PARKER: Take Off Your Dress

Parker (2013) – Directed by Taylor Hackford – Starring Jason Statham, Jennifer Lopez, Michael Chiklis, Wendell Pierce, Clifton Collins Jr., Bobby Cannavale, Patti Lupone, Carlos Carrasco, Michah Hauptman, Emma Booth, Daniel Bernhardt, and Nick Nolte.

Fifteen years.

I was not expecting the number to be that high, but it’s been fifteen years since Jennifer Lopez appeared in Out of Sight. Fifteen years since she delivered the best performance of her career and here she is, starring in another crime thriller, starring as another good woman who gets tangled up with another bad man. Fifteen years ago, she starred opposite George Clooney, under the direction of Steven Soderbergh, and in an Elmore Leonard story, and while I believe you have to look at every film on its own, let’s be clear about a few things.

Jason Statham, who I like, is not nearly the actor George Clooney is.

Taylor Hackford, who I like, is not nearly the director Steven Soderbergh is.

Donald Westlake, who I like, is not nearly the novelist Elmore Leonard is.

And PARKER is not nearly the film Out of Sight is.

Yet despite all of that, here sits Jennifer Lopez, in a movie that is, in no way, the equal of Out of Sight, delivering a performance nearly as good. It begs the question – is there any actress in the last 20 years who’s done a poorer job maxing out their talent than Jennifer Lopez?

I absolutely loathe when people tell others how to live their life. I find it noxious when sportswriters, who are the biggest criminals in this regard, tell athletes or coaches that they should retire, that they’re somehow spoiling their legacy by continuing to play, so I am not here to tell Jennifer Lopez she has lived the last 15 years of her life incorrectly. She’s a woman with many talents and many interests and only she can determine whether those choices were the right ones, whether the artistic and business decisions she’s made have brought her happiness. What I am saying – and I’m saying this from a purely selfish point of view of a guy who’s interested in her acting far more than her music or clothing or talent judging – is that she has great talent as an actress, far greater talent than is revealed in her filmography.

Since Out of Sight, she’s been run through the Hollywood Mill: where men who show that particular mix of acting ability and box office potential get tossed in action movie after action movie, women get tossed into romance flicks and romantic comedies and thrillers/horror movies. Lopez followed up Out of Sight with a unique choice (The Cell), but since then, it’s been largely romantic-driven material. There’s been a few box office hits sprinkled in, but it’s been rare that she’s delivered a performance that tapped into the talent that was so clearly on display in Soderbergh’s film.

Which brings me to PARKER, a film that either has no idea what it wants to be or no ability to deliver it. It’s a movie that isn’t awful, but it’s also a movie that has no consistent or coherent vision, a movie that is completely lacking in the style it so desperately needs if it wants to be a crime film, and the energy it needs if it wants to be an action film.

Folded into this inconsistent mess, however, is a really great performance from Lopez. She plays Leslie Rogers, a woman who’s forced to start her life over as she nears 40 years of age. Her ex-husband turned out to be a better cover than book, and she’s been forced to move back in with her mom (Patti Lupone) and work low on the food chain at a high-end real estate agency. Cash is tight (the car she’s leasing and the clothes she’s wearing are above her current pay grade, and she has to help pay off her ex’s bankruptcy), and she’s grown desperate. She steals Parker (who’s pretending to be a rich Texan to scout real estate and find his enemies) from a co-worker and while she complains about the men who hit on her while she’s showing them property (and having to allow some of their advances so as not to lose them as clients) she throws herself at the rich Texan.

It’s pathetic and desperate and Lopez delivers it all beautifully. There’s a real sadness to Leslie, and I believe that she sees first the rich Texan and then the British criminal as a way out of her predicament. It makes me wonder how the last fifteen years would have been different for Lopez if her opportunities and choices had done a better job tapping into her talent instead of relying on her star power.

Of all the things wrong with PARKER, Jennifer Lopez is not among them.

It’s not a film’s fault if it’s marketed poorly, and the movie PARKER purports to be in its commercials is not the film you’ll find when you watch it. This is not a sexy crime thriller. In the commercials there’s lots of sexual allusions: about how “it’s not the size of the gun, but how you use it,” about a sexy shower scene, and about Lopez’s body.

