The Expendables

“You guys aren’t gonna start sucking each other’s dicks, are you?” Bruce Willis asks Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger - an image any gay porn producer would triple the trio’s fees to see happen. It’s typical of a tone which teeters between knowing and not caring, in writer-director Stallone’s all-star homage to his Eighties action lunkhead prime.

The cast is the concept - Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Eric Roberts and wrestler Steve Austin are along for the ride too, an assemblage of straight-to-video royalty that has just sent The Expendables to No 1 in the US. They play a gang of mercenaries led by Stallone, motto: “If the money’s right, we’ll do it.”

After massacring Somali pirates, they are sent by CIA fixer Willis to scout out a corrupt South American island, with a view to knocking over its dictator. In the ensuing carnage Stallone falls for the dictator’s rebel daughter and, impressed by her ideals, returns to rescue her. Stallone has spoken of “regret” as the aching theme in his work which “haunts” his character, as if this is The Wild Bunch for Eighties action has-beens. The reality is somewhat different.

The whole film is on steroids, with the biggest muscles, guns and bullets that can be squeezed on the screen. The first weapon fired blows a man’s torso clean off, and by the end artillery shells are being hand-hurled. Stallone’s macho insistence on the stars doing their own stunt work whenever possible adds organic, bone-crunching authenticity lacking in current CGI excess. Youngsters Statham and Li apart, faces aren’t so much lived in as heavily reconditioned. Stallone looks worked over with putty, like a rush job at Madame Tussaud’s, and he has biceps no 64-year-old should want. In this company, Mickey Rourke looks pretty normal. Only Lundgren, Stallone’s man-mountain Russian rival in Rocky IV, has weathered interestingly with age as the Expendables’ drug-addicted loosest cannon.

Schwarzenegger and Willis’s names on UK posters aren’t exactly justified by their five-minute cameo, full of Rat Pack-style in-jokes and banter. As when Tarantino let Willis and Travolta pace round each other in Pulp Fiction, the frisson of seeing such stars together is like a super-hero team-up in an old Marvel comic - pretty much the whole film’s premise. But even in the main cast, only Statham and Li are real stars right now, and only Statham has much screen time.

This is really all about Stallone, the most disappointing movie star of modern times. The nerve that made him famously hold out as a young unknown to star in his Rocky script was used up then; whether appearing on the cover of the American Film Institute’s house magazine in scholarly suit and specs, or acting credibly in a character part alongside De Niro and Keitel in the flop Cop Land (the Method actors’ version of The Expendables), he’s never sustained his attempts at respectability and change. The Expendables' main achievement for Sly is to find a new way forward that builds on a largely failed career.

It also avoids his accident-prone previous efforts to engage with the real world, like the cavalry charge of bin Laden’s mujahideen he led against the Red army in Rambo III, just as the Cold War was thawing; or the humourless, ugly ultra-violence of John Rambo’s blitz on the Burmese junta. The Expendables takes more quizzical positions. Waterboarding is shown as torture when used by ex-CIA villain Eric Roberts on an innocent woman (a combination of extreme sadism amidst cartoon violence familiar to 1980s action fans). The dictator’s railing against “this American disease” when he patriotically turns on both Roberts’ and Stallone’s interfering crews also suggests a more thoughtful film.

But as Sly’s gang settle back at the end in their no-girls clubhouse, ready for more bloody japes, Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town” plays. It sums up this cauliflower-eared fun.

• The Expendables is on general release