Stallone back to big action in `The Expendables'

With his business shirt, black tie and blue tinted shades, Sylvester Stallone looks more like a hipster movie executive than a battle-worn bruiser on a deadly mission in South America.

But beneath that shirt are the muscles he first revealed in 'Rocky', and behind those eyes is the grit that got his breakthrough movie made back in 1976. At 64, Stallone is still a tough guy, and he aims to prove it alongside a cast of killer comrades in 'The Expendables', which opens on Friday.
In the film Stallone leads a gang of impossibly muscular mercenaries who get caught up in a plot to overthrow the murderous dictator of a fictitious nation, though all is not as it seems.
The muscles, the fights, cameos by Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, even the tattoos they sport in the film are real.
"They are all bad-ass, for real. Like they know how to hurt you," Stallone said of his cast at a hotel suite just outside the recent Comic-Con fan fest, where he presented clips of the film. "And the audience hasn't seen guys who can run through a wall and snap you like a pretzel, for real."
Stallone himself got pretzeled. He broke his neck and tore his shoulder while filming a fight scene with Austin. "I still have two more operations to go on my shoulder," he said.
'The Expendables' started out as a more intellectual story, but then Stallone ditched half the script and focused on an action-filled tale of men on a mission to save the girl, their gang and, he says, their very souls. He wanted to bring back the classic tough-guy characters and real big-screen fights that were popular before the advent of computer-generated effects and Velcro muscles.
The movie focuses on pure action with old-school physical fighting. Most of the fights in the movie are without aid and are sans special effects. These are real tough guys. And though the cast is all over 40 (Crews is the youngest at 42), their age isn't acknowledged in the film.
"I wasn't trying to flaunt it, but it just seems that the tough guys, the ones I know, are mature," Stallone explained. "I haven't seen the young tough guys yet. Hopefully, if this works, you'll be able to find the young Rambos and the young Charles Bronsons, who want to show their machismo."
And as for Stallone himself?
"I look at myself as like an 18-year-old with arthritis," he said. "I know we were called geezers and we're this and we're past our prime, but I said good, wait until you see this."