The answer: Sylvester Stallone, the writer/director.

I’ll give the man some credit as the lead star—at age 64, he’s bringing it, botox and all.  Ripped to shreds, and pumped up with steroids (there just can’t be any other way), Stallone returns to cinemas as Barney Ross, leader of a mercenary squad hired by Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) to take out a former CIA operative, Munroe (Eric Roberts) and his drug-trading South American general Garza (David Zayas).  Stallone wants a payment of $5 million for his team which includes a list of hand-me-down single-trait killers.

Among the line-up we have Jason Statham as Lee Christmas, a blade-wielding expert, believing wholeheartedly that knives travel faster than bullets.  Jet Li plays martial-artist Ying Yang, but his sole trait is that he’s made fun of for his height.  Why don’t they call him Short-Round?  UFC fighter Randy Couture really has no traits except for awkwardly explaining his cauliflower ear.  Terry Crews is only memorable for toting an AA-12 shotgun (much like Jesse Ventura being memorable for sporting a Gatling gun in Predator).  Finally, Dolph Lundgren plays Gunner, messed up on drugs and a thirst for blood, an uncontrollable rage that gets him tossed to the curb and wanting to exact revenge.

After Ross accepts the mission from Mr. Church, he and Christmas head out to their South American location to scope out their targets and who all is involved.  The two end up launching an attack on the entire base after nearly being captured along with their informant, Sandra (Giselle Itie), the daughter of Gen. Garza.  Upon the boys’ escape, Sandra refuses to leave and gets captured by her father’s army.  Ross returns to listen to the team’s mechanic, Tool (Mickey Rourke), tell a Vietnam story about a woman he failed to save that has haunted him ever since.  That story apparently shakes up Ross clogging his brain with guilt and remorse, and he decides to return to the island and rescue the woman, but his men refuse to let him go alone.  Meanwhile, former teammate Gunner has given up his old team to Munroe and has plans to stop the ‘expendables’ from succeeding.

The Expendables has only one good scene—where Rourke pours his heart out over his Vietnam regret.  As potentially forced as Stallone’s dramatic change of heart may be following Rourke’s speal, the scene still plays out very well, and it’s the only real ‘acting’ moment in the entire movie.  I know some will be questioning about the obligatory scene featuring Schwarzenegger and Willis hamming it up with Stallone.  Well, as much fun as the scene should be, it isn’t.  It’s forced.  It’s awkward.  It’s poorly written, if scripted at all—much like the rest of the film.  Schwarzenegger plays a competing mercenary leader that used to work with Stallone, but they went their separate ways.  He tells Willis, “Give this job to my friend, he loves playing in the jungle.”  Bruce says of Arnold, “What’s that guy’s problem?”  Stallone: “He wants to be president.”  So much for what could have been.  But that’s the problem with Stallone’s entire movie.

This had all the potential in the world, and the movie disappointingly feels like a cut-and-paste assignment thrown together so sloppily because of Stallone’s desire to cram a bunch of action stars together.  He delivers zero character development, the plot makes absolutely no sense, and I hardly believe Stallone’s sudden transition in wanting to rescue this younger woman (suggesting an awkward romance between her and the action star who is 30 years her senior).  Also be sure to watch out for any of the dialogue, as it hits you in the gut so hard with its stupidity that you’ll be puking within the first 20 minutes.  I’m not talking about funny camp-style 80s one-liners.  I’m talking about terribly-written dialogue meeting awful line readings, one after the other—particularly from Lundgren and Li.

Perhaps my biggest issue with the film isn’t the bad acting, or the horrible writing, or the lacking camradery among the Expendables, but it is Stallone’s way of filming most of the scenes.  Shot almost completely in close-up the entire time, Stallone zooms in on these stars’ individual faces, even in multi-character moments, and it is beyond awkward.  Trust me, he’s not doing these old-timers any favors.  Even in scenes showcasing the location of the island, the extras in the town are shot in close-up, and it becomes unbelievably distracting.

