• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

The Expendables 3

I guess another country thought the poster was too busy and stripped it down to who everyone really cares about (minus Jet Li):

 
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, The AV Club:

Expendables 3 could be a straight-up cartoon action flick in the manner of Joe Carnahan’s underrated The A-Team, but it lacks the necessarily elastic sense of style. (Hughes does get a few good shots in during an early chase through a Somalian harbor, though.) It could be a serious consideration of violence and its effects on a group of combat-hardened men; Stallone’s dialogue certainly suggests that he wants it to be one. Heck, it could even be both. Unfortunately, it’s neither; its only ambition is to put a group of charismatic stars together in a room, and let them crack wise. Their back-and-forths are entertaining. It’s just about everything else that feels lacking.
Maybe EX4 should center around the gang having their passports permanently revoked, and being forced to become lavish wedding planners for the nation's most elite bridezillas?
 
I saw it last night. The story was clearer than in the first two and they did well at structuring the movie to give the new big names something to do but I found myself unimpressed with all the machoness and the formula feels tired and played out. This was my least favorite movie of the summer.

As for our new additions...

Wesley Snipes: Did great but a little over-the-top at times.

Harrison Ford: Did great but a little too clichéd at times as the pencil-pusher/out-of-retirement action hero (I'm glad he got in on the action though).

Antonio Banderas: I didn't like his character. He was supposed to be the comic relief but instead he came off like too much of a buffoon. They should have given his character more confidence and charisma. That would have made him more like the rest but it would have worked.

Mel Gibson: A decent villain with an interesting backstory.

If they do another one, they really need to shake things up by bringing in some women. The younger cast that they introduced don't seem like enough to carry the series, though I did like Ronda Rousey.
 
^ That thread (about the upcoming ExpendaBelles) asked why the Asylum hasn't already ripped these films off. I thought they had? They're usually pretty quick on the draw when they want to steal somebody's idea.

Although maybe the problem there is, there aren't any real famous "Asylum actors" who could do one. The best they could probably come up with would be a bunch of guys nobody's ever heard of...

And before anybody mentions Tim Thomerson: He belongs in a real Expendables movie. You KNOW you want it.
 
The Asylum actually made their cheap female Expendables flick already with Kristanna Loken, Bridgette Nielsen, Vivica A. Fox and Cynthia Rothrock, using the creative and unique title... Mercenaries.
 
^ Yeah, Bridgette Nielsen especially would have been perfect for a future Expendables movie and/or a proper spin-off. Too bad the Asylum nabbed her up already.

A Loken/Schwarzenegger reunion would have been good too.
 
Speaking of Tim Thomerson, supposedly a B-movie martial arts Expendables-type movie with Don "The Dragon" Wilson, Jeff Speakman, Cynthia Rothrock and Michael Dudikoff (and whoever else from that era they can get), was being developed but I don't know if anything ever came of it.

And I just remembered I posted a thread about this topic already in 2012.

And you posted about Thomerson there too. :p
 
I kind-of want to checkout "The Mercenaries"

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiE18U7to0M[/yt]

As for Expendables 3, I may check it out. I enjoyed the other ones.
 
Speaking of Tim Thomerson, supposedly a B-movie martial arts Expendables-type movie with Don "The Dragon" Wilson, Jeff Speakman, Cynthia Rothrock and Michael Dudikoff (and whoever else from that era they can get), was being developed but I don't know if anything ever came of it.

And I just remembered I posted a thread about this topic already in 2012.

And you posted about Thomerson there too. :p

They should put those guys you mentioned against the Stallone team.
 
Kind of disappointed that Rousey (the only female in the group) has to be rescued (timestamp 1:31) along with some of the lesser members

Maybe, but if her introduction scene - beating up drunken idiots wearing that slinky red dress - didn't lift your spirits, you must turn in your Man card for a period of three days.

And she held her own for the rest of the movie after her rescue. And keep in mind three guys had to be rescued right along with her. They were equal opportunity hostages.

Meanwhile, I don't know about the entire summer, but this is definitely my favorite movie of the franchise.
 
I was very disappointed with EXP3. And I wasn't going in with high expectations.

EXP1 is just okay, while EXP2 I actually found to be a very good action film.

The cardinal sin of this movie is that it eliminates 90% of its primary cast for over half the movie. I could really give a &@#$ about these random new characters played by not-famous people. So I just can't believe that over half the movie involved introducing them and sending them off on a mission. I don't want to see these people, I want to see Terry Crews and Jet Li! Oh wait, they're on in a couple of scenes of the movie. Sigh.