But there’s nothing sexy about PARKER. Sure, there’s good looking leads here, but the film isn’t sexy. The line about the size of the gun? It’s not said from Parker (Statham) to Leslie, but Parker to a guy he’s just shot who claimed “mine’s bigger.” The sexy shower scene? It’s not between Parker and Leslie, but Parker and his actual girlfriend, Claire (Emma Booth), and there’s nothing sexy about it. And Lopez’s body? When Parker tells her to “take off your dress,” the camera puts Lopez’s entire body in the frame, but there isn’t anything sexy about the scene. Parker says he needs to know if she’s wearing a wire, and he really means he wants to know if she’s wearing a wire. There’s no tension, sexual or otherwise.

I’m left struggling about what this movie is supposed to be. Is this supposed to be the movie that takes Statham into the A list of action stars? Is it supposed to be the movie that shows us he’s every bit the actor as he is the puncher and kicker? Or is it supposed to be just another Statham film dressed up with a few stars to try and get bigger box office cake?

Whatever it’s trying to be, it isn’t it.

As I mentioned, I try and judge every film on its own merits, yet there’s so much about PARKER that begs you think of other, better options that it’s hard to escape.

When you do a crime movie that attempts to take a “good guy bad guy” and use him as the protagonist, you’re stepping on Elmore Leonard’s turf, and Westlake isn’t Leonard. What this film desperately needs is some Elmore Leonard characters (or, since the movie is set in Florida, some Carl Hiassen characters) to surround the driven, focused Parker. I like Jason Statham and I think he’s a good enough actor to escape the action genre, and I like the performance he gives here as the principled criminal, but if you’re going to have that kind of main character, you need to give the audience something somewhere else to balance that off – make it stylistic or surround him with personable characters. Other than Lopez’s Leslie, PARKER completely fails in this regard.

The issues with the lack of visual style in the movie has to fall to Taylor Hackford. He’s a fine director and gets fine performances from all of the actors in the film, but PARKER has all the visual style of a Lifetime Movie of the Week. The camera is largely flat and static. The action scenes have no immediacy to them, and except for one moment where Parker uses a piece of a toilet to crack his opponent in the face, the violence hits with the impact of getting punched in the face by a man with no arms. The story is slow and dull, and it begs for a film that wins you over with visual style. The few shots we see of Parker with his shirt off shows us that he’s got nasty scars all over his body, and the scenes beg out for the camera to linger. When Claire looks and them or runs her hands over them, the camera needs to linger there, too. Hackford could play with perspective, giving us the establishing shots intercut with extreme close-ups of the scars, but he doesn’t. It’s just, “Here’s a shot of Statham without his shirt in a shower and he’s got scars, what’s next?”

My least favorite part of the film is the ending. After Parker gets his revenge and he and Leslie are sitting in a car with the jewels that Michael Chiklis’ crew stole, he tells her how it’s going to go down, laying out how she’ll hide the jewels, how he’ll send someone to get them, that he’ll fence them, how the cut works, etc. Then he gets out of the car and she pulls away.

That happens, and if the movie had ended right there, it would have been the best part of the movie. It would have been a rare moment of style bringing out the best in both characters. But even though we’ve just spent the entire film learning that Parker is a man of his word, that “when I say I’m going to do something, I do it,” the film then has to show us how it all plays out. For some reason, even though you completely trust that he’s going to do what he says, the film has to show us Leslie getting a package full of money. It’s dumb and unnecessary and has the feel of either filmmakers who don’t know what they’re doing or producers who’ve demanded its inclusion because of what a dumb focus group has told them.

The end result is a film that isn’t bad but is unsatisfactory, a film that needs style but lacks it, a film that needs characters but lacks them, and a film that never equals the sum of its parts.

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My latest collection of reviews is now available for purchase. I cover every Marvel comic movie, from The Avengers to Howard the Duck, from Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk to Ed Norton’s Hulk to Eric Bana’s Hulk to Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno’s Hulk. All the big budget movies are reviewed, all the 1970s made-for-TV movies are reviewed, and all the straight-to-video animated titles, too. Thanks for checking it out!

DEATH RACE: Anyone Can Wear the Mask, Not Just Anyone Can Drive the Car

Death Race (2008) – Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson – Starring Jason Statham, Joan Allen, Tyrese Gibson, Ian McShane, Natalie Martinez, Max Ryan, Jason Clarke, Frederick Koehler, Jacob Vargas, Robin Shou, and David Carradine.

