Feature | Lights, Camera, Action! – The Expendables 3 (Movie Review)

The Expendables 3 (UK Rating: 12A)

Stallone came up with the idea for the film - which can't have taken long - and also co-wrote the script, so a lot of the blame for this piece of clichéd tosh is well and truly his. The members of the audience who left before the credits started to roll wouldn't have seen that, but they were, to put it mildly, voting with their feet. Who can blame them? It is, as Arnie unintentionally points out, boring - bog-standard action sequences, deeply dull characters, a Swiss cheese storyline and precious little humour. That's not to say that they don't try to raise a laugh, but most of what passes for gags is drowned out by the sheer noise of it all. Those that do break through are hardly worth it, like Harrison Ford not being able to understand a word Jason Statham says. It's so tedious that counting the number of explosions is probably more interesting. There's about 40, by the way.

Given that this is number three in the series, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect a sense of the cast enjoying working together again, but not even that is in evidence. The only person who appears to be having fun is one of the new members of the team, Antonio Banderas, as a talkative Latino. He does at least bring a smile to the face, but he's the only one.

2/10

Very Bad

An expendable is somebody of little significance who's easy to destroy or abandon, and that pretty much sums up The Expendables 3. It's dull and uninspired, a B movie puffed up by a bunch of A-listers and a budget to match. Inflicting a fourth outing on the cinema-going public would be downright unkind yet, by all accounts, Stallone is planning an all-girl version, The Expendabelles. See what he's done there? All together now … ENOUGH!