★★
After a passable franchise opener and an excellent sequel, Sly Stallone and his gang of Expendables are back for a third disappointingly average outing rife with impressive performances and laughable effects.
Like the other two Expendables movies, 3 has Stallone as the center of attention, leading his team of aging mercenaries on a series of dangerous missions to make some quick cash and, more importantly, to kill people and blow things up. This one starts as only it could with the new cast, with the team rescuing Wesley Snipes from a prison train (“What’d you get locked up for?” “Tax evasion.” Ha, ha) and killing a ton of guards in the process. These are the good guys.
All that would be fun, a cheeky nod to Snipes’ recent real-life release, if it weren’t directed like a glitchy Call of Duty cutscene and given special effects that could encourage the team behind “Bubsy 3D”. The film also instantly rubs its pathetic PG-13 rating in our faces, never showing a single one of the thousands of kills the characters make, instead opting for cheesy sound effects and forcing us to go by only the reactions of the “heroes”.
Blood isn’t necessarily a defensible thing, but a film of this style would benefit from blatancy and gratuity. What we get, however, are actions scenes about as thrilling as Duck Dynasty and the obligatory single F-word, spoken in Harrison Ford’s only moderately exciting line.
The film starts to pick up steam when, as unfortunately usual these days, the action sequences die down and the story begins to unfold. While in Somalia on a mission for Harrison Ford’s government agency to hunt down for a sketchy weapons dealer, the Expendables discover the man behind all the treachery is Mel Gibson’s Conrad Stonebanks, Stallone’s former partner who was presumed dead but naturally isn’t. The backstory is nothing we haven’t heard before, but Gibson brings a refreshing grit and bravado that the series has severely lacked in its villains thus far (Van Damme was alright, but Gibson is excellent).
Scared he will get himself killed on this now very personal mission, and down a weapon specialist as Terry Crews, the most entertaining of all Expendables, is hospitalized, Stallone decides to drop his withering old team (no real loss, except for maybe Jason Statham, if we’re honest here; we never really learned about the other characters) and find a younger one that is actually by definition expendable.
The middle third of the film is the most fun, as it contains barely any action and focuses solely on developing (a few) characters and providing laughs. Stallone meets with the entertaining Kelsey Grammer, who takes him around the US and Mexico finding young specialists who can fill the roles his old team long to. New to the team are John Smilee (Kellan Lutz), Luna (Ronda Rousey), Thorn (Glen Powell) and Mars (Victor Ortiz). They all earn their paychecks with good performances, but their dialogue is scarce and what little they have is to some extent quite poorly written. The youngsters exist solely to be the butt of a few thematic jokes, and to provide a reason for the Expendables to have more than one epic entrances.
One actually useful addition to the cast is Antonio Banderas, who is hilarious in every excellent scene in which he’s on screen. Another aging soldier who persists Stallone until he relents to let him join the team, Banderas is comical, emotional, and moment-stealing. His role, along with that of Gibson and to a lesser extent Grammer, are what makes this third Expendables film watchable. Schwarzenegger also provides the usual laughs, but he just has to reference the bloody “get to the chopper line” not once, but twice.
Harrison Ford is severely underused; he had more screen presence in Ender’s Game (to be fair, he was excellent in that and a more important character). Jet Li’s role is pathetic, existing literally so he can be called short. That’s all he does, get called short. Bruce Willis is nowhere to be seen this time, finally realizing, I suppose, that it’s not worth the money. It’s a shame, though, because it was due in part to his rapport with Arnie that the second one was a very good film.
Banderas, Gibson, Grammer, and the returning actors with real screen time all provide the audience with enough laughs and energy to make the film a moderately worthwhile experience for fans of the series. It has barely half the laughs of the second one and less exciting action than the first, but it entertains in places.
Unless you’re a fan of the series, though, you probably won’t find much of worth here. The film survives only on its star power, with the production values of DashCon and action scenes that rival the Transformers series in mindlessness. I’ll watch the fourth in the hope that the R rating returns and the team can mix up the story a bit. I know from an effort standpoint that would be insane. Courageous, but insane.
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