The Expendables III review: It's a Bollywood action film made in Hollywood

What happens when you get a gang of once-ragingly popular actors past their prime and build a movie around them, hoping that people will flock to the theatres if only to watch them walk around each other? You get a lot of guns and explosions, testosterone and tattooed muscle display but a plot so weak as if the filmmakers were trying to prove that it is not necessary that a film has a plot.

Actually_, The Expendables III_ might have actually made a point here. The fact that Sylvester Stallone was willing to make three The Expendables movies, all of which are considered to be commercially successful, says a lot about how much viewers care about plot and acting in an action movie.

In The Expendables III, Barney Ross (Stallone) and his team of mercenaries are up against arms trader and co-founder of The Expendables, Conrad Stonebanks (Mel Gibson). While investigating an illegal arms deal, the Expendables, much to Ross’ shock, find out that Stonebanks is behind the entire deal. In a subsequent fight, Hale Caesar (Terry Crews) is severely injured and the team is forced to retreat.

Determined to stop Stonebanks, Ross puts together an all new, young and improved team. The new team intercepts Stonebanks during one of his deals and abducts him. However, Stonebanks’ henchmen attack the Expendables, free and rescue their boss and capture everyone on the team except Ross, who falls into a river.

Ross, with his old team, then goes on a mission to rescue his new team and stop Stonebanks once and for all. Will he succeed? That was a rhetorical question. The answer is as easy to get as it is easy to wonder why Sylvester Stallone chooses to persistently look constipated.

However, even if you ignore the highly predictable and stereotypical plot of the film, you will still marvel at its stupidity. For example, why would Ross choose to go on a dangerous mission with an entirely new team instead of his old one only to later go on an even more dangerous mission of trying to rescue his new team with the help of his old one? Doesn’t this destroy the entire point of not choosing the old team in the first place?

As if that wasn’t enough, Stonebanks, after being freed by his henchmen, sends a video to Ross showing him that he is indeed holding his fellow Expendables hostage and then (drum roll) dares him to “come and get them”. For a shrewd arms dealer who only cares about profit, how stupid is the decision to keep his kidnappers alive and dare his enemy to come after him instead of killing the captured Expendables straightaway and living happily ever after? Now the last thing we came across in a film that endorsed the same brand of logic, was vampire Pattinson’s decision to have a baby with human Kirsten in the last Twilight movie.

The most hilarious part of the film, though, is the final showdown between The Expendables and Stonebanks’ (wait for it) army. Who will win? The bulletproof Expendables or the army of drunken goofs who would more likely shoot themselves than hit a target?

But since we already established that the characters in the movie were motivated by excessive testosterone rather than logic, let’s talk about the acting. Probably the saving grace of The Expendables III is Gibson’s acting. Stallone comes a close second, though he mostly looks like a Game of Thrones fan in India utterly upset with Torrents speed, through most parts of the film.

He looks like the man who should lead the Expendables, with the right amount of brain and brawn to advise and order the Expendables around, as the other Expendables are just fighting machines. Actually, the only hint of nuance that any other character in the Expendables shows is when one decides to chew a gum as the rest look like they have pyramids for jaws. There’s just one woman in the team, who looks consistently upset as if she has been just made to watch Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda video on loop and can no more look at a human butt without feeling nauseous.

And guess what’s the job of these motley group of upset people? Surprise, surprise! It is to shoot at things or blow them up.

Gibson has delivered the best performance in the movie. The way he plays the role of the cunning, conniving and ruthless arms dealer brings about the only depth there is in the movie and also manages to cover up the stupidity of the character. For example, in a scene where Stonebanks is trying to convince the other Expendables that Ross himself is not entirely the good guy he seems to be, Gibson successfully creates doubt in the viewer’s mind and brings a touch of grey to the otherwise blatantly black and white roles in the movie.

The other characters in the movie are mostly one-dimensional and shallow. Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) acts like he wants to marry a knife, as usual. Gunnar Jensen (Dolph Lundgren) plays his part of a really mean guy with a good heart well but is not given enough screen time. The worst acting, however, comes from Ronda Rousey. Apart from the lamest and cheesiest one-liners, Rousey plays the part of Luna with such gimmicky masculinity as if being feminine is forbidden by The Expendables. Basically, Rousey’s job in the film was to scream that there is a woman in The Expendables now, who is as tough as any of the men. Why? Because she can look grumpy and knit her brows and can call bigger men ’ladies’ as if that’s supposed to be an insult.

(Warning: If you are a feminist, do not watch this movie. You are likely to want to murder someone.)

But perhaps the saddest thing to see in The Expendables III is the way the characters of Antonio Banderas and Arnold Schwarzenegger folded out. Both are highly accomplished action movie stars. Yet, they are confined to being sidekicks with character development shallower than that of the wolves in Twilight.

Banderas’ character is a clown whose jokes never work. He is the comic relief in the movie who is treated like dirt by everyone. Even his comic relief does not work as the viewers will end up dying from an overdose of lame punchlines. Schwarzenegger, who is considered by many to be the best and the last action hero (pun intended), is reduced to a character who only smokes cigars, keeps calling Stallone’s character an idiot and expresses great affection for Jet Li’s character.

Some of the scenes in The Expendables III could even be said to be copied. The way Stonebanks gets captured and then freed is strangely similar to the plotline of Mission Impossible III in which Philip Hoffman’s character gets captured and freed. The video which Stonebanks sends to Ross reminds one of the video which The Joker (Heath Ledger) releases in which he tortures and kills his victim in The Dark Knight.

In a nutshell, The Expendables III is the sort of movie you want to watch if you want to see Hollywood actors doing stuff which usually happens in a typical Bollywood action flick, only with better graphics and cuss words in English.