The Expendables 3
Dir: Patrick Hughes
2014
**
Sylvester Stallone may have collected the best line up yet in the third installment of the Expendables series. Cameos are nil (okay, apart from Robert Davi but that was much appreciated), every new member of the team has their place and more than five minutes screen time each. Wesley Snipes's character starts of well with quite a lot of intrigue surrounding him, unfortunately this is sidelined and he disappears into the crowd. Harrison Ford pops up unexpectedly and delivers a very odd performance, looks elderly and reappears in the last five minutes. He was a big name and they totally wasted him. Mel Gibson on the other hand was the best baddie they've had so far by a country mile. He seemed to be the only person capable of acting, which will always make one look good but he really was intense and believable. Similarly, Antonio Banderas made a great addition to the cast as a form of light relief that the franchise desperately needed. No one was capable of saving the film though, everything from the story to the terrible CGI made this installment pretty hard to watch. It was cliched in a bad way, rather than in the retro-tribute b-movie way that it should have been. If it weren't for the big names this would have been straight to DVD and into the bargain bin in the local supermarket. The franchise is a one trick pony and I think time is now up.