Expendables 3

Expendables 3 (2014)

34% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 134 reviews)

Runtime: 126 soul-crushing minutes

Directed by: Patrick Hughes; well, I understand there was studio interference, or at least that's the rumor

Starring: A whole bunch of people; probably too much, as a matter of fact

From: The incompetent buffoons at Lionsgate

Oh boy... here we go. For the record, I gave this 1 ½ stars at Letterboxd. I'll explain why.

"Barney augments his team with new blood for a personal battle: to take down Conrad Stonebanks, the Expendables co-founder and notorious arms trader who is hell bent on wiping out Barney and every single one of his associates."

If I was the type of guy to give one sentence reviews, for this movie I would have said, “I really should have downloaded the leaked copy...” and I probably would have gotten many likes. But I like to be more in-depth than that and in this case I have quite a bit to say about this movie and why I feel so let down by it when I saw it today... not via torrent but on the big screen at my local cineplex.

Now, I am someone who loved the first two movies in this series, rating them at 4 and 5 stars respectively. I know most would disagree strongly with the ratings but that's my honest opinion; the second film in general gave me an incredible adrenaline rush when I saw it in the theatre. I think both movies are a lot of fun in an 80's sort of way.

With this film, I started to worry about it early in the year. As others noticed, most of the people in the huge cast were on the side of the good guys and that was just stupid. Then, the rating of PG-13 hit; the horrible movie studio known as Lionsgate always wanted the rating for the movies and those clowns finally got their way. Well, you saw how well the rating helped out at the box office... I know the excuse is that the movie leaked. IMO it's not that many people who would have seen it just watched it on their laptop; it's that people saw it on their computer screens and spread the word that the movie sucks, and well... I agree! It does suck.

I place a lot of the blame on Lionsgate. They had to be the ones that wanted “the youth angle” and they also had to be the ones to choose non-actors for some of the roles; you get to see Victor Ortiz fire a shotgun a few times and that's about it; you don't even see the people that presumably got mowed down by those blasts. Ronda Rousey was nice to look at in the movie, sure... she's not even Gina Carano when it comes to acting, to be honest.

I was hoping I'd enjoy the action scenes despite the stupid rating. Well, besides things being neutered the rating may as well have been irrelevant as the action was poorly filmed (way too close too often) and when it wasn't hard to follow it was just not engaging or exciting in the least bit. The rather bad CGI didn't help either.

On a messageboard someone described “the young crew” as “The Forgettables” and that is really the perfect description for them. What a blank void they were and their contributions were pretty much meaningless.

The story... terrible. Too often I was wondering what was going on or what happened to a character that resulted in them being where they suddenly ended up with no explanation. How an important character got captured I still don't get; did I literally blink and miss it? Was it just badly filmed? Probably both... really, this is a poorly made movie all around. I hadn't seen any of the young director's films before but I did hear a rumor that there was the dreaded studio interference... I've already given a few of many reasons why Lionsgate is just atrocious all around.

Antonio Banderas... I don't know why most people went wild over the character; as someone here mentioned, he was as loathsome and obnoxious as Jar Jar Binks and that really was true. Then again pretty much all the characters were A-holes and spouted off acres of horrible dialogue and “bro-speak” and in general acted like A-holes.

Really, the only reason this gets the rating it does is Mel Gibson as the villain. It was an interesting character and old Mel does a swell job with the role. Even he can't help how the character got treated, though, or how the final showdown between Stallone and Gibson was incredibly limp and flaccid.

So, this movie sidelined the people that most people wanted to see for far too long, introduced terrible characters you couldn't give a flying F about, was poorly made and filmed, had unexciting action and a weak plot... no wonder why there was bad buzz once people first saw this. This year has had some disappointments movie-wise but this is a big one to me; I had the sinking feeling I wouldn't have a blast with it like the first two but for it to be a lame waste of time generic action movie of modern times is almost soul-crushing.

I'll return tomorrow afternoon.