I love DEATH RACE, which is as lean, mean, and violent a car movie as you’re going to find.

I love car movies: Cannonball Run, Smokey and the Bandit, Speed Racer, The Fast and the Furious, Herbie the Love Bug … if a movie has awesome cars going fast, I’m going to … wait for it … take it for a ride. (Shalit!) Heck, I’ll even watch the Herbie movies without the Shaggy D.A. and with I’m a Mac (though I’ve never seen the one with Brisco County, Jr.). Of all the car movies, DEATH RACE offers the literal most bang for your buck. There’s a solid story here about a man named Jenson Ames (Jason Statham) who’s framed for the murder of his wife in order that he end up at the Terminal City prison to drive in the Death Race in the Frankenstein persona (who’s more Stig than the original Death Race 2000 Frank), and writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson has done a marvelous job balancing the action and the story.

It’s incredibly hard to make a movie like DEATH RACE of this kind of quality. Like so many films today, DEATH RACE is caught in the liminal space between A-List and B-List features. Paul W.S. Anderson mines this area of B+ movies as well as anyone. Just take a look at his directorial credits: Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon, Soldier, Resident Evil, Alien vs. Predator, and two of the Resident Evil sequels. That’s a whole lot of quality, balancing mid-range budgets and mid-range casts. Most of the films grab either a genre star or borderline A-list star with solid acting skills and puts them into a simple to understand but difficult to get out of predicament.

(I think I need, “Simple to Understand, Difficult to Get Out Of” on a poster near my computer, because it’s the perfect mantra for telling solid, adrenaline-packed, stories.)

DEATH RACE hits all the marks I want out of a B+ movie:

1. A Compelling Lead – Jenson Ames is a perfect vehicle (Shalit!) for Jason Statham. Wrongly accused, infused but not burdened with a recently acquired moral center, and given free reign to tap into the violent tendencies he thought he had left behind him, Jenson allows Statham to do what he does best: growl, look at the camera over his shoulder, fight, make dry remarks, and take his shirt off. There are some actors with the range to walk over wide plains. That’s not Statham. His range is limited but it is finely honed and fiercely delivered, and if you join him on his turf, it’s inevitably you who will follow his lead and not the other way around.

2. Good Story – Largely covered above, DEATH RACE tells a small story in big explosions. There’s a prison. There’s a race. People die. Almost everyone’s a scumbag. Around that middle, Anderson adds the proper flourishes: the evil warden, Hennessey (Joan Allen), her vile sidekick, colorful secondary antagonists, kick-ass cars, and a bit of eye candy.

3. Colorful Characters – DEATH RACE adheres to the Skittles School of Casting, making sure we’ve got a diverse cast, and the casting folk do a good job giving us actors who are included because they fit the movie rather than some racial or ethnic checklist. Tyrese Gibson has been in both car movies (2 Fast 2 Furious) and sci-fi movies (Transformers), making him a perfect choice for the antagonist-turned-protagonist’s-sidekick role. Robert LaSardo has an extensive resume of playing bad guys, and he’s used here perfectly. There’s not much to his character, but he’s cast for his personality and he can take a few scenes and work them for all their worth.

4. Good Casting – The most inspired choice here is Joan Allen as Hennessey, which DEATH RACE a little bit of acting cred. Allen has been nominated for three Oscars, so seeing her show up to play a one-note bad guy is pretty awesome. She totally gives herself to the role, too. There’s no sense she’s just here because she needed the paycheck. Similarly, Ian McShane virtually floats through the movie, and the movie uses him in a such a way as to continually tell you, “Yup, we’ve got Ian McShane.” He’s the mentor, the smart guy … he’s basically Shawshank Redemption‘s Morgan Freeman and James Whitmore merged with Days of Thunder‘s Robert Duvall.

5. The Right Look – DEATH RACE has an awesome, post-industrial look. Everything is cold and hard and grey. Except for the explosions.

6. A Recognition of What It Is – I do not mean this in a dismissive way. I simply mean that what DEATH RACE wants to be is exactly what it delivers at a very high level, and so in terms of conception/execution, DEATH RACE is every bit the equal of Boogie Nights or Steel Magnolias.

