Imagine the Cliff’s Notes version of Michael Mann’s melancholy Heat (1995) and you have something like Takers, a glossy, handsome, heist movie that never gets past the beguiling surface to the damaged souls beneath.

Expat Gordon Jennings (Elba) is the brains behind a suave, five-man pack of L.A.-based bank robbers who’ve made themselves rich enough to indulge their every yen for sharp suits and fast cars while staying out of jail by meticulously planning every job down to the smallest detail. A.J (Christianson) is the tech guy; John Rahway (Walker) is the driver and occasional sniper; Jesse Attica (Brown) is the one with heart and his brother Jake (Ealy), who’s head-over-heels in love with gorgeous club-owner Lilli (Saldana), is the financial whiz who invests their loot. They’ve just pulled off a spectacular robbery and are preparing to lay low for a year — no point attracting undue attention — when their old associate Delonte “Ghost” Rivers (Atlanta-based rapper T.I.) strolls in with a honey of a plan.

Four years ago, Ghost took a bullet mid-job and went to jail, where he steadfastly refused to rat out his friends. Ghost figures he’s owed a little payback, and a $20 million armored-car score would float all boats so really, what’s the downside? The fact that Lilli used to be the lean and hungry-looking Ghost’s girl should probably give the crew pause, and the timetable — the heist has to take place in five days or not at all — does; they’re not about quick and dirty jobs. And then there’s the distraction of Gordon’s beloved sister Naomi (Baptiste, Oscar-nominated for Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies), who’s about to come out of her umpteenth stint in rehab and has a history of rapid relapses. But sentiment prevails over suspicion and in the end they’re all in.

Meanwhile, LAPD detective Jack Welles (Dillon), who’s let his obsession with taking down these cocky, elusive pricks destroy both his marriage and his professional reputation, gets wind that there’s something in the air. With his partner, Eddie Hatcher (Hernandez), Welles mounts a go-for-broke effort to take down Gordon’s crew.

Is The Expendables a self-conscious joke or a sly throwback to grindhouse fare like Enzo Castellari’s The Inglorious Bastards, which pitted the B-list likes of Fred Williamson, Bo Svenson and Peter Hooten against a pack of barking Nazis? How you perceive it depends on which side of the age divide you fall, but either way it’s a strong contender for the title of manliest movie ever made.

Mercenaries Barney Ross (Stallone), Lee Christmas (Statham), Ying Yang (Li), Hale Caesar (Crews), Toll Road (Couture) and Gunner Jensen (Lundgren) have been all over this dirty world, collecting hefty paychecks to kick ass from Mombasa to Sarajevo and keep their mouths shut when they come home. They may be getting a little long in the tooth, but they’re impressively lean and mean without being heartless bastards. Really — they fall out with longtime companion Jensen because he wants to hang him a Somali pirate, and that’s just not their style. They garrote, gut and blow bad guys to smithereens, sure, but hanging a man is barbaric, Neanderthal crap and they don’t roll that way. Oh, and they don’t roll with junkies either, so strung-out Jensen gets the heave-ho after the gang finishes rescuing a bunch of bedraggled hostages in the Gulf of Aden.

After getting his lavish tattoos touched up by former Expendable Tool (Rourke), Ross gets a new gig from the mysterious “Mr. Church” (Willis, uncredited despite the fact that he’s featured prominently on the movie’s poster), after trading barbs with best frenemy Trench (Schwarzenegger, also uncredited and not on the poster), who declares the job a fool’s errand. The assignment involves deposing Third World dictator General Garza (Zayas of TV’s Dexter), who, with the help of sleek Ugly American John Munroe (Roberts) and his sadistic sidekick Paine (Austin), has turned the banana republic of Vilena into an insanely lucrative, ruthlessly efficient cocaine-producing machine.

Ross aborts the mission when he realizes that Church is with the CIA and they’re all Agency pawns in some cynical, black-op power struggle, but not before being profoundly moved by the efforts of Garza’s tough-yet-idealistic daughter (Itie) to help her brutally oppressed countrymen. Haunted by the fact that she refused to abandon them to save her own skin, Ross resolves to go back into the mouth of Hell and polish up his tarnished karma.

