And Kelsey fucking Grammer, who spent the '80s playing an incongruously pretentious know-it-all at a cozy bar on a TV sitcom.

E3, sadly, comes after the franchise has already called in Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, & Chuck Norris, and the best it can add to the table are Wesley Snipes, a fine addition who gets precisely fuck-all to do Mel Gibson, a currently disgraced loony whose action heyday was in a kind of light entertainment miles away from anything that Stallone or Schwarzenegger ever dreamed of doing Harrison Ford, barely even feigning an attempt to hide his disinterest in the film (he gets the solitary F-bomb in a movie that successfully, but pointlessly, targeted a PG-13 rating, and I do think he enjoyed that) Antonio Banderas, who, okay, I'll let them have Antonio Banderas. Neither one of them is really any good at all, but they at least live up to their billing. 2010's The Expendables managed to scrape by on the strength of its conceit, and 2012's The Expendables 2 at least had Jean-Claude Van Damme camping up a storm as a bad guy named Vilain. But that is not to be the case: this is an inordinately humorless film, in fact, especially for one which boasts such a considerable percentage of its running time in the form of lead-footed quips choked out by its ensemble cast in a vague approximation of the japes that action stars toss out when they off a bad guy in a specially elaborate way.īut I do not wish to lose the thread. It would, at any rate, be sufficiently brazen about being stupid in such a case that it might be possible to regard the movie as moderately charming in its self-aware crappiness. Whatever natural goodwill one has towards the central gimmick of the central gimmick of the Expendables franchise - lookit all the '80s action stars in one place! and these other guys like Terry Crews and Randy Couture, for no immediately apparent reason! - it has long since been expended worn out by the time arrive at The Expendables 3, a movie that commits the mortal sin of having that many 'E's in its title, and replacing none of them with the Arabic numeral '3'.

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