Couldn't Think of Anything Else to Post

So yeah, just reached another full post-less week.  This last week's been busy, mostly with friends now that everyone's all a bit closer together.  In any case, I figured I should post something...it just might not be popular.  I'm going to talk about how I felt about The Expendables.
Well for the most part, TheSpoonyOne was right.  It was honestly one of the most disappointing movies I've seen.  It's certainly not the worst I've ever seen (which is probably Transformers 2), but it's still pretty damn bad.

Now, I should preface what I have to say by noting that I am not in any means the target audience for action movies.  I can't lose inhibitions and not think about what I'm seeing, it's just not in me. I fully understand people who do it and I have nothing against it, but it's not me.  What I don't understand is why even the target audience likes this movie so much.
But first off, everything aside from the action was just plain awful.  Which I expected, but it's worth mentioning because it was probably a good 5 times worse than I was expecting.  The plot/story, script and vast majority of the acting was all terrible.  Plus I always hate it when an overstated subplot shows up in a movie and has absolutely no payoff (in this case, a subplot involving Lee Christmas; Jason Statham; and his girlfriend); similar to the hackers in Transformers (2007).
The one good performance was from the one character that did nothing:  Mickey Rourke (obviously the actor; I don't remember the character's name).  Truth be told, I enjoyed Stallone's performance just for being...'one-note, but in a good way' is probably the best way to put it.  Rourke was the only one who actually performed skillfully though.  I really couldn't take Giselle Itié as Sandra, AKA standard hottie, seriously. As soon as she came on screen, my mind just said "...really? That's the 'hottie' of the film? She has a jawline that could rival Schwarzenegger's."
Then there were unfortunate attempts at humour.  There are 2 funny lines in the movie, and they're really funny so they saved the humour for me.  All I'll say about them is that they are real-world references, one much more subtle than the other.
There was a really unusual running...gag, I guess, that was basically mild ribbing of Jet Li's height.  Now, the reason I'm hesitant to call it a 'gag' is because it was never funny.  It provided occasional banter but never any sort of actual joke or humour.  It's also a little unusual how overdone it is because he's not even that short.  One scene shows Li and Stallone standing side by side and there's at most a 4-inch difference between them.

Now for the big part, the action.  Like I said, I don't understand why even the type of people this movie was made for would like it.  There are 3 parts of the action truly worth watching, which were really cool, and they total probably about 20 seconds.  Every other bit of the action was entirely average, and horribly filmed; you can thank both shaky cam and horrible understanding of cinematography for that.  And even though the action is "average", which makes it the best part of the film, it bothers me more than any other aspect.  Wasn't the whole point to make a big budget film starring the biggest action stars of the last 3 decades?  With that in mind, why the hell is the action just so average?
Speaking of 'big budget', a lot of the special effects were...astoundingly terrible.  For the sake of avoiding more confusion, I'm going to attribute that to being a reference to old cheesey action flicks.
Every other action movie I've seen (which admittedly is limited to only the Die Hard Anthology, Taken, and a few others I can't remember right now) has been much better.

It just seems really unfortunate that this movie is what it is.  Truth be told, while (again) it's definitely not the worst movie I've ever seen (by a long shot), it makes me more angry to think about than any other movie I've seen.  This is the one bad movie I know of that I can't think of any good reasoning for it being so bad.  I actually didn't sleep the night after I saw it because I couldn't stop rambling to myself about all it's problems and being unable to understand why.
One more thing:  Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis are in a single scene of the movie that lasts about 2 minutes.  A disappointment and a fair warning for anyone still planning to see the film and hoping to see these actors.

Well, hopefully sometime soon I'll get out to see Scott Pilgrim.  Here's hoping it does a much better job with the action.  Once again, I won't expect much in plot, but knowing ahead of time it's pretty much 'If Relationships Worked Like Video Games' I'm sure it should be a bit of fun to watch.