Yes, the marks of tongue-in-cheek snark are all over The Expendables, from the characters’ ludicrous names (none of which is as slyly preposterous as “Randy Couture,” and that one’s for real — no wonder the guy became a mixed martial-arts fighter) to Christmas and Ross’ cover for their reconnaissance trip to Vilena. Sure, they’re ornithologists from the Global Wildlife Conservancy, and love that logo stenciled on their company plane — a glowering raven perched on a wireframe sphere (the ultimate insider’s nod to Stallone’s long-languishing Edgar Allan Poe biopic). And let’s not even get into the bits of business meant to humanize the muscle-bound anti-heroes — Li’s constant complaints about money (he deserves a bigger cut because he works harder than the rest, on account of being so small), Christmas and Ross’ ongoing debate about whether a blade is more efficient than a bullet, Road’s sensitivity about his cauliflower ear, Caesar’s fetishistic love for exotic ordnance... they're shorthand so short they barely register.

But when push comes to shove, The Expendables

In a not-too-distant future, no one’s secrets are safe, not even those buried in the deepest recesses of their minds: High-tech “extraction” technology allows teams of spies-for-hire to manipulate the dreams of others, creeping around their thoughts and riffling through their subconscious minds.

Dominic Cobb (DiCaprio) is the best in the business —good enough that even former victims like corporate hotshot Saito (Watanabe) turn to him when they need someone to do the impossible. Saito is in a position to offer Cobb the one thing he wants most in the world: a way home. Saito’s connections can erase the murder charge that forced Cobb to flee his country and abandon his children to the care of their grandfather (Caine), and all he has to do in return is get inside the head of Richard Fischer (Murphy), heir to a multinational empire, and plant the idea to dismantle it so deep that Fischer will believe he thought of it all by himself.

Conventional wisdom has it that mental capital only flows one way: You can dig it out, but you can’t sneak it in. Cobb knows otherwise and assembles a team willing to do the mindwarp with him: chameleon Eames (Hardy), who can assume any identity within a dream; chemist Yusuf (Rao), whose concoctions facilitate deep, prolonged sleep; architect Ariadne (Page), who imagines every physical detail of the dream world; and point-man Arthur (Gordon-Levitt), who sweats whatever details need sweating.

By their nature, rubber-reality movies walk a thin line between clever and stupid. But when they work, the balancing act is breathtaking: Just think back to 1999, when The Matrix had fanboys, mall rats and cineastes alike lined up for a tumble down the rabbit hole. Inception owes both The Matrix and the all-but-forgotten Dreamscape (1984), in which a psychic is unwittingly drawn into a plot to assassinate the President of the United States in his dreams, a debt of imagination. But writer-director Christopher Nolan is much more than a crass recycler of other people’s cool ideas, and his greatest strength is the ability to tether pop-culture spectacle to authentic emotions.

If Inception were all spectacle, it would be nothing more than magic trick of the month: nifty but disposable, at the mercy of smart alecks eager to reveal the cogs and wheels behind the illusion. But while one day soon the eye-popping effects will inevitably look dated, Cobb’s misery — a messy mix of grief, guilt, denial and resentment — will continue to feel painfully real. Whether or not history validates comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Inception is a superior summer movie, one with heart and brains and loads of razzle-dazzle.

This review originally appeared in Film Journal International.

The second sequel to surprise 2006 hit Step Up is an uneven mix of innovative dance and cliched drama, all rendered in glorious 3D.