7. Good Action – It’s here where DEATH RACE really delivers. The car racing scenes are very well shot, showing off both the cars and their drivers. The cars are characters, too, and Anderson does an excellent job keeping these cars unique from one another. One of the things that drives me nuts about a movie like Transformers is how all the robots end up looking the same, in part by their design but mostly because Michael Bay keeps his camera in way too close. The action happens so fast from so close that it’s hard to keep many of the robots apart in my head. That’s not the case here. You might not know that Jenson drives a Ford Mustang or that Machine Gun Joe (Gibson) drives a Dodge Ram or that 14K (Robin Shou) drives a Porsche Carrera, but you know they’re different cars, which is impressive given how all of the cars are rendered in grey and covered with all sorts of weapons.

DEATH RACE has been called both a remake of Death Race 2000 as well as a prequel, but really, DEATH RACE is more properly thought of as a remake of Shawshank Redemption with cars. It’s a wise decision. Shawshank is the best prison movie ever made (or, at the very least, the most recognizable prison movie for contemporary audiences), and Anderson does a good job taking it and remaking it as a post-apocalyptic action flick. I’ve mentioned the way Coach takes part of Morgan’s character (the wise old man) and Whitmore’s character (he can’t live outside the walls of the prison) to create an easy suit for McShane to stroll around in, but we’ve also got the wrongly-convicted protagonist, allusions to forced sodomy, a prison warden using the prisoners’ skills for their benefit, the warden’s primary henchman being a sadistic prison guard, the dramatic night-time escape, and the epilogue escape to the warmer climate of Mexico. Jenson and Joe are joined by Case (Natalie Martinez), Frankenstein’s navigator, and Jensen’s daughter, setting up a wonderfully odd little family unit, and giving a post-apocalyptic car movie as good a Happily Ever After as you’re likely to find.

The sequence that makes me love DEATH RACE comes during the second of three races, where Jenson and Joe team up to defeat a freaking Peterbilt 18 Wheeler overhauled to be one of the most impressively massive machines of death you’ll find. I love the way the film sets it up and uses it, and then quickly takes it away from us. It’s hinted at early in the film, then revealed in the second race, then eliminated in the second race, too, in an awesomely brutal collision. The Peterbilt could very well have been the basis for the third race, but by employing and eliminating it in Race #2, it elevates the personal drama for the third race.

There are imperfect moments in DEATH RACE, of course. Why is Jenson so worried about the Peterbilt truck in the second race when he knows the Warden needs him to get to the third stage to help the pay-per-view buys? (The races are PPV events put on to make money because prisons are run by corporations as for-profit enterprises.) Why does everyone keep looking over to his car and nodding and waving and whatnot, and why does Jenson nod and wave and whatnot back, when Coach has told us no one can see in the window?

Truthfully, I don’t care. From the opening sequence where David Carradine’s voice is used for the original Frankenstein and right through to the Mexican ending, DEATH RACE is flat-out enjoyable.

THE EXPENDABLES 2: Track Him, Find Him, Kill Him

The Expendables 2 (2012) – Directed by Simon West – Starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Yu Nan, Chuck Norris, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Liam Hemsworth, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Scott Adkins, and Charisma Carpenter.

If you’re new to the Anxiety, be aware that SPOILERS LIE AHEAD. This is NOT one of those reviews that talks about the movie without talking about the movie. This is not a huge issue with a movie like EXPENDABLES 2, but I don’t want anyone to read ahead under false pretenses. So, one last time, there are SPOILERS ahead of you if you keep reading.

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THE EXPENDABLES 2 is the perfect dessert for a summer that offered a lot of high-quality films (The Hunger Games, The Avengers, Amazing Spider-Man, Dark Knight Rises, Prometheus), but also a relatively staggering amount of movies that, irrespective of how well they were made, were not designed get you laughing (Hunger Games, Dark Knight Rises, Prometheus, The Raven, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Snow White & The Huntsman, Total Recall). There were movies that tried to offer a good time, but those films were largely mediocre to awful (Dark Shadows, Men in Black 3, Battleship, The Watch, and the good but disappointing Brave). I wish I’d made it to the theater to see Ted, because that seems to have been the one comedy released this summer that really delivered the funny.

