The Expendables 3 first look review a blundering jackhammer of a film

The third instalment of Sylvester Stallones over-the-hill-mercenaries franchise gives us more of the same with added Mel Gibson

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Four words, but oh so depressing: Wait theyve got reinforcements! They are uttered by Jason Statham about two-thirds of the way through The Expendables 3; just when you might be reasonably expecting this blundering jackhammer of a film to be reaching its final stages up pops Statham to inform us theres still more of this to come. More tanks, more rocket-propelled grenades, more blokes on motorcycles, more semi-audible pay-off lines howled over the thunder of detonating ordnance.

For fans of The Expendables series, you have to assume, this is exactly what they want. A self-conscious retread of the glory days of the 1980s action movie, this trilogy is actually much more of a modern, sanitised variant, with the blood and guts of its template movies edited away, and a colour-graded sheen slathered over everything, making for self-indulgent, mildly pernicious essay in gun-worship.