The expendable Expendables: how has Hollywood’s least essential franchise persisted?
For anyone of a certain age who grew up in the Eighties and Nineties, there was always a wistful feeling that persisted whenever a big-budget blockbuster came out. The likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis were often seen slaughtering (usually foreign) villains and dispensing manly quips. But why did they never team up to do so together? Was there not the possibility that, one day, a veritable Dirty Dozen of Hollywood hard men could be assembled to kick ass, take names and (perhaps) compare notes on agents’ fees, too? Well, Stallone himself was not deaf to the pleas of action-loving cineastes, and so his 2010 film The Expendables was an honorable attempt to make exactly this sort of film.
