The Expendables

Seen August 29, afternoon at the Fox 5 in downtown Sterling, Colorado.

A strange way to break a month's fast. A spontaneous three-day road trip last month took me out onto the Eastern Plains---one of my favorite places to drive for hours on end without seeing anyone.

After two days of that, little Sterling seems like an oasis of civilization, a space colony in the midst of a void---cleans motels, a lovely museum well kept up, about the Rural Electrification Project.

The downtown multiplex is a coverted single screen establishment off the main boulevard. I arrived just in time to catch this movie, which I call the It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World of 2010.

Stanley Kramer's 1963 madcap epic was the end of a era, a last hoorah for an entire generation of the cast in many ways. The world was about to change in big ways.

Now, among other things, the action star as we know it is fading into history. There is a sadness among the old men in this movie that there is not a next generation. Cinema has moved on.

But it's much more than that. The mercenaries in the movie somehow know something went really, really wrong with America, and they identify it as stemming from the Serbian War. Very intriguing idea.

It's camp and pretensious on every level, and the action scenes rather bored me at times, but I still liked it for the reasons I've just described.

The finest scene in the film is a short performance by Mickey Roarke, as a hip Austin motorcycle tatoo artist and retried mercenary. He delivers a soliloquy in a close-up while bent into purple light as he concentrates on one of his designs. "We used to stand for something," he says.

I think of his character here as essentially the ghost of his character from The Wrestler, speaking form beyond the grave, mourning the death of the America we all knew and loved, and for which Stallone thought he was fighting, in his own Postmodern way.

I hear ya, brother. I hear ya.