If that’s not enough, even the fight sequences have little creativity and energy.  Granted, the final action bout on the island featuring the entire mercenary squad against a hundred or so faceless enemy soldiers works about as best as it can, if you can tell what’s going on—which is a rare occasion.  The battles also feature hilariously cheesy CGI blood and sloppy special effects surrounding the mayhem as the film’s MPAA rating was never decided on until late in the game.  Since the movie could have ended up being PG-13, I guess no physical fake blood was used during filming, and it really shows.

In fact, all of the film’s flaws really show.  It seems to be an embarrassing exercise in rushed filmmaking with little substance to build on from the get-go.  I love the concept of The Expendables, and I really feel as though I wasn’t expecting top-notch quality here.  But Stallone, who actually put out a solid and gratuitous fourth Rambo installment just two years ago, ought to know how to write and direct at this point.  It feels as though he did neither here, having his film fare about the same as these Direct-to-DVD actioners we see Steven Seagal and Van Damme releasing five of a year.  For the inevitable sequel, I hope Sly stays in front of the camera and allows another filmmaker to take the reigns, perhaps Quentin Tarantino?  Hey, I can dream.

*½~~~ (1.5/5)

We’ve got guns, explosions, fights, chases, tree-trunk-sized action stars, and some sweet cathphrases too.  The film is pretty much everything you see in the trailer expanded to 90 minutes, but I ask you, is that a bad thing?  My answer is a resounding “no.”  We’re not talking Dark Knight or Terminator 2 here (despite a scene with Stallone riding his police chopper that looks like was ripped directly from T2), and there’s little in the way of subtext and certainly nothing even remotely resembling subtlety.  But this is precisely why I found the movie to be so entertaining.  It’s a straight-up action movie with a ripped-to-shreds Sylvester Stallone, lots of cool weapons, and a straightforward plot that never deviates from its purpose.  And to be honest, you just don’t see that too much anymore.  There’s even a cool enemy robot that’s (gasp!) an actual animatronic creature instead of a shiny, sterile CGI creation.  Is it cheesy?  Sure, but that’s part of the fun.  Don’t take this one too seriously–just grab a busket of popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the ride.

A thousand years from now, the earth is so overpopulated that the only practical way of doling out justice is through the use of Judges with the legal authority to arrest and sentence anyone on the spot.  Entrusted with high-tech crimefighting implements like multifunction handguns, impenetrable body armor, hover-cycles that break down the instant the rider hits the throttle, and a litany of cool quips like “Court’s adjourned” and “I’ll be the judge of that,” these judges run around town responding to threats with an expediency that would make our current legal system wet its collective legal pants.

Judge Dredd: He. Is. The. Law. Don't believe it? He'll tell you so.

Stallone, basically the Master Chief of Judges, is falsely convicted of a murder and sentenced to a plane ride next to Rob Schneider and must find a way to clear his good name before he ends up in a Deuce Bigalow movie.  Several explosions later he ends up back in Mega City on a mission to find his estranged brother who, wouldn’t you know it, is the evil genius behind it all.

Somehow Diane Lane and Max Von Sydow were tricked into joining the cast, along with ex soap opera heartthrob Armand Assante, which makes Judge Dredd a somewhat anomalous compilation of A-grade acting talent (Rob Schneider notwithstanding) in a B-level script.  Don’t come to the show expecting character development either–Dredd was genetically engineered to be the perfect crimefighting tool, so he possesses none of those inconvenient traits like empathy, love, or self-doubt that so often lead to such annoyances like interpersonal relationships or romantic conflicts.  But the movie never takes itself too seriously, and even Von Sydow seems to be winking at the camera during a few scenes.  Fortunately there’s an outstanding production value to the whole spectacle, so the death-deflying stunts, high-speed chases, and human/robot showdowns are all fantastically realized.

