THE EXPENDABLES (15) Treads a very fine line between hokey fun and utter drivel

Stallone. Statham. Li. Lungdren. Rourke. Willis. Schwarzenegger. It’s a cast list that could only really be matched if someone came up with a movie poster that read: De Niro. Pacino. Nicholson. Hoffman. Duvall. Spacey. Brando. Which really would be impressive, considering the latter has been dead for six years.

And yet Sylvester Stallone the director really has managed to assemble that first lot in the service of this brainless action extravaganza, albeit with the screen-time of Brucie and Arnie totalling less than two minutes. Still, nice to see them all together at last.

For an actor and filmmaker who was an object of derision for most of the past two decades, Sly has regained a great deal of dignity and respect in the last couple of years with his final tilts at Rocky and Rambo, so expectations for this were perhaps set higher than might normally be the case.

We’re introduced to the Expendables during a hostage situation, as Stallone and his crew of mercenaries (Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lungdren, Terry Crews, Randy Couture – the characters do have names, but that’s not important) face off against Somali kidnappers.

Following the mission, Mickey Rourke pops us as the middle man who tells Stallone of their next possible job – to be hired by Bruce Willis’ CIA agent to take out a rogue general who has turned a central American island into a drug-producing dictatorship.

Treading a very fine line between hokey fun and utter drivel, this is the kind of film that comes with so much built in goodwill that you want to give it the benefit of the doubt.

The last thing you’d expect to be accusing it of is dullness, but after the prologue, the next bullet fired in anger is a long time coming. But the bacon is saved by an outstanding sequence during Sly and Statham’s recce of the island before we hit another slump in the sometimes strained build up to the climax.

Instead of action we have to make do with an overdose of would-be easy banter that begins to grate after a while because it’s delivered by actors with no great gift for the playful. Stabbing people in the neck and blowing up entire countries, fair enough – but light comedy, not so much.

When the final reckoning does eventually come, it’s a bone-crunching, limb-slicing onslaught, with levels of violence that push the 15 certificate to its absolute limit.

It’s almost as bloody as the last Rambo film but without the rage, with an apocalyptic body count and a chance for the other members of the team to finally get to show what they can do.

Fans of the likes of Commando should be thrilled, as everything about it screams of the 1980s, from the cast to the hackneyed story, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

And yet Stallone refuses to completely commit to the demented tone necessary, even though he knows it’s nonsense.

Much like the 64-year-old star himself, The Expendables is a bit creaky and should have delivered a good deal more, but it just about gets the job done.

Director: Sylvester Stallone

Running time: 103mins

THE ILLUSIONIST (PG) Edinburgh’s never looked lovelier

Based on an unproduced script by the inexplicably popular French comedian Jacques Tati, this near-silent animation is set in a lovingly rendered Edinburgh in the 1950s.

A struggling magician leaves Paris and heads to Britain looking for work, steadily making his way north until he ends up in a village in the Highlands.

There he befriends a young girl and they make their way to Edinburgh where he tries to find work while she attempts to put him in the poorhouse with her constant demands and expensive tastes in shoes and clothes.

Looking like a forlorn watercolour, there’s little doubt that Edinburgh has probably never appeared lovelier on film.

But there’s a good deal more entertainment value to be had trying to recognise city landmarks than there is in the wafer thin story itself.

It’s intended as paean to the dying of music hall tradition and a gentler way of life, but there’s a very good reason why such variety acts are a thing of the past.

It’s little more than an extended sketch, with side characters and subplots that threaten to be interesting but are then discarded as quickly as they’re introduced, while the girl’s indeterminate age makes the nature of their relationship questionable.

It could have made for a charming short but as a feature, it’s stretched almost beyond endurance.

Director: Sylvain Chomet

Running time: 80mins

THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE) (PG) Thuddingly tedious and pointless

The Human Centipede starts out like any other horror, as two young American women on holiday in Germany break down in a secluded spot.

They find themselves at the house of a doctor who turns out to be a mad scientist with a dream of creating a human centipede by surgically conjoining three people – by means best left unmentioned.

As a genre exercise it exists purely on the basis of its premise, and then fails utterly to deliver on it because Dutch writer-director Tom Six is so in love with his central conceit that he neglects to build any meaningful story around it. It’s so stretched and sparsely plotted that we’re well beyond the halfway point before we get any centipede action, at which time it can’t even provide the basic yuck factor you might be expecting.

So it not that it’s horrific, it’s that it’s thuddingly tedious and ultimately pointless. And if you’re wondering why it has the subtitle First Sequence, rest assured that a sequel (Full Sequence) is already in the offing.

Director: Tom Six

Running time: 92mins