And while it's great to see more Ahnuld, they managed to make his character completely uninteresting. I enjoyed how he was an adversarial asshole in all his previous scenes, but here he's just a uninteresting soldier that doesn't stand out.

Even Mel Gibson, who I was really excited about having as a bad guy, wasn't terribly impressive. He was a lot more fun as a bad guy in Machete Kills. I would say that Van Damme was a much better villain in EXP2.

But just so I don't sound entirely negative, I liked Wesley Snipes and Antonio Banderas :p
 
Beaten by a CG raccoon, CG turtles, and two sitcom stars in at least the third cop-movie parody/comedy of the year - that, amigos, is humiliation:


Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Guardians of the Galaxy held on to the top two spots at the box office this weekend, handily defeating the disappointing Expendables 3.
[...]
In a surprising development, The Expendables 3 wasn't the highest-grossing newcomer of the weekend. That honor went to Let's Be Cops, which took third place with $17.7 million. Including its Wednesday and Thursday grosses, Let's Be Cops has already earned $26.1 million.
[...]
The Expendables 3 opened in fourth place with an estimated $16.2 million, which is off a massive 43 percent from The Expendables 2's debut. That's a stunning drop, and is almost unheard of for closely-timed sequels (though fellow Lionsgate/Summit release Step Up All In was off 45 percent from its predecessor last weekend).
[...]
A handful of factors contributed to this steep drop. As is the case with many third installments, franchise fatigue has set in; while the movie did seem to mix things up a bit, it still couldn't overcome the feeling that it was more of the same. Meanwhile, some die-hard fans of the first two installments were likely turned off by the movie's PG-13 rating; for a franchise that was built around over-the-top violence, this seemed like an odd change.

Finally, it's likely that piracy had some kind of impact. A pristine version of the movie has been online for the past few weeks, and has reportedly been downloaded over two million times. It's impossible to say exactly how much of an impact this had, but it's also hard to imagine that the movie would have dropped 43 percent without the piracy effect.
(Box Office Mojo)

Bullet to the Head, The Last Stand, Escape Plan, Sabotage, and now this... all flops. Arnie's got another Terminator on the way, and Ford has Star Wars, of course, but I'd be surprised to see another Expendables without a severely reduced budget - which might not be such a bad thing. Oh, and Stallone's also prepping "one last" Rambo (5).

... I've said it before, I'll say it again: can't Arnie play an old buddy of Quaritch's, and sail out to the Pandora system with a hornet up his arse? 'Cause he may soon need the work...
 
My theory?

Not only did the piracy contribute, but none of the advertising that I saw did a good job "selling this movie."

Yes, it has a great cast, but nothing in the ads I saw made me stop and say, "Holy shit! This is going to awesome!"

So if I wasn't already an Expendables fan, I probably wouldn't have started with this simply because the ads didn't make it all that interesting.

Further, the first film HAD to kinda have left a bad taste in some people's mouths because they HEAVILY advertised the long awaited reunion between Stallone, Arnold and Bruce Willis, and it wasn't even an action scene, just a 2 minute talking scene. I know I heard people casually talking about, "It was just one scene!" as if they had expected something more.

Anyway, I just saw it today.

I enjoyed it. Fun action film.

Wesley Snipes did a great job, and so did Antonio Banderas. Of the new people, I only really liked the girl. The new team should've been guys like Vin Diesel, The Rock and more recent action guys. Mel Gibson was great as usual.

The one thing I felt that really lacked was one or two badass henchmen for Mel Gibson. Give Arnold, Snipes, Banderas, Couture, or Lundgren a henchman to fight. They gave Statham that big dude, but they didn't really build up to it.

Too bad this is flopping because I wouldn't mind seeing a fourth.
 
Last edited:
I didn't find the movie to be that bad.
It's bad for about 1/3 of the time which is to say the second act.
It opens strong and ends strong cause in those moments the film is realizing the founding premise of the franchise.
ESTABLISHED ACTION MOVIE ICONS JOINING TOGETHER

Not only are MMA "stars" not star power enough in my book they are neither actors, nor actions stars and they sure as hell aren't icons. The script would've done better to focus on the new comers to the series in Act 2. Giving more depth to Doc(Snipes), Banderras, Gibson and Ford's characters. Gibson especially could've used some more backstory. Sure what we got suffices one could argue but more could've been done if they weren't trying to sell me on MMA athletes being worthy of being included. I was hoping like the Hemmsworth character in EX2 that most would be executed by Mel at the end of Act 2.

I'd rate it about a B-
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top