The cheese meter is maxed out here, but unlike Stallone’s other future-based blow ‘em up movie, Judge Dredd is more entertaining than embarrassing.  Walking a fine line between Michael Bay excess and Uwe Boll stupidity, it’s an outstanding guilty pleasure that gives you exactly what you would expect without overstaying its welcome.  Watching Judge Dredd is kind of like going to McDonald’s and going all-out for the biggest Angus Burger on the menu.  It’s not fine cuisine, but it sure does get the job done.  And sometimes that’s all you want.

Rating:***½~ (3.5/5)

The opening fifteen minutes of the movie are a paint-by-numbers of action movie cliches, but True Lies this is not.  Demolition Man actually seems to take itself seriously, even as Sylvester Stallone, playing John *cough* Spartan, rappels from a helicopter into a building where insane evil mastermind Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes) is holed up with a couple dozen hostages.  And like a checklist, the action movie cliches begin to pile up like the bodies of evil henchmen:  Spartan the loose cannon who doesn’t play by the rules, thinking Phoenix is bluffing about having hostages in the building, fights through hordes of expendable bad guys, meets and spars with Phoenix, accidentally starts the building on fire, and runs down a hallway while the whole place explodes around him.  Having taken Phoenix into custody, Spartan finds out that the hostages (why had Spartan kidnapped them?  What were his demands?  What was he trying to accomplish?  Such things matter not to director Marco Brambilla.) were in fact in the building and he now responsible for the death of over 30 innocent people.

John Spartan, the Demolition Man. Subtle this movie most certainly is not.

The only fitting punishment for Phoenix?  Freeze him!  That way he can be rehabilitated over the next 70 years by machines that say really nice things to frozen dudes for decades on end so they will mellow out and be able to re-enter society free from violent tendencies.  Conveniently, this is also the best way to deal with Spartan–the movie’s namesake–because, you know, his totally unorthodox methods of fighting crime get lots of stuff blowed up.  But gosh darn it, 30 years into Phoenix’s rehabilitation, something goes wrong and he is accidentally unfrozen!  He begins to wreak havock on Future Los Angeles, a place where violence has been virtually eliminated and the police, grown soft after not fighting crime for decades, have no idea how to deal with an Insane Criminal Mastermind.  The solution?  Thaw out John Spartan, of course!

The ridiculous plot only gets worse from there on out, as the movie wanders from being a paper-thin exploration of how people can become so dependent on technology that we risk losing what makes us human to an all-out ‘splosion fest in various Future Locales.  In Future World, physical touch is considered taboo so people experience pleasure by wearing virtual-reality helmets.  Cursing is outlawed and individuals are fined “one credit” for each instance (an insufferable joke that overstays its welcome almost immediately).  But this James Cameron-esque attempt to add a bit of depth only results in a handful of awkward scenes that do not advance the plot and only serve to create an uneven pacing throughout the film.  Even the barest attempt at developing a relationship between Spartan and Lt. Lenina Huxley is forced and entirely unbelievable.

Somebody forgot to tell Wesley Snipes that yellow hair and blue overalls are the opposite of intimidating.

And so what we have left is a film that is one poorly-staged shootout after another between the well-nigh invincible John Spartan and his nemesis Simon Phoenix, the stark-raving-mad evil genius computer hacker (not kidding) with Kung Fu skillz.  And even this silly premise might not be such a bad movie were it properly directed, but every fight or shootout is so poorly blocked and mindlessly executed that it looks as though you’re watching a ninth-grade home video project.  After a shootout in a museum, Spartan is chasing Phoenix across a clearing when his quarry jumps down an embankment…and Spartan just stops running.  It’s as though writer Peter Lenkov didn’t know how to end the scene, so he just, well, ended it. Even worse, the climax has Stallone swaying slowly back and forth on a giant mechanical arm in the freezing chamber while Snipes laughs like an Evil Maniac and unloads clip after clip while hitting everything in the room but Stallone.  It’s madness, I tell you.  Madness.

In short?  You know a movie is terrible when the best thing about it is a Rob Schneider cameo.  And Demolition Man is that movie.

Rating:*½~~~ (1.5/5)