About.com Rating

The kind of filmmaking that makes you imagine a Red Bull can in an Ed Hardy shirt being struck by lightning and ascending to the director's chair, The Expendables 3 continues the breakfast buffet approach of Sylvester Stallone's most recent set of films, where freshness or quality is less important than gut-busting amounts of quantity. Originally, the idea of combining several, uh, let's say elder statesmen of the action genre's past to make a literal-and-figurative more-bang-for-your-buck scenario felt both inspired and a little tired.

This third film, actually directed by relative newcomer Patrick Hughes makes big, deliberate mis-steps -- a PG-13 rating, too many new characters, under-using the characters we already know -- that make The Expendables 3 feel more disposable than not.

The plot -- as such --  is simplicity: A gig goes wrong for Barney (Sylvester Stallone) and the rag-tag crew of mercenaries who give the film its title, thanks in no small part due to the presence of international bad guy Conrad Stonebanks (Mel Gibson), a ruthless arms dealer who, surprise surprise, used to be one of The Expendables alongside Barney. With some of his crew laid up -- and the rest clearly too long-in-the-tooth for the dangerous job that must be done -- Barney abandons old pals like Toll Road (Randy Coture), Gunnar (Dolph Lundgren), Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) and Dr. Death (Wesley Snipes) to recruit a new group of younger, tougher Kid-spendables like Thorn (Glen Powell), Mars (Victor Ortiz), Luna (Ronda Rousey) and Smilee (Kellan Lutz) to take down Stonebanks.

This, too, goes wrong, with Barney now having to get a team -- any team -- together to rescue the now-captured Kid-spendables, with help from Antonio Banderas' talkative death-dealer Gallo, Arnold Schwarzenegger's Trench, Jet Li's Yin Yang and CIA man Drummer, played with reheated grit by Harrison Ford, as well as the gang he left behind earlier. This lineup seems large, and you are right; by the time the climax in The Expendables 3 happens, the scene feels less like action cinema and more like a small-town high-school musical production of Hello, Dolly, where there are two dozen singing waiters because everyone from Ms. Bradley's sophomore drama class has to be in the production.

Again, the need to make the film PG-13 is a grim, disreputable piece of money-making strategy; at least the early Expendables films had a little bit of crimson splashing around to liven things up. And while Gibson used to be able to bring some intensity to his roles, really, there's not a lot he can do with threats like "I'll open up your meat-shirt and show you your heart." In fact, the film foolishly sidelines the most charming and vital Expendable -- Terry Crews' Hale Caesar -- while Snipes and Banderas steal scenes mostly by virtue of looking awake.

There are some adequate action bits in The Expendables 3 -- Rousey, as you may know, can fight, and a pas de deux of fists and firearms conducted between her and Banderas is a highlight of the film. But a lot of the action here is also painfully old-school -- digital explosions, set-pieces in ruined buildings, dirty deeds down by the docks -- as if the best Hollywood can do for action in 2014 is shooting Hong Kong-style from 1994. The Expendables 3 ends with a group of its characters drinking, happy, at a bar and doing karaoke, and that's pretty much what the film feels like -- people straining and wheezing through what, once upon a time, was original, tripping on tedium and painfully under the influence of nostalgia.