The Expendables 3
Director: Patrick Hughes
Talent: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford
Release Date: 22nd August 2014
The Expendables franchise is about two things: latent homoerotics sublimated as macho violence, and the mass-killing of an othered ethnic underclass sublimated as a righteous revenge narrative that, over the course of each film, nobody pretends to even care about or understand. You can consider both those boxes emphatically ticked by this latest product of Sylvester Stallone’s HGH-addled and clearly hurting psyche, in which the eponymous mercenary team’s target is none other than Stonebanks (Mel Gibson), a former ally turned arms dealer to foreign “warlords” and “madmen” that have the grace not to trouble our screens at all (and maybe they’re all the more scary and inscrutable for it!). So the Expendables cull a violent and relentless surplus population of an anonymous Middle East, then Barney (that’s Stallone) kills Stonebanks and, in one of the greatest kiss-offs in action movie history, claims to be the Hague. A good old imperialist yarn!
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
For more film coverage this month, see our reviews of Moebius, The Hundred Foot Journey, The Congress, Million Dollar Arm, Into The Storm, Deliver Us From Evil, Obvious Child, and We Gotta Get Out Of This Place.
