The “putting the team together” montage seems to stretch out for about twenty minutes and is perilously low on jokes that work. This mid-section of the movie really drags. The sequence is well put together and exciting, but the best part is who they’re breaking out - Wesley Snipes, who recently completed a prison sentence for tax evasion. It helps that ‘The Expendables 3’ starts off with a witty, wham-bang action sequence, as the grizzled Expendables, a group of old school, battle-ready mercenaries (this line-up is more streamlined than in past installments and consists of Stallone, Jason Statham, a sorely under-utilized Dolph Lundgren, and wrestler Randy Couture), break one of the original Expendables out from a runaway prison train in some godforsaken Eastern European country (almost all the locations in ‘The Expendables 3’ are fictional, with the bulk of the filming in anonymously grey locales in Bulgaria). Thankfully, notes have been taken, problems have been addressed, and “ The Expendables 3,” while far from an ironclad masterpiece, is probably as enjoyable as this genre can get. All the elements for a good time are there, but the first two movies in the franchise sagged and swayed, faltering under sloppy direction, limp scripts and a staggering lack of style. The conceit behind the Sylvester Stallone-led “ The Expendables” franchise has thus far been niftier than the resulting movies: take a bunch of iconic, past-their-prime action stars from the eighties heyday of macho filmmaking, put them together, lob some old age jokes their way, add excessive gunplay and heat well.
0 kommentar(er)
