Critics reviews

Those first two movies look like Seven Samurai next to The Expendables 3, a sad, bad, parade of uninspired cameos and listless violence... As [Barney and Bonaparte] watched with admiration as [Luna] beat down several misbehaving clubgoers on the dance floor, I realized that I, the viewer, wasn't seeing _anything_: Just some awkward close-ups and reaction shots and some choppy editing designed to let me know that somewhere, somehow, ass was being kicked.

With its third entry, the Sylvester Stallone-led Expendables franchise finally becomes the live-action Saturday morning cartoon it was always destined to be. Constrained by a PG-13 rating (the previous two films were R-rated), the series' over-the-top violence becomes even more unreal; here, miniguns are emptied into crowds of henchmen who crumple conveniently out of frame and knives are thrown at out-of-focus targets.

It's all a bit like a classic-rock tribute concert, or playing with all your action figures at once, or maybe "Cannonball Run," with the strained buddy-buddy back-and-forth. It's also a leisurely action movie that feels as though it's spread pretty thin across its more-is-better cast.

It should come as no surprise that Hughes's empty-headed bonanza, with its tinny, tough-as-fuck dialogue and unimaginative set pieces, serves as a 128-minute velvet-gloved stroke of Stallone's ego. Seemingly every character has to be measured against Ross and his legacy and, in the case of his ask-questions-later brethren, the ones who have known him the longest are most deserving of respect.

Even though this third film has nothing at all new to add to the conversation... The Expendables 3 still somehow manages to be the strongest in the series thus far. Cinema's ability to enhance and romanticise reality is used to its fullest, from a quaint sequence which sees Stallone sprinting across a rooftop, to a new generation of young Expendables doing awkward, hastily-learned karaoke along to Neil Young's 'Old Man' in a blues bar.