This is Mickey Rourke’s year - by Christmas he’ll have won an Oscar, become the biggest star on Earth and colonised the moon.

That’s if you believe the hype. If you don’t believe the hype you’ll realise that Mickey Rourke was lucky enough to be cast in a movie that required a washed-up squidge-faced dumbbell who cries a lot as a star. But either way, thanks to The Wrestler Mickey Rourke is back in business.

So how is Mickey Rourke going to continue of his run of critically-acclaimed highbrow movies? By co-starring in a low-rent film about Sylvester Stallone killing everything. Whoops.

The Wrestler is something of a once-in-a-lifetime movie role for Mickey Rourke. In it, he gets to do what he’s good at - which is basically beat people up - while looking all sad because he’s not really that famous any more. Until someone writes a film called Barry The Nightclub Doorman Who Suffers From Nonspecific Anxiety Disorder, there won’t ever be a film better suited to Mickey Rourke than The Wrestler.

Of course, with all the praise and mountains of award nominations he’s received for The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke runs the very real risk of being typecast as the hasbeen beefcake in serious films that are lauded by his peers and constantly nominated for the highest honours in the movie industry. And Mickey Rourke wouldn’t want that, would he?

And that’s why the first film that Mickey Rourke has agreed to appear in after the wave of renewed interest in him stirred up by The Wrestler is The Expendables, which appears to be a sort of Kwik Save knock-off version of The Dirty Dozen. Variety reports:

Mickey Rourke has joined the ranks of “The Expendables,” joining the ensemble of the Sylvester Stallone-directed action adventure for Nu Image/Millennium Films. Rourke will play an unscrupulous arms dealer who becomes the go-to guy for a group of mercenaries planning to topple a South American dictator.

OK, OK, we get it. Sylvester Stallone did the whole art mirroring life thing with Rocky Balboa where he got to play a past-it old beefcake who cries a lot, and now he’s getting Mickey Rourke - a man who’s just done the exact same thing - to be in The Expendables with him. Wow, talk about over-egging the pudding. You’re both expendable. We understand. Jeez. But at least that’s it, right?

Well, no. Also signed up for The Expendables alongside Sylvester Stallone and Mickey Rourke are expendable middle-aged cage fighter Randy Couture, expendable goon du jour Jason Statham, expendable faded kung-fu legend Jet Li and expendable blonde Sylvester Stallone Dolph Lungdren. We could be wrong, but we’re guessing that The Expendables is going to feature a lot of product placement by Stannah Stairlifts.

Best of all, The Expendables isn’t even going to being shooting until March, so there’s plenty of time for Sylvester Stallone to recruit all the other actors who Hollywood has casually tossed aside over the years, including Steven Seagal, Burt Reynolds, Cuba Gooding Jr, Heath Ledger, the ghost of Marlon Brando, with a special guest appearance by The Puppet Corpse Of Orson Welles as a hardbitted lieutenant who doesn’t play by the rules.

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