Review: ‘The Expandables 3’ From the Editor Chief

by: Antonio La Cerva

The Expendables are back, the question is: is this movie worth your time?

The story is pretty simple, Conrad Stonebanks (Mel Gibson) is thought to be dead with the twist he returns dealing arms on the black market. With an attack on ‘The Expandable’ team, it’s up to Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) and his team to take him down.

Expendables isn’t a movie that focuses the success on the story, but instead it focus on the explosions, the non-stop action scenes, and of course the buoyant stern-charismatic cast. The story starts with a mission went wrong where one of the ‘Expandables’ got badly injured by the hand of our main villain Conrad Stonebanks (Mel Gibson), co-founder of the expendables who went dark and was taken down by Barney, or so he thought. Right after the incidents the movie goes a bit downhill and I’ll explain why.

This film works as I said, because of the charismatic actors that we all know from the previous action films of the 70s-late 90s—along with the two previous Expandables films, but here they get put aside. However, until the very end the older generation is replaced with new Expendables who, in my opinion, have little to no charisma, don’t get me wrong they try, but unfortunately they don’t succeed.

Summing up the ending as being really cliché which can be enjoyable though debatable. I love the typical Arnold Schwarzenegger humor and really enjoyed having Wesley Snipes back even if he didn’t have much screen time. Although I really miss the presence of Bruce Willis who got replaced by Harrison Ford, Ford made his role feel like he was actually in charge. The special effects were well done and the explosions were awesome and spot on (yes, Transformers I’m talking to you).

Overall The Expendables 3 was a really good movie, I wanted more of the old ‘Expandables’ than the new ones, but I really enjoyed it. The runtime for a movie like this, is fair (126 minutes) and it doesn’t drag; Mel Gibson gaves a really great performance and it has a good amount of screen time.

My rating for this film is 8/10.