The Expendables 3

Review by Matt Finley

In concept, THE EXPENDABLES films have enough cultural caché, gritty drive and sweat-slicked human meat to play greasy, mugging John Henry against the modern blockbuster machine, with all its CG robots and green screen fancy-pantsing. In execution, however, they fall woefully short, feeling less like the flesh-and-bone, stunt-driven actioners of yesterday than plodding victory laps after the fact.

Patrick Hughes’ (RED HILL) THE EXPENDABLES 3 is no exception.

In true Expendables fashion, I could exhaust my word count on the role call alone: Sylvestor Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Randy Couture, Terry Crews and Dolph Lundgren (who is seriously starting to look like a scientist tried to build a Mickey Rourke that is also a Rutger Hauer) all return to their roles (Barney, Christmas, Yin Yang, Toll Road, Caeser and Gunner, respectively) to grunt and gambol their way through a fill-in-the-blank action movie template.

The Expendables 2

Review by Bob Ignizio

How many action heroes can you cram into one movie before it becomes a cluttered mess? It seemed as though that question had been answered by 2010's THE EXPENDABLES. That film had its moments, but far too often it felt rushed and confusing. So how then to explain the fact that THE EXPENDABLES 2 beefs up the roles for two stars who had only brief cameos last time, adds two more of the biggest names in action hero history to its cast, and even manages to give us a pair of new, younger heroes, and yet still manages to juggle all these stars and their respective egos far better while only losing one major cast member (Mickey Rourke) from the previous film?