Sly and the silly 'Expendables'

While watching "The Expendables," which rounds up Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Mickey Rourke and other vintage tough guys to play a team of lovably violent mercenaries, you might ask yourself a question: How serious is this film?

Here are some hints: The heroes have silly names like Hale Caesar (Terry Crews), while the villain is played by the dependably shameless Eric Roberts (no silly name needed).

The answer: Not very serious, which is to say, not serious enough.

With "The Expendables," director and co-writer Stallone is fondly gazing over his meaty shoulder to ye olde 1980s, when barrel-chested stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis (both have cameos here) dominated the box office. It was a pre-irony age, when action movies were clever ("Die Hard") and jokey ("Total Recall") but were not yet clever jokes themselves ("Kill Bill"). "The Expendables" aims to inject a weakened genre with some older, purer blood, while also padding its ensemble with youngish stars like Jason Statham and Jet Li.

"The Expendables" is best when it goes for straight schlock: tattoos, knives, longnecks, a soundtrack of classic-rock slabs from Mountain and Creedence Clearwater Revival. But Stallone also adopts the new language of video-game violence, in which bodies don't just bleed but explode. That gives the film a cartoonish patina it doesn't need.

With its AARP-ready cast, "The Expendables" glancingly addresses themes of age and mortality (Lundgren, as a weak-willed junkie, is the cast's improbable standout). But mostly the movie tries to join the current Hollywood game, playing safe with its characters and begging for a sequel. As Stallone should know better than anyone, you can't have it both ways.