If you’ve seen the trailers for EXPENDABLES 2, you know the film promises to deliver explosions and laughs, and that’s exactly what EX2 delivers.

Part nostalgia, part pure action, Sylvester Stallone’s all-star ode to the way he used to be is big, loud, and wonderfully ridiculous. Unquestionably, a big part of the fun here is watching all of the action all-stars sharing the screen, and if I had one small complaint with EX2, it’s that returning characters Yin Yang, Gunner, Hale Caesar, and Toll Road (Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, and Randy Couture) are minimized to a degree to make way for new arrivals Booker, Maggie, and Billy the Kid (Chuck Norris, Yu Nan, and Liam Hemsworth), and returning Hall of Famers Church and Trench (Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger).

Don’t get me wrong – it’s great to see Norris, Willis, and Arnold banging around in this movie, and both Yu Nan’s Maggie and Liam Hemsworth’s Billy the Kid provide some some of the film’s stronger narrative elements, but their inclusion is obviously going to come at someone’s expense, and that person is not going to be Sylvester Stallone (nor should it). It’s disappointing that Jet Li is only around for the opening action sequence, that Crews and Couture aren’t given more to do (Couture was one of the best parts of the first EXPENDABLES movie), and that even Jason Statham’s role feels diminished this time around.

After Barney Ross and Lee Christmas (Stallone and Statham) beat up some bad guys, Barney sends Lee back to get their weapons. I’m sitting in the theater and thinking, “Why are there so many burned kernels in this tub of popcorn? And why is one of the two main stars in the movie being sent on an errand?” Lee even makes this same point (about the errand, not the corn), when he tells Barney to get someone else to do it. But Barney doesn’t, and so Lee goes off for a solo run. Immediately, I was scolding myself for questioning what was happening because clearly Lee was going to be in for some solo ass-kicking. Maybe he’d be on the receiving end, maybe he’d be on the giving end, but what wasn’t going to happen was Lee would drop out of the narrative.

Yet, that’s what happens. He goes off to get the equipment. He complains on the radio to Barney. He drives back. He’s late for a fight where the team gets saved by the surprise arrival of Booker. Someone cracks a joke about “Christmas being late this year.”

EXPENDABLES 2 is a bit of a different beast than the first EXPENDABLES movie. The first film felt like a declaration by Stallone that could still make a kick-ass action film with the best of them. And he could. To achieve this, Stallone wrapped himself in the context of younger, faster, stronger men. Sure, Willis and Arnold were around for a cameo, and yeah, there was Dolph Lundgren still kicking around in his company, but Statham and Li were guys with active action-film careers, and Crews and Couture were noticeably younger and bigger.

In contrast to the first movie, EX2 is a victory lap, and it’s a well-earned lap for Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Willis, Norris, and Jean-Claude Van Damme, who plays a villain named, er, Vilain.

The result of this celebration of themselves is a more humorous film, and while EXPENDABLES 2 isn’t, on the whole, a better overall movie than EXPENDABLES, it is a more enjoyable movie. I’ll watch the first film when I want to watch a purer action movie, but the second film when I want something a bit lighter. They’re both very good movies, though, and much like EXPENDABLES had me hoping for EXPENDABLES 2, EX2 already has me wishing for EXPENDABLES 3 to get here.

I say “lighter” like this is a pure comedy and that’s not the case. In fact, now that Stallone has handed the directing reigns over to Simon West, the action sequences are a notch better, too. EX2 just hums from start to finish. It opens with a fantastic rescue mission that sees the team rescuing not only a Chinese businessman, but Trench, too. It’s a big sequence, longer than, say, a typical James Bond opening, and West makes us feel every punch, every kick, every gunshot, every slice of the knife. There’s all manner of trucks and copters and smashing and explosions, and it sets a powerful tone.

Then Jet Li exits after one last good line. Yin Yang is jumping from the Expendables’ plane with the rescued businessman and says that maybe he’ll be back and maybe he won’t. Gunner says, “If you don’t come back, who am I going to pick on?”

“I’m sure you’ll find another minority,” Yin shoots back.

