nanoboy said:
I'll leave Chlidonias to write a much more exciting review when he sees the movie in about 5 years. If you liked the first two movies, then you should enjoy this one as well. Self-deprecating jokes abound , for example, when they rescue a strait-jacketed Wesley Snipes from a maximum security prison, he claims that he was incarcerated for tax evasion.
There are 80's and 90's stars aplenty including Stallone, Schwarzenneger, Snipes, Lundren, Jet Li, Antonio Banderas, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Harrison Ford, Kelsey Gramer, Mel Gibson and Jason Statham. They introduced a new, unknown cast of young and upcoming 'expendables', who I assume are MMA fighters or wrestlers - I didn't recognise anyone. Look, just go rent the movie - you could do worse.
ha, it's only been one year!
The Expendables 3
Yes, they're back. I love writing
Expendables reviews!
The Expendables was a fair enough movie if you grew up on 80s action movies and although dumb it was still quite fun to watch, even if it was mostly the Stallone-Statham show.
The Expendables 2 lost the plot entirely and was no fun at all, just really stretched and insulting to anybody who paid to see it.
The Expendables 3 manages to get the tone exactly right - just enough comedy to splice into the serious action, some cool fight scenes, lots of explosions, one-liners. It is vastly superior to the second movie and yet, even though I enjoyed it, it still fails overall.
One major flaw is that it doesn't seem to know who it is aimed at. It should be obvious that the target audience are the man-children in the 30/40+ age bracket who want real 1980s action movies instead of the watered-down 2000s action movies. That's what the first two movies were all about - 80s action stars doing what they do [did] best. In this movie Stallone decides to ditch the old crew and use a group of young bland-faces. Who wants to see that? Nobody, that's who.
For the young crew they didn't even use actual action stars and most of them aren't even real fighters. The only one I recognised was Ronda Rousey who is an MMA fighter and, incidentally, the absolute worst actor I have ever seen in a movie - her "sad face" when Stallone is supposed to be dead near the end is both hilarious and awful at the same time. I had to google the others. There's Victor Ortiz, a welterweight boxer, who doesn't throw a single punch in the whole movie. Seriously, that's like getting Jet Li but just making him sit in a helicopter with a machine gun! Ha ha ha h...oh, that's what they did do. Now I am sad. Then there's some guy named Glen Powell, and Kellan Lutz who was in all the
Twilight movies. Okay, really? Is that some sort of joke?
Tying in with the "who is this movie for?" is this next problem - it is rated PG13. The first movie ran Hollywood dry of blood squibs so for the second one they had to use CGI blood splatter. For the third one they just went, "meh, let's make a movie for the kids; no blood this time round." Who the heck is going to want to watch a PG13 version of an 80s action movie? It'd turn out like the
RoboCop remake ... dammit, I just made myself sad again.
The movie starts out with the remnants of the Expendables (Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren and Randy Couture) breaking Wesley Snipes out of a prison train. Nothing is more secure than a prison train, what with its inability to go anywhere except where the track is. Apparently Snipes and Stallone were two of the original Expendables, which makes the other Expendables jealous, but they're all bros soon enough. The reason they had to break Snipes out was because they were one man short for their next job - presumably because Jet Li jumped out of a plane at the very start of the second movie and never came back - and so once they have him they head off to Somalia to meet up with Terry Crews. I'm not quite sure why they needed that extra man, or even what their plan was supposed to entail, but when the main villain arrives it turns out to be - dun dun DUN! - Mel Gibson! And then it turns out that Gibson and Stallone were - dun dun DUN
DUUUN! - the two most original Expendables of them all!! Gibson is so evil that he shoots Terry Crews who then has to be put into a coma until the end of the movie so that Snipes can be the black guy. There can only be one of each non-white person at a time after all. There's an extended sad scene when Crews is shot and then again at the hospital, and I'm just sitting there thinking "The dude's not even an 80s action hero! Who cares?!"
Soon afterwards Stallone is contacted by the CIA guy B̶r̶u̶c̶e̶ ̶W̶i̶l̶l̶i̶s Harrison Ford who quite literally looks like he is about to drop dead on set. Ford wants Stallone to bring Gibson in for trial at The Hague for war crimes. Naturally Stallone immediately ditches his old team because what a hero, and goes to find that well-known action movie stalwart, Kelsey Grammar. The next half an hour is spent in a state of near-boredom watching Stallone and Grammar tripping around the world picking out youngsters to replace the old guard. This is right about where the movie turns in to
The Expendables Babies; it's like
The Muppet Babies or
Baby Looney Tunes but less fun and with less reason to exist. There's also a bit to show how sad all the old Expendables are at being abandoned, so sad that they can't even be sad together. Saddest of all is Randy Couture. Why so sad, Sad Randy?
There is, of course, no need for Stallone to train the newbies in covert surveillance or anything dumb like that. They're fighters, they automatically know everything for special ops missions. I mean, the sole reason Stallone picked any of the new members was because one was a bouncer, one fell off a cliff, one took a dive in a fight, and one had some guns. That's pretty much it. Then they just winged the entire mission. There is an actual scene where Stallone doesn't have a plan and the computer guy says "hey, why don't I do this and this?" and Stallone is just like "yeah ok".
What happens next is pretty predictable. The kids are useless and Gibson escapes, kidnaps the newbies, etc etc, and all the old team have to get back together to break them free. However they have one new addition - Antonio Banderas, having a ball with his role and without a shadow of a doubt the best character in the movie. Absolutely bonkers, as he always is, bouncing around like a jerboa on a caffeine-rush and he gets the best fight scene in the whole thing alongside Ronda Rousey (she can't act but she moves real well). Ford turns up as well, in a helicopter, along with Schwarzenegger and Jet Li, and all together they blow the entire army of Asmanistan to kingdom come.
The final fight is reserved for Stallone and Gibson. Stallone is angry, but Gibson is mad. Not sure who would win in real life out of that combination, but in the movie it is Stallone. When Gibson says "What about The Hague?" Stallone replies "I am The Hague" before shooting him dead. I am The Hague. That really sounds like the kind of thing you say on the spur of the moment, thinking it sounds really cool, but as soon as it comes out of your mouth you know it sounded idiotic. I think that's probably the real reason he shot Gibson dead, so there would be no witnesses.
My burning question after watching the whole movie: where the heck was Charisma Carpenter??!
