Sylvester Stallone – Age, Movies & Children – Biography
I watched the Expendables the other night with my husband. It is one of those macho movies with all the big male stars: Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Terry Crews & Wesley Snipes. There is the Die Hard,
Fast and Furious and Mission: impossible franchises that do the same thing. – Destroy everything in sight, then walk off as heroes. Of course, Stallone cut his teeth on the Rambo series. I wonder if he only knows how to destroy the sound stages. Yet, it’s never too old to learn something new.
The action thriller, The Expendables, is distributed by Lionsgate, spans four films, and is about “a group of elite mercenaries tasked with a mission to overthrow a Latin American dictator whom they soon discover to be a mere puppet controlled by a corrupt ex-CIA agent. It pays tribute to the blockbuster action films of the late 1980s and early 1990s.”
Based on characters created by David Callaham, it was written and directed by Sylvester Stallone, (Patrick Hughes and Simon West also directed.) In this series, Stallone gets all his toughest friends together to kick as much ass as their aging bodies can sustain.
They come into town with their big guns blazing, find the bad guys, shoot up the place, fight a little more with the bad guys, blow up the town while they get away and have a rollicking good time destroying the whole village as they make it to their get-a-way plane. Finally, they circle back in the plane and blow the harbor to kingdom come while they fly off into the sunset, another day’s work behind them.
My take away is: where is the plot? But more. Who is going to clean up the mess they made? They go into, what looks like a poor, Latin American country, blow the town to smithereens, and depart as heroes. Who says they are heroes and not just rich kids playing cowboy?
All the heroes of my childhood rode into the sunset, leaving behind a place that was better off for having had them.
McGyver always helped restore the forest, the agriculture, the town. He didn’t use a gun to take down the bad guys. The Lone Ranger was fast, polite and always got his man. He shot, but never to kill, only to maim. He left the towns and people wondering where he had gone, but the buildings were mostly intact. Superman, only needed an open window to fly through, but again nabbed the bad guys without as much destruction as today’s heroes. And Superman was often seen helping clean up the mess, as well. Marshall Dillon created less destruction in the whole series of the show, Gunsmoke, than Stallone did in one film.
Many of the thriller, action movies of today have a preponderance of destruction built into the plot. Even the dinosaur franchise, has massive amounts of destruction. Sure, the dinosaurs are the ones knocking down buildings, destroying forests and terrorizing the populace, but humans do their share of shoot-em-up. With more destruction, comes even more clean up and rebuilding. At what cost do the poor townspeople entertain these modern-day heroes who are all about making guns and destruction glorious?
Hey Sly, why don’t you make a movie that shows how you all fly into town, (rivet) guns blazing and build up the town, create new or renew existing jobs, help the locals plant crops and trees? That’s the kind of movie I want to see.
Or even if you have to have a fight to the death with the villain, spend those last few minutes restoring some semblance of order among the locals. Send in the Red Cross or UN clean up folks, spend your time and money helping rectify the destruction your “help” caused. Then, I will see you guys as heroes.
References:
The Expendables (2010); The Expendables 2 (2012); The Expendables 3 (2014); The Expendables 4 (2023)
The Expendables, at: https://bit.ly/3SjhLbZ