There’s a victory party at the local bar back in the States, but Barney takes off early after having a chat with Billy. The youngster wants to get out of this business and go settle down with his girlfriend but he also wants to stick through to the end of the month. In other words, you pretty much know he’s going to die. And he does. Church gets Barney and Co. to take a new assignment to even up the score after Barney’s actions at the end of the first mission. Barney makes the crew take a woman along with them because Maggie is an expert at getting into the safe they need to crack. They get the device Church wants, but then Vilain, his sidekick Hector (Scott Adkins), and their terrorist group, the Sang get the drop on Billy and force Barney to give the device over to them.

Van Damme is top notch in the film as the cool, confident bad guy. He kills Billy by having Hector hold a knife before the kid’s heart and then kicking it through his chest and into his heart. It’s a pretty bad-ass move, and nearly everything JCVD does in this film is bad ass. He’s the perfect bad guy for a film like this, and his final one-on-one fight with Stallone is a darn good one.

There’s a plot here about JCVD stealing some abandoned Russian plutonium but it’s just the vehicle to get to all the action and laughs.

When the group is pinned down in an abandoned Soviet training facility that looks more like an abandoned back lot of a Hollywood studio, a mysterious hail of bullets comes in to kill all the Sang and save the day. Who could this mysterious savior be?

None other than Chuck Norris. The movie has a lot of fun with in-jokes and none more than with Norris. His character’s name is Booker, which is the same name of the character Norris played in Good Guys Wear Black. Stallone refers to him as a “lone wolf,” which is the title of the Norris flick, Lone Wolf McQuade. They even work in one of those Chuck Norris tough guy jokes when Booker says that he was once bit by a poisonous snake, but after five days of holding on, the snake died.

Almost as if he was taking this as a challenge, Arnold reminds everyone that he’s the King of One Liners, dropping an “I’ll be back” one time too many for Willis, who shoots back a “You’ve been back too many times already. It’s my turn,” and when he runs off, Schwarzenegger says, “Yippy Ki Yay,” stealing one of Willis’ famous line. He even comments on all the dramatic reappearances after Norris saves him and Willis by asking, “Who’s next, Rambo?”

As I mentioned up above, EXPENDABLES 2 is the perfect dessert with which to end the summer. It’s a big, loud, explosive, fun movie. The Sang might even set a record for most henchmen killed in a film. It’s a victory lap film, and I enjoyed every second of it – even when Arnold would say something that caused me to roll my eyes, it made me smile, because I was giving him the same eye roll that I’ve been giving him his old career. One of the reasons why I can’t stand awards shows is what Billy Crystal said back when City Slickers was out. He said that Slickers was the kind of film that was never going to win an Academy Award but that he doubted people had more fun seeing any other film that year. That’s what EXPENDABLES 2 is to me – it’s not nearly the best film of the year, but there hasn’t been many films more enjoyable to watch.

Here’s hoping this film is successful enough for a third film; if it happens, the rumor mill is already in full force, with talks of Steven Seagal, Nicolas Cage, and John Travolta perhaps jumping on board. (I can’t see Eastwood doing it.) There’s even talk of a female EXPENDABLES, which Simon West tossing out names like Angelina Jolie and Cameron Diaz. I suppose that West’s dream list shows the difference between men and women in Hollywood – when the male EXPENDABLES was made, it was largely filled with either guys who’s glory days were behind them, or guys that had never had glory days. Statham and Li were still viable solo stars, but of action movies and not considered A-list talent. When it comes to the female version, however, here’s West tossing out two A-list stars to come in. When A-list men get together, they make Ocean’s 11, but the women are supposed to make a fun explosion fest? That said, I hope a female EXPENDABLES is made with the same mix of ex-A-listers and current genre stars. We’ve been playing the casting game a bit over at the Better in the Dark Facebook page, and the team I assembled was Gina Carano and Sigourney Weaver in the Statham/Stallone roles, and rounded out with Carla Gugino, Michelle Rodriguez, Lucy Liu, Rhona Mitra, Milla Jovovich, Jamie Chung, and the Babysitter Twins. Pam Grier could take on the Scwarzenegger/Willis role, and Uma Thurman and Eliza Dushku would make great bad guys.

Playing FEMALE EXPENDABLES is a fun game and it makes you realize just how many viable female action stars are out there. Certainly, there’s not as many, but there’s more than enough to make a darn fine film. Whether we get a female version or another male version, however, I just flat-out want more EXPENDABLES films in my life.