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.