2 outta 5

If measuring by combined weight of the cast, The Expendables 3 is the biggest entry in the franchise, however bigger does not mean better.  The first Expendables is a decent ’80s throwback men on a mission flick and the second is an excellently paced, self-aware piece of pop action cinema.  Unfortunately, this time is not a success.  3 is the weakest instalment and makes more than a few missteps however there are some neat beats here and there that grab your attention.  Overall, Expendables 3 feels like something the other two movies did not; this feels tired.  

Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) is the leader of the team of mercenaries known as The Expendables and they’ve just sprung an old member, Dr. Death (Wesley Snipes) from prison.  Their latest mission is a disaster when a target, Stonebanks (Mel Gibson), puts one of their members, Caesar (Terry Crews), in critical condition.  With a gritty CIA spook, Drummer (Harrison Ford), breathing down Barney’s neck, Barney sends the old crew packing and finds a group of young hotshots to take on Stonebanks.   But things go sideways quickly and Barney has to assemble new and old Expendables if he has any chance to defeat the bad guy.

This is the first entry in the Expendables series to be rated PG-13 in the States which means the violence is missing the crunchy messiness that made the first two stand out.  There are many, many explosions, possibly the most in the series, but the gunshot violence feels more like a videogame than a ’80s action entry.  At least in the other Expendables various goons would go splat when shot.  Here they just fall down. 

A big misstep is to disband the Expendables crew at the 30 minute mark, taking away the zippy chemistry of the other films.   Too much of Expendables 3 is devoted to Barney and the new guys who are a bland bunch.  You get the feeling the producers wanted hot young actors for the roles but couldn’t get any so instead we get faceless unknowns.  There’s a long sequence where Barney and a cohort, enjoyably played by Kelsey Grammer, recruit members and while Grammer provides a lot of quips the meetings with the new crew are fairly boring.  MMA fighter Ronda Rousey’s character is defined entirely by her disgustedly snorting “Men” after beating dudes up.  One bright spot is Antonio Banderas as a merc trying to lie his way onto the team and Banderas plays his character as a bundle of energy, never shutting up.  Banderas also delivers the requisite Expendables series Very Serious Monologue About War (which was provided by Mickey Rourke and Liam Hemsworth the last two flicks). 

Arnold Schwarzenegger pops up again and is amusingly goofy as Barney’s buddy / rival in mercenary work, even getting in a “GET TO THE CHOPPA!” howl for good measure.   Jason Statham’s second in command and the other original members barely register as cameos, with one of the most charismatic Expendables, Crews’ Caesar, sidelined completely.  In real life, Snipes is freely out of prison so the fact that they bust him out confinement is a neat meta gag.  His character enters the movie in a great action scene with mucho boom but soon Dr. Death takes a back seat.  Ford snarls grumpily as Barney’s boss and Ford knows the right semi-serious / semi-goofy movie star tone to hit.   Also he does some daredevil helicopter flying at the end so you can pretend he’s being Han Solo with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Chewbacca.  Things perk up whenever Gibson provides hammy villainy.  He gets in a rant about how he started the Expendables with Barney and was betrayed which is very well delivered.  There are a few other babbling diatribes Gibson empathically monologues with fun reactions; when Stonebanks finds out that he’s going to be tried for war crimes at the Hague Gibson seems positively giddy. 

The action is weighted a bit too heavily at the opening and closing of the film which little to keep you engaged in between, aside from a few sporadic moments with Gibson, Banderas, or Schwarzenegger.   The Expendables descending upon a speeding train in a helicopter to retrieve Dr. Death is zippy and ends with some excessive exploding and the first raid against Stonebanks has a nice progression to the action (whenever a boat lands on a truck, that’s a bonus).  But after a spirited start, the movie hits a severe lull that kills its momentum.  By the end, there are Expendables fighting a whole army, intercutting between dozens of individual battles with cool flourishes but instead of exiting it’s mostly just loud.          

The previous two films were, if anything, entertaining watches, but here the edges are softened and the narrative rudderless, which makes Expendables 3 a disappointment.   You can see a more fun movie peeking around the edges, especially at the end, but for all the rampant, bloodless chaos, it’s too little too late.