The Rambo Squad by Prospero Pulma Jr.

The Rambo Squad

How many men does it take to crush a drug cartel and topple the dictator of an island nation? A reinforced U.S. Marine division, exactly what a general will deploy since the target is an island. Or five men if Sylvester Stallone will have his way – Jason Statham, Jet Li, Terry Crews, Randy Coutere, and Rocky/Rambo himself.

Calm down. Calm down. I know that you have seen those posters of “Expendables” that has an A-list of other tough guys – Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Dolph Lungren, Mickey Rourke, Steve Austin – but in Hollywood, you can conquer a bigger country, say the Philippines, if all of them take part in the action. But I can promise you several things. The cast is 95% male (not your average Joes but gun-toting beefcakes with anger management issues) and 5% female who are cover girl material (as to which magazine, you are free to speculate on). And the story is 40% dialogue (the characters have to rest between battles and talk, you know) and 60% bang, bang, boom, boom.

Now, let’s tackle the movie and it will be a short talk as there is little to talk about. “Expendables” is a film about, well, mercenaries or soldiers of fortune if you will. Sly Stallone is Barney Ross, the leader of a squad of mercenaries. Serving under his muscular wings are Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), Ying Yang (Li), Gunner Jensen (Lungren), Hale Caesar (Crews), and Toll Road (Coutere). Oh, please. Stop snickering over their names, especially Barney!

Barney (the purple dinosaur is starting to play and sing nursery rhymes in my head) and his crew’s adrenaline-filled lives are injected with more barrels of adrenaline when Bruce Willis, as the enigmatic Mr. Church, offers them a fat contract to neutralize James Munroe (Eric Roberts) and General Garza (David Zayas). Fronting for the CIA, Mr. Church wants the pair dead because of their agricultural joint venture project, i.e., cultivating coca on the island. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as Trench and Barney’s former teammate, waltzes in, recites a page of the script about letting Barney do the job, and exits. The church scene was one of film’s calmest, no single shot fired and no limb broken, considering the megawatts of action star power present in it. By the way, Mickey Rourke (Tool) has more speaking lines than Arnie and Bruce combined but he does not fire a gun.

What could have been an infiltrate-and-kill-Munroe-and-Garza plan becomes complicated because their local contact, Sandra (Giselle Itie), turns out to be the dictator’s daughter, Barney and Lee’s scouting mission goes badly, and Jensen briefly turns to the dark side when he attacks Barney and Ying at the behest of Munroe. Now, Jensen is the most dangerous man in the film for the simple reason that guns, attitude, and drugs form a very lethal cocktail and Jensen has all of them.

Barney goes back with his team and does what a U.S. Marine Division can do. After getting their thumbs sore from firing thousands of rounds and having ringing in their ears from multiple explosions, Barney and Friends save the day. Did I tell you that “Expendables” is 60% bang, bang, boom, boom? Right. I did.

-Prospero E. Pulma Jr.-