The Expendables (2010)

You don't stroll into Applebee's seeking out a culinary epiphany, right? Similarly, The Expendables will almost certainly deliver the expected goods to its target audience, satiating ones appetite for automatic weapons, knife-throwing, beheadings, and flimsy plots of government corruption by ex-military personnel. But can the eye-content hungry movie-goer find a morsel of ophthalmology in The Expendables? Read on!

Early in this mercenary flick, Jet Li delivers a ferocious kick with a steel-toed boot to Dolph Lundgren's left upper eyelid, causing a superficial laceration. Dolph's character even comments on the injury, stating that it will probably require sutures, and he expresses his dislike for sutures.

Later in the movie, the viewer notes that his laceration has been repaired with simple Steri-Strips, thin adhesive strips produced by 3M. They are applied across the laceration in a manner which pulls the skin on either side of the wound together. Their purported benefits compared to sutures include less scarring, easier care and application, and enhanced patient comfort. A major drawback is the loss of integrity when wet, something that a badass New Orleans-based soldier of fortune might want to take into consideration.

I won't go into a long treatise on the relative benefits of wound closure by suture versus Steri-Strips versus Dermabond, but suffice it to say that like with many areas of medicine, this issue is surrounded by heavy dogmatic declarations. ER doctors (read "I'm never going to see this patient again in follow up") will have a greater preference for quick and easy wound closure, whereas plastic surgeons (read "I'm not the one knee-deep in an ER swamped with drunkards and screaming kids at 3 AM") will pride themselves on meticulous suture closure with a grateful, well-insured, and sober clientele.

It's hard to judge The Expendables, because you get exactly what you signed up for. It's still pretty tough to overlook the banal plot and shabby dialogue. There should also be a law against movies where people run, out in the open, away from an army of people firing machine guns from less than 20 feet, escaping any serious injury. The whole theme of Jet Li repeatedly getting his ass kicked by a shady white person and then getting rescued by a noble white person got a bit old for this Asian-American male reviewer, too. Where is the Chuck Norris-spanking Bruce Lee from Enter the Dragon when we need him?

I'm going to give The Expendables a C - , which pains me, because I went to high school with one of the executive producers (see if you can guess which guy in the picture!) Sorry, Jason. Let's see if we can get just a little more ophthalmology content in the sequel, OK?