In case you haven't been keeping up with the news, the third installment in Sly Stallone's "Expendables" ensemble action franchise was leaked to the internet on July 24th, three weeks before it was due to hit theatres.
Normally I'd have a few qualms about pirating a film I'd intended to see in the cinema, but I was having some moral issues with seeing Expendables 3 in the first place. My main objection was that the film had been classified as PG-13 in the States - the equivalent of 12A in the UK. Action films with that rating are always terrible, because you're not really allowed to show any violence.
My other objection to paying money for the film was that the antagonist was being played by Mel Gibson, and I have this weird personal rule about not giving money to crazy, racist, bible-thumping assholes.
The plot of the film sees Gibson as Colonel Stonebanks, a founding member of the titular mercenary group, who had a falling out with Stallone's character many years ago. Presumed dead, he resurfaces unexpectedly and severely wounds one of the cheaper-and-less-famous Expendables.
This causes Stallone's character to have a crisis of conscience (none of his guys have taken so much as a scratch for two whole movies now, after all, except that red-shirt kid in EX2) and disband the team, deciding instead to go on a suicide mission to take out Col. Stonebanks. For this, he will need younger, crazier Expendables, and a radio psychiatrist from Seattle.
I wasn't kidding.
Predictably, the younger Expendables get caught and the old dogs of war have to turn up to save the day, with a little help from their friends (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford, Wesley Snipes and the barely-in-this-movie-at-all Jet Li.)
If this sounds like a pointlessly circuitous plot, that's because it is. The attempt to shoe-horn in younger cast members is on of the biggest problems with this film, and as said shoe-horning takes up most of the middle of the movie, it's a major problem.
Things start promisingly enough when the team attempt to break Wesley Snipes out of jail - movie jail, not the actual jail Snipes has recently been in for tax reasons. A joke about Snipes' character being imprisoned in this ultra-high security mobile jail for tax evasion feels like an odd choice, as though we, the audience, are expected to chuckle and side with Snipes - a millionaire who got caught paying less tax than the rest of us.
As soon as the team begin their assault on the train, however, it becomes clear what's going to be wrong with the whole film. The expendables arrive in a helicopter and machine gun a dozen guards to death, and they all fall down without a drop of blood or any visible injuries, in order to keep the theoretically lucrative PG-13 rating.
During the same prison train sequence, the expendables have strung a wire across the tracks so that guards on top of the train will be taken care of, and when said guards run into the wire at 80 miles an hour, they're knocked over like dominoes instead of more realistically being cut-the-fuck-in-half.
PG-13.
Snipes is by now off and running, and we see him leap athletically into the train's engine room and do... something violent. Not sure what. Every time it was implied that he killed someone the camera would cut away to spare the delicate sensibilities of the audience.
The whole movie goes on like this - constantly squeamish and with a twitchy, peekaboo editing style that makes sure we never see anything too graphic in a film whose entire selling point is its stars' reputations for on-screen violence.
Not that any stars with a decent reputation are much in attendance. Stallone, impressively cut at 62 years old in the first Expendables movie, but now struggling to hide his growing paunch at 67, clearly didn't do much more than just turn up for this film. It's painfully evident when they switch to his stunt man for any scene that calls for anything more strenuous than "chatting with Kelsey Grammer." Harrison Ford also looks every minute of his seventy-some years, casting some heavy doubts about the efficacy of these Star Wars sequels he's currently filming. Snipes, too, has a scene in which his stuntman shines while he presumably sat in his trailer smoking a bong - Snipes may be a skilled martial artist, but the scene in which (from a distance) he demonstrates a sudden knack for parkour is jarringly out of place. I refuse to believe Snipes could learn to do too much free running from the 8-by-12 foot cell he's spent the last few years in, so I call bullshit.
Indeed, it's a strangely parkour-heavy film. Antonio Banderas crops up as an athletic, acrobatic mercenary in an attempt at comic relief, and then proceeds to be painfully unfunny for the rest of the film. Hollywood needs to learn that having a stock "irritating" character isn't funny - we, the audience, wish he'd shut up every bit as much as the other characters on screen.
The new Expendables, meanwhile, might be better off calling themselves The Interchangeables. They're all young and perky, and consist of a hacker, a guy with an explodey gun that I swear is never seen again after his intro, the token "problem with authority" rebel character and real life MMA fighter Ronda Rousey, a shocking inclusion as "an Expendable with tits."
Gibson as the villain is passable, but really just doing the same "crazy" schtick that was a lot more palatable before anyone found out that he honestly was crazy. His character is under-written and hypocritical at best. We're asked to believe he's the bad guy because he's an arms dealer who has killed thousands of people, and the only people who can stop him are Stallone and co, who we've already spent two movies watching mow down hundreds of anonymous soldiers. The fact that Gibson's character points out that Stallone is a mass-murderer doesn't excuse the loophole, only highlight it. There's some token guff about Stallone and Gibson having their feud because Stallone's character "has a conscience," but it really doesn't wash.
The real problem with this film (and the franchise as a whole) is that people seemed to have lost faith in it very quickly. The first film was a violent, semi-serious action film that felt comfortable with itself. Nobody would ever argue for it being a classic of cinema, but if you wanted a film with shooting and fighting and everything blowing up, it was perfectly serviceable.
Expendables 2, meanwhile, seemed to lose its way somewhat and at times became an outright parody of itself.
Expendables 3 has gone past the point of parody and into the realms of cartoon. The kid-friendly style of the film shows that the producers have no faith in the adult demographic that made their stars famous turning up, so they've decided to make it as vanilla as possible in the hopes of attracting the maximum number of people.
It is, in a word, bloodless. In both senses.
With the internet leak and the overall shoddiness of the product, this will probably put the last nail in the coffin of The Expendables franchise. Everyone seems to expect a trilogy, these days, and Sly and friends have pulled it off. Just about. On this evidence, however, if they're desperate enough to make a fourth film I probably won't bother.
Even if it is for free.
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