It’s funny, but not only is "The Expendables” -- as many noticed -- a throwback to the heyday of ‘80s action stars (Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Statham … oops, the latter’s from the ‘00s!), but more to the point, it’s really a throwback to one of the classic action films of all time, 1967’s famous (infamous?) “Dirty Dozen.”
Now, the “Dozen” wasn’t alone. In fact, it was one in a long line of all-star WWII movies, from “The Longest Day” -- starring an old John Wayne, a young Sean Connery and everyone from Sir Richard Burton to Fabian in between -- to “The Great Escape” (Steve McQueen, James Garner, Lord Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, et al.).
Indeed, one might argue that “The Dirty Dozen” was actually the end of something, not the beginning. After it, the so-called “spy genre” led by James Bond, John LeCarre and spoofs like “Matt Helm,” “Our Man Flint,” starring James Coburn and Woody Allen’s “Casino Royale” subsumed the action arena for years to come.
How do I remember all this? Well, in part because Quentin Tarantino beat Stallone to the punch in ripping off “Dozen” last year with “Inglorious Basterds,” with Brad Pitt playing the Lee Marvin role of the wily (bordering on sadistic) commander of “The Dirty Dozen,” recruiting his sad-sack crew of vicious losers from the stockade.
But more importantly, because about 15 years ago a young writer, one always ahead of his time -- he was working on an Ivy League football documentary a decade before HBO’s recent “Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29” -- came to me with an idea for an updated “Dirty Dozen” to be set in of all places (given this was 1994), Afghanistan.
A former Ivy League football player himself -- he played on the same Columbia team as “Lost” Fox and against Princeton’s Dean “Superman” Cain -- he’d gone on to the graduate screenwriting program at USC.
His first big idea after graduation? A reboot of the “Dozen” idea, only in this case entitled “Kashmir.”
His name was George Francisco, and he’s since gone on to share writing, producing or directing credits on numerous TV, feature and reality shows (including sharing a “story by” credit on the very first mixed-martial-arts movie, 1996’s “Champions” (which I produced).
But “Kashmir” was way ahead of -- and, in the sense that it channeled those great old ‘60s war films, behind -- its time.
It began as a script called “Roger’s Rangers,” in which a long-lost relative of the founder of the modern U.S. Army Rangers, the Revolutionary War’s Col. Robert Rogers, has fallen on hard times in the modern military.
Out of respect for his family’s lineage, the brass gives him one last chance to restore his reputation -- go to the Army’s facility for handicapped and PTSD’ed out soldiers from the first Gulf War and recruit a crew for a devil’s mission, one in which (a la “The Dirty Dozen”) few if any were expected to return alive.
