow this timeline, he shouldn't even exist...because he'd never been conceived. Never been born. End of movie, right?

Yeah, and this couldn't happen, either...

But, no, it keeps plodding along, not imagining that the very reason for its existence never happened. Unless there's been a second Immaculate Conception, which I don't think James Cameron believes in (and I know for damn sure Schwarzenegger doesn't), the movie should just stop dead in the projector with the forward time-jump, followed by the ushers with the brooms and rolling garbage receptacle. And see, they've managed to completely eliminate the whole franchise in this one dumb movie. It's one thing to change the space-time continuum in a re-boot (Hello, Star Trek), but make sure that you don't eliminate a character that sets the thing in motion—and no, I'm not talking Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor—from the start. Massively, unequivocably...dumb. Blame screenwriters Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier and director Alan Taylor, who couldn't have an explanation other than "shit happens." 

Shit does indeed happen.  And this movie is the proof.

Rest in pieces

* Not that the original was...wholly original: It's part of record that Harlan Ellison was paid a bunch of money (which he can't disclose) and a special credit tele-cine'd on prints of the film ("...gratefully acknowledge his work.") because he threatened to sue Hemdale and Orion Pictures when he saw an early screening of the film and saw that the opening sequence had a lot of similarity to "Soldier," an episode of "The Outer Limits" that he wrote in the early 1960's.  Cameron wasn't happy about it, but didn't want to be sued by the corporations if they lost, so it was all settled out of court.  It's claimed on the internets that there's a similarity to "Demon with a Glass Hand," another episode of "OT" written by Ellison, but it is a little more far afield...until this movie.

** Fulfilling the original premise of Harlan Ellison's "Demon with a Glass Hand," one of the "Outer Limits" episodes mentioned above.