This time, the featured hoofers are Moose (Sevani) and Camille (Stoner), who are both about to begin their freshman years at NYU. When we last saw Moose (in Step Up 2: The Streets), he was a lanky caterpiller discovering his inner butterfly through dancing. Step Up’s Camille (Alyson Stoner) was the bratty younger sister of hunky Tyler Gage, a Baltimore throwaway kid who escaped the thug life through the redemptive power of, yes, dance (Channing Tatum, who played Tyler in both earlier movies, apparently declined to return for a third go-round). Good-boy Moose has decided to make his loving parents happy by abandoning this dancing nonsense in favor of electrical engineering. It’s not entirely clear what Camille is studying, but it’s not dance and really, she’s only there so Moose can repeatedly stand her up after the charismatic (Luke) draws him back into the world of competitive stepping.

Luke presides over the House of Pirates, a crew of formerly homeless street dancers who live together in the industrial-chic Brooklyn warehouse Luke inherited from his parents, back up dancers who realized their dream of creating a place where any dancer — famous or not — could shine like a star. Luke, himself an accoplished dancer, dreams of being a filmmaker but sublimates his own ambitions to his parents’ legacy. He’s preparing his crew for the upcoming World Jam street-dance competition, in part because the $100,000 prize could keep his building out of foreclosure. That’s why he’s aggressively recruiting fresh talent like the loose-limbed Moose and sexy-waif Natalie (Vinson), whose lethal blend of hip-hop sass and classical training is so mesmerizing that Luke never bothers to ask much about her past.

Angelina Jolie plays a CIA agent accused of being a Russian spy in this silly but energetic action movie.

Once a highly respected field agent, Evelyn Salt (Jolie) was removed from the line of fire after a North Korean operation went terribly wrong. Salt was eventually recovered via a prisoner exchange and removed from the line of fire: Now her duties run more to debriefing tedious Russian defectors — ho hum — like the scruffy Orlov (Polish actor Obrychski, youthful star of multiple Andrezej Wajda movies), which is no doubt how she found time to nurture her blissful marriage to German spider specialist Mike Krause (Diehl). In fact, Salt is focused on the anniversary party she's planning when Orlov drops a cold-war bombshell: The Soviet Union, he says, has spent decades preparing an assault on the US from within, training an army of super soldiers from childhood and burying them so deep in the American mainstream that even they don't know they're sleeper agents waiting for a wake-up call. One of them has even infiltrated the CIA, Orlov continues, and her name is Evelyn Salt.

Salt's closest colleague, Ted Winter (Schreiber), doesn?t believe a word of it, but their boss, Peabody (Ejiofor), isn't so sure, which is no doubt why he's boss: Sentiment and loyalty to subordinates have no place in career building, especially a spook house like the CIA. So Salt takes it on the lam, determined to prove her innocence and foil the assassination plot she uncovers in the process, in between high-octane stunt sequences and clever demonstrations of the exotic uses to which common household and office supplies can be put. Who knew an ordinary swivel chair and a fire extinguisher could be McGuyvered into a rocket launcher? And remember ladies, not only do panties keep your privates covered while exiting taxis in indecently short skirts, but they can be used to blind inconveniently-placed security cameras!

Australian filmmaker Philip Noyce's workmanlike competence is woefully underappreciated in the US: Remember Dead Calm (1989), the psycho-on-a-boat thriller with Nicole Kidman? His. Ditto Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger (1992, 1994), two of the three best Tom Clancy adaptations that aren't video games (the other being, of course, John McTiernan's 1990 Hunt for Red October). Noyce brings two major assets to Salt: The understanding that skipping character development ensures that no one will give a flying fig when characters start getting killed, and the knowledge that that nothing undermines a well-staged action sequence like eyeball-scrambling flash cuts. Both used to be givens in any decently-budgeted mainstream movie and neither is now, so it's thanks to Noyce that Salt delivers both the genre-mandated mayhem and gives you reason, however slim, to care who's left standing.

That said, I still found Salt dull... Kurt Wimmer's script owes a serious debt of imagination to the 1977 Charles Bronson vehicle Telefon (which was based on a novel by Walter Wager, whose 58 Minutes was later twisted into the first Die Hard sequel), and the action is, well, action: Bodies twist and churn, cars careen and crash, and stuff blows up. Been there, seen that, forgot it 24 hours later.