Friday Five – Favorite Roles Played By Guys From The Expendables

Welcome to the Friday Five! Each week I help you get to know me a bit better through the magical art of a top five list! This week: Favorite Roles Played By Guys From The Expendables.

The Expendables 2 comes out today. It stars almost every action movie star of the 80’s, which is great if you like that sort of thing. One problem. I don’t really like that sort of thing, so this is gonna be a very odd list.

I’m not a big dumb action movie fan, so I haven’t seen a great deal of these people’s work. In fact, I’ve never seen a single movie with Jason Statham; only 1 with Liam Hemsworth (The Hunger Games), Jean-Claude Van Damme (Street Fighter) or Chuck Norris (Dodgeball, and that’s just a glorified cameo); only 2 with Jet Li (Lethal Weapon 4, Hero) or Dolph Lundgren (Masters of the Universe, Rocky IV); and only 2 movies with Stallone that aren’t Rocky or Rambo (Over The Top, Judge Dread), so this isn’t my strongest list. It doesn’t help that most of the movies that they have been in, besides for Willis and Schwarzenegger, have been total garbage.

1. Sylvester Stallone as Lincoln Hawk in Over The Top – I’ve discussed my love of Over the Top a few times before, but it’s mostly because of the awesome music and 80’s arm wrestling montage goodness

 

2. Dolph Lundgren as Ivan Drago in Rocky IV – “I will break you”. Pretty much ditto, but replace arm wrestling with boxing.

 

3. Jean-Claude Van Damme as Col. William F. Guile in Street Fighter – A role that on paper doesn’t make any sense (getting the world’s best know Belgian to play an American fighter pilot), but considering how bad the rest of the movie was, watching him play off Raul Julia (in his last role before his death) was surprisingly good.

 

4. Bruce Willis as James Cole in 12 Monkeys – I love me a good time travel movie, and it was cool that they filmed it right in Philly and the surrounding area, and you could be like “Oh, they are staying at that seedy hotel with all the hookers next to the strip bars on Admiral Wilson Boulevard”, even though they tore it, and the strip bars, down long ago when the Republican National Convention was in town, because it was the one road all the delegates had to drive by and they didn’t want to look bad.

 

5. Arnold Schwarzenegger as T-800 (Cyberdyne Systems Model 101) in Terminator 2: Judgement Day – Pretty much goes without saying, but one of the best and most thoughtful action movies of all time, especially so in the extended director’s edition.

JohnScott is the proud owner of a life size replica Captain Kirk Chair. He is a hoarder of Comic Books, Transformers, and Star Trek action figures. He attended Space Camp as an adult. He has taken vacations to the closing of the Star Trek Experience and the final night Shuttle launch. He has been known to yell at his television when the kids can't put together the damn statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. When not writing for InsufficientScotty, he is a Software Engineer for a major healthcare communications company. You can Email or follow on Twitter @NotEnoughScotty or Facebook