Sylverster Stallone’s glorious throwback to the brawny 80s is also about something, and it’s not Bourne-ian self-discovery. It’s about something that actually matters. And in this age of nihilism when believing in anything bigger than self is considered old-fashioned, unsophisticated and naïve, that’s both refreshing and important.  Mickey Rourke, who has a small but showy supporting role as the proprietor of the tattoo parlor that serves as the Expendables’ hangout, explains it with a single word. I won’t spoil anything, but without this scene, this important turning point, “The Expendables” wouldn’t be half the movie it is. 

Stallone plays Barney Ross (probably not his real name), the leader of a band of American mercenaries who, along with Christmas (Jason Statham), Gunner (Dolph Lundgren), Yang (Jet Li), Toll (Randy Couture), and Caesar (Terry Crews), is willing to go most anywhere and kill most any bad guy for a price. The story opens with a well-crafted action sequence involving Somalia pirates that not only establishes how deadly competent our guys are, but also that they’re not cold-blooded killers.  These are men with a moral code and one of their own breaking that code will be the root cause of deadly complications and a couple over the top action sequences to come. 

The plot gets a nudge courtesy of a self-referential Meeting of The Titans. Ever in search of a job, Barney meets with “Church” (Bruce Willis), a CIA spook in need of some housecleaning that won’t make headlines and Arnold Schwarzenegger, a long-time rival. Cinematically this is far from a great scene, but Stallone the director isn’t looking to please the American Film Institute and the early morning packed house I saw this with buzzed to life during every satisfying moment. 

The mission is to go to South America to rid the world of a Castro-like dictator who’s made a deal with the devil in the form of an ex-CIA baddie played to the hilt by The Mighty Eric Roberts. And what irony that “Eat Pray Love,” starring the less-talented and charismatic Roberts opened the same day.  Yes, this weekend it’s Roberts vs. Roberts – Men Who Do vs. Women Who New Age. 

Though getting on in years (Stallone is 64), these are still formidable men, experienced enough to know how the world works and that wringing your hands over the nuance of it all is just an excuse for cowardly inaction. They also understand that when a tin-pot dictator brutalizes the self-determination out of his own people, his being in favor of national health care doesn’t make that okay. These are also men who worry about their own skin. No paycheck is worth dying for. But loyalty to one another is, and sometimes they can even be shamed into action — a likely suicide mission — by the bravery of one woman (Giselle Itie) who’s willing to stand for something.  But these aren’t men who talk a whole lot, and when they do it’s usually in the form of affectionate crowd-pleasing insults that might not move the plot or add character dimension, but once again Stallone (who co-wrote the screenplay with Dave Callahan) knows his audience.   

Satisfying is probably the best way to describe this labor of love conjured up by a superstar who sat in the direct-to-DVD bin for almost a decade waiting for America to come to its collective senses and figure out how much we missed him and his kind of action filmmaking.. There’s also a kind of validation that comes with the price of admission, especially for those of us who couldn’t figure out why in the hell anyone would call metro-sexuals angsting over calling evil what it is and apologizing for America an action movie. 

“The Expendables” proves us right. 

Matt Damon sucks and the eighties freaking ruled.

–

To be honest, anything with Julia Roberts** pretty much loses me from the start. She was never a great actress female actor, but before Diva-dom struck about 40 minutes into “Erin Brockovich (2000),” she had a remarkably warm and accessible screen presence. That’s gone now. Even the famous smile feels calculated. Roberts can’t do “empowered” without coming off as cold and distant. Kate Winslet*** and Naomi Watts can play ‘em tough without losing the important undercurrent of vulnerability and tenderness. In her day, even Sharon Stone could pull this off on some level.

Clive Owen, on the other hand, is the real deal but this thriller looks and feels an awful lot like his previous thriller “The International,” which flopped pretty hard just a few weeks ago. How many people will confuse the two? The trailer tries to strike a jaunty vibe with that already-tired “Oceans 11-12-13″ score, but even I was surprised (pleasantly) when Naomi Watts showed up for “The International” instead of Roberts.

*The original plan was to write about “Terminator Salvation,” but Christian Bale and I are done professionally.

**Eric Roberts, on the other hand, rawks in way too many ways to count. “Charlie! They took my thumb!”

***Embarrassingly bad Revolutionary Road performance excepted.

His speech is so entertaining that as I was hosting an Oscar Eve radio special on 790 KABC in Los Angeles last night, every guest that had been at the Spirits could talk about nothing else, including Best Supporting Actress nominee Taraji P. Henson from Benjamin Button, E!’s Ben Lyons, Associated Press film critic Christy Lemire, James Marsh, the writer/director of Man On Wire (favored to win Best Documentary Feature tonight) and Emmy winning actor Bryan Cranston from Breaking Bad (set to return on AMC on March 8).

This acceptance speech comes with a strong R rating, so if you are easily offended, be forewarned.