Sometimes I look at Hollywood with a mixture of amusement and disgust.  Because, you see, sitting on my computer hard drive is a little script called “Stuff Go Boom”.  It’s essentially ninety minutes of attractive young women setting off large-scale explosions for little or no reason at all. No plot. No story. No Aesop-esque lessons. No redeeming social value whatsoever. Just ninety minutes of explosions.

And every time a movie like The Expendables shows up, I get a little closer to believing that, someday, someone will buy Stuff Go Boom, and I will never stop laughing.

The Expendables, meanwhile, brings together a whole slew of action stars to do a movie that looks like it should have been made back in the eighties, but somehow was forgotten about until this very day. A group of mercenaries, who are really more like a family in that back-slapping testosterone-rich way that guys who hang out with big guns and bigger knives for a living usually end up being, get an assignment with a big payday attached.  They’re to go to a tiny little military dictatorship, kill said military dictator, and come home. And of course, it’s nowhere NEAR as easy as it sounds.

Most of the movie, surprisingly, will veer between explosions and various stretches of what could charitably be called character development if you squint real hard and look sort of to the left of it, almost like looking for pictures in the clouds.

They spent a lot of time hawking this movie as “the manliest movie ever”, and frankly, I’m hard pressed to find a better example.  There’s plenty of explosions and gunplay here–Terry Crews is loads of fun (you’ll remember him from the Old Spice commercials shrieking about his abdominals) as a shotgun-crazed mercenary who’s named his shells.  Bodies go flying, get cut in half, and get stacked like cordwood in a truly epic fashion.

Scott Pilgrim can call himself an epic of epic epicness until his emo boi lips fall off, but he wouldn’t last three minutes in this movie before someone used his twig-like body to swab their gun barrel.

The Expendables is like watching a two hour Powerthirst commercial.  Even I started looking at all these explosions and gunfire and started thinking, man, this is just getting ridiculous. It’s almost like a parody of itself, and it even features a couple nifty twists, especially at the end.  Protip: consider the knife.

But considering that most anyone who goes to this is either going for explosions or to humor someone who wants to see explosions, then the lack of anything serious in plot will not be a huge loss.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, thusly, hands over a seven out of ten to a movie that knew what it was doing when it went in, and thus does a pretty decent job.  It’s not pretending to be anything serious, so just enjoy it for its sheer lack of serious.  At least until Stuff Go Boom finally gets made.