Bill O’Byrne’s Bargain Bin Blues: The Expendables 3

The Expendables 3: $$1/2

• Directed by Patrick Hughes.
• Written by: Sylvester Stallone, Creighton Rothenberger, Katrin Benedikt.
• Starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Mel Gibson.

PHIL vs BILL
Sanitised violence was blamed for the third in the geriatric gunslingers franchise punching below its weight of action greats at the box office. Yet it’s this softening of the blows that helps to make Expendables 3 more enjoyable and less offensive than its predecessors. That and a wittier screenplay, with the ‘80s old guard — Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Snipes, Lundgren — squaring off against the ambitious young turks they recruit to help capture warmonger Mel Gibson for black ops boss Harrison Ford. But the most inspired casting is Kelsey Grammer as a gun-for-hire headhunter, whose grizzled charm amusingly leavens the wall-to-wall brawn. The mostly expendable extras include a making-of hour, gag reel and extended scene. — Phil Wakefield.

So you’re a crane operator in Mogadishu and the foreman says, “Hey Jama, unload that container ship over there.”

So you go, “Sure thing boss,” or whatever the Somalian equivalent is when asked to unload a container ship.

You go up in the cab and suddenly there’s a bunch of big muscley middle-aged guys shooting seven shades of shite out of everything and everyone, and before you can get on your phone to take a photo and send it to your cousin who’s also called Jama, some big muscley middle-aged guy leaps up into the cab and cuts your goddam throat with a huge frikkin’ machete!

I just don’t think that’s a fair suck of the sav. There were 300-400 other AK47 firing minions of some Somalian criminal willing to run headlong into the infinite number of bullets that The Expendables can fit into their magazines, but the poor bloody crane driver wasn’t doing much at all.

It is rather akin to when Neo and Trinity go into the foyer in The Matrix and shoot rather a large number of innocent security guys who aren’t Agents and have no idea that they’re living in an artificially constructed universe.

“What are you going to do at work dear?”

“Oh, what we always do. Sit around, read the paper, have coffees, talk crap. It’s pretty quiet there.”

So Dave gets up to check the bags of some Nazi-dressing a-hole who’s too cool for school and Holy Jesus on a Monorail, he’s packing all kinds of heat!

And then this happens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEuZgK669zY

Nazi-chic and automatic weapon fire in slo mo doesn’t make killing security guys ok.

So getting a tad off topic here. Though the treatment of fictional extras as cannon fodder will become an Important Social Issue, mark my words.

It’s not just about how many minions you kill, it’s that you’re nicely colour co-ordinated when you’re doing it.

The Expendables. From a story by Sylvester Stallone, directed by Patrick Hughes, starring every action hero in the latter part of the 21^st century, apart from maybe Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven “What an arsehole” Seagal. (Which was his mother’s pet name for him, I believe.)

Anyway, it starts with Sly rescuing Wesley Snipes from an armoured railway in Somewherestan (after killing a really large number of guys whose marksmanship indicates they were all graduates of the Empire’s Stormtrooper School of Musketry), has some male banter with the guys, takes out the previously mentioned army of Somalian ne’er do wells, and Jama the crane driver, and lo, they see Mel Gibson who was suppose to be killed off in the earlier movie, but he’s come back and he’s still a totally naughty arms dealer who tries to kill them all with a big, big bomb.

They escape but exposition, exposition, male banter, exposition, blowing shit up, get new team of snot noses to replace old team, shooting, escape, capture, kill, kill, get stuck in an old casino surrounded by about 200,000 bad guy troops, shoot, stab, stab, shoot, blowy uppy. Holy parsecs, it’s Han Solo!, even more stabbing, shooting, tank fire.

If there is a fortified compound in the middle of some hard-to-pronounce country, The Expendables are going to blow it up. Guaranteed.

Don’t think for a moment I am knocking such preposterous crap. I love fun preposterous crap. What was missing was the actual fun. Or camaraderie. Not totally. Jason Statham is always a go to guy for humourous asides in sticky situations, but when Sly tries to recreate the old magic with Arnie, it doesn’t work.

Antonio Banderas is one of the bright spots, hamming it up more than Porky Pig on Cialis. Meanwhile, Stallone appears to be on his third layer of facial Polyfilla and Dolph Lundgren is working hard on his second facial expression, so that’s progress of sorts.

Another disturbing thing was the lack of blood. Apparently in an attempt to get a PG13 rating they kept the gore off the screen. It doesn’t work. One could say morally it is wrong to reduce the real-world impact on a human body by being shot, sliced, skewered and stomped on by Deadly Dad Squad, but it also just looks naff. We, the fans of giant, dumb, action movie, deserve our blood squibs and gore, not some Disney snuff movie.

There is nothing after the credits, and plenty of extras including the obligatory gag reel of actors forgetting lines and laughing, young actors talking with sincerity about the two dimensional characters they’re playing, and stuff that won’t add or detract from your enjoyment of this movie one bit.

2.5 stars out of 5. But! bonus executive producer name of Basil Iwanyk. Well, I laughed.