The Expendables 3 (2014)

Posted in Reviews by - August 20, 2014
The Expendables 3 (2014)

The third Expendables film stockpiles big names like rounds of artillery. Rambo, He-Man, The Transporter and new addition Blade flunk their one shot at capturing former buddy Mad Max, who has now gone rogue as a shady arms dealer and is wanted for war crimes at The Hague by CIA chief Han Solo. The old guys can’t cut it anymore so the expendables are expended and replaced by younger blood – hackers, Parkour experts, mixed martial artists and Zorro (here being played by Puss in Boots), all hand-picked by TV’s Frasier. The new crew mix muscles with the geriatrics in a blown-out Bucharest shit tip strapped with C-4 and go merrymaking with a small army and enough firepower to blow up a small country, with the Terminator and Wong Fei-hung supplying additional gun fire from a helicopter.

It’s lunacy, but for brief moments it still holds a spark. The intensity of the action, particularly during the fight scenes (aside from Ronda Rousey’s glorious take downs), suffers under the tightened 12A certificate, which also acts to undermine the whole concept of the franchise. As the result, it is the most sanitised of the three, which is probably just as well considering it’s a miracle some of these old timers can even stand up straight. Sly, who is undeniably compos mentis, still hulks about like a talking wardrobe. Arnie is reduced to shouting out lines from his old films like a patient in a care home. If there’s any life left in this franchise then someone will have to wake up the cast and let them know.

This post was written by
Editor and creator of Kung Fu Movie Guide and the host of the Kung Fu Movie Guide Podcast. I live behind a laptop in London, UK.

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