Review of The Expendables 3 (2014) by James D — 20 Sep 2014

4.5/10 It fails to achieve even the most elementary of its purpouses, being it to provide some good old action fun with all of our favourite 80-90s action stars, but it still manages to pull off a decent flowing movie with some highlights and interesting setpieces.

The movie soley relies on its cast which is no doubt top tier for what they are intended to do, but that is where they stop making a real effort. Nobody here is trying to do something special, something interesting nor surprising. They limit themselves to do nothing but what the paycheck requires. Expetions to this are soley Mel Gibson and Antonio Banderas who are the two founding pillars of the film and keep it away from total failure: their performances are both well played out and manage to make the best of their screen time, never failing to capture an opportunity to shine on screen and they both do that brilliantly when they intend to. All of their fellow cast members are simply decent and nothing more, not even Stallone is doing anything really interesting and the only two actors, other than Gibson and Banderas, who manage to have a moment are Ford and Schwarzenegger.

On all of the other levels the film is very mediocre, never terrible or unwatchable, but very cheap and it surely doesn't understand tonally what it wants to or should do. It spends way too much time doing things we don't really care about and when it switches to the action it disappoints. The action is really, really sloppy and the CGI involved other than being a bit too much is totally underdeveloped. The oneliners fail nine times out of ten but thankfully that one time they actually manage to be very funny, yet they are mostly delivered by Banderas.

To sum it up I did not have what I wanted from The Expendables in the portion I wanted it, but I kind of got a consolation prize in various occasions.