The Expendables 3 review

The Expendables 3 (12A/PG-13, 126 mins)
Director: Patrick Hughes
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

To borrow a quote from one of this week’s other releases, Hector and the Search for Happiness, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

And yet it’s pretty much all this creaky franchise has going for it. This third entry in the action star retirement home series is not well written, it’s 30 minutes too long and the action isn’t even particularly good. And yet, for reasons that are mostly to do with the unnameable magnetism of sheer star wattage, it remains oddly watchable throughout.

It begins with a massive attack on a prison train by a handful of ageing mercenaries, the Expendables (Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham et al), to bust out old comrade Wesley Snipes. It’s cheesy and daft to the extent that it must be a parody, brimful of macho posturing, which to some degree has been diluted this time around by the lighter tone, even if the attempts at banter are generally pretty feeble.

It lumbers to another set piece where an old foe turns up in the shape of Mel Gibson, a former Expendable turned arms dealer. Gibson adds real value here, with an admirably composed nutjob performance that demonstrates how much he’s been missed from our screens in recent years.

And still the superstars get rolled out, with Harrison Ford securing a nice payday as a replacement for Bruce Willis, cameoing as a CIA boss who gives Stallone the mission to go after Gibson. Whatever passes for a theme in the movie arrives with an acknowledgment that the Expendables might be getting a little long in the tooth for such silliness; the problem is they (and the film) don’t really believe it.

But still we get a dead midsection where nothing happens while Stallone disbands the crew and teams up with Kelsey Grammer to recruit new younger members. This takes an age, but at least comes with the addition of Antonio Banderas, who adds a touch of pep to the otherwise taciturn team.

For a movie with a teen-friendly rating, the action is sturdy enough and the body count is astronomical (the climax see the Expendables take on literally an entire army) but a bit more blood might have helped. The problem with the action is a physical and logistical one, with little sense of space given and too often overloaded with CGI or cut together much too maniacally.

But it all boils down to watching these stars do their thing, and the pleasure in that is undeniable. Considering the cast is so massive it’s still very much the Stallone show, since he came up with the story and co-wrote the screenplay. Terry Crews, Dolph Lundgren and Jet Li barely get a look in, but every once in a while, just seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger and Harrison Ford sharing the screen can be enough to raise a smile.

There are many winks and nods to past glories, and while you can only coast on nostalgia so long, hearing Arnie trot out some of his classic lines will be good enough for many.

The Expendables 2 review

The Expendables 2 (15/R, 102 mins)
Director: Simon West
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

The proposed joy of mindless action-fest The Expendables from a couple of years ago was its bringing together of a marquee list of action legends old and new, from Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lungdren, to Jet Li and Jason Statham.

And yet it didn’t quite deliver on that promise, since it was never quite as silly as it needed to be and, since pretty much all of them made it to the end, they weren’t even that expendable.

Everyone is back (although some barely), plus a couple of new faces for this second go around, which begins with a rescue. The identity of who they're rescuing is cute, one of a lot of nice winking touches that make this a bit of silly fun for an audience in the mood rather than one looking for great cinema. This involves wholesale massacre of an entire encampment of goons, and sets the scene for an astronomical body count to come.

Their mission proper comes when the shady Church (Bruce Willis), who reckons Stallone owes him for a previous transgression, gives him a job to pay the debt which involves retrieving the contents of a safe.

But the contents are stolen by Jean-Claude Van Damme, who’s actually fairly decent value as a bad guy, leaving the Expendable team to slaughter their way through Albania, in what appears to be WWII judging by the sets and costumes, to find their way to Van Damme.

It all makes for a shameless 80s throwback where the object of the exercise is to blow things up often enough and loudly enough that no one notices the otherwise crippling flaws and gaping plot holes.

It’s spectacularly bloody, and delivers exactly what you might expect, no more, no less, and on those terms it almost succeeds, though it’s put together with no great precision or imagination. For all its ensemble appearance, it’s still largely the Stallone and Statham show. Li disappears completely after the opening salvo, and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Willis don’t exactly figure highly, though there is much more of them than there was first time around.

Banter-wise, it’s a dead zone, which might not matter so much if there wasn’t so dang much of it. But it’s so ridiculously cheesy that still there are lines or the appearance of an iconic face to make you smile, even if more often than not you’re laughing at it and not with it.

The Expendables review

The Expendables (15, 103 mins)
Director: Sylvester Stallone

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Stallone. Statham. Li. Lungdren. Rourke. Willis. Schwarzenegger.

It’s a cast list that could only really be matched if someone came up with a movie poster that read:
De Niro. Pacino. Nicholson. Hoffman. Duvall. Spacey. Brando. Which really would be impressive considering he’s been dead for six years.

And yet Sylvester Stallone the director really has managed to assemble that first lot in the service of this brainless action extravaganza, albeit with the screen-time of Brucie and Arnie totalling less than two minutes. Still, nice to see them all together at last.

For an actor and filmmaker who was an object of derision for most of the last two decades, Sly has regained a great deal of dignity and respect in the last couple of years with his final tilts at Rocky and Rambo, so expectations for this were perhaps set higher than might normally be the case.

We’re introduced to the Expendables during a hostage situation, as Stallone and his crew of mercenaries (Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lungdren, Terry Crews, Randy Couture – the characters do have names, but that’s not important) face off against Somali kidnappers.

Following the mission, Mickey Rourke pops us as the middle man who tells Stallone of their next possible job – to be hired by Bruce Willis’ CIA agent to take out a rogue general who has turned a central American island into a drug producing dictatorship.

Treading a very fine line between hokey fun and utter drivel, this is the kind of film that comes with so much built in good will that you want to give it the benefit of the doubt. The last thing you’d expect to be accusing it of is dullness, but after the prologue the next bullet fired in anger is a long time coming. But the bacon is saved by an outstanding sequence during Sly and Statham’s recce of the island before we hit another slump in the sometimes strained build up to the climax.

Instead of action we have to make do with an overdose of would-be easy banter that begins to grate after a while because it’s delivered by actors with no great gift for the playful. Stabbing people in the neck and blowing up entire countries, fair enough - but light comedy, not so much.

When the final reckoning does eventually come, it’s a bone-crunching, limb-slicing onslaught, with levels of violence that push the 15 certificate to its absolute limit. It’s almost as bloody as the last Rambo film but without the rage, with an apocalyptic body count and a chance for the other members of the team to finally get to show what they can do.

Fans of the likes of Commando should be thrilled, as everything about it screams of the 1980s, from the cast to the hackneyed story, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. And yet Stallone refuses to completely commit to the demented tone necessary, even though he knows it’s nonsense.

Much like the 64-year-old star himself, The Expendables is a bit creaky and should have delivered a good deal more, but it just about gets the job done.