YOU SILLY OLD FOOLS
The plot’s creaking and so are the cast, but the Expendables are back for more preposterous fun
The Expendables 3 (12A) Verdict: Star-laden bullet-fest The Rover (15) Verdict: Classy but grim
AT THIS year’s Cannes Film Festival, the starry cast of The Expendables 3 rumbled into town on a pair of decommissioned Soviet tanks. Out of one, Harrison Ford lowered himself as gingerly as you would expect of someone in his 70s.
Then, as he walked slowly and a little bewildered i nto t he l obby of t he Carlton Hotel, the single hoop earring he wore (an exhibition of what you might call artificial hip) fooled nobody. Here was an action hero more in need of Horlicks than a howitzer.
In the film itself, needless to add, the former Indiana Jones wears his age slightly less obviously.
And it’s hard not to admire him, plus Rambo and The Terminator of blessed memory, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger (whose combined years add up to 207), for not only continuing t o blaze away with machine-guns, but even doing so from helicopters, with quite such a defiant lack of irony.
The picture they were so gamely promoting in Cannes might just as easily be called The Incorrigibles.
It doesn’t really bother itself with anything as flippant as a plot. The shooting and dying begin pretty much from the first frame, as Barney Ross (Stallone), Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), and their hard-nut cohorts spring former colleague Doctor Death (Wesley Snipes) from prison.
It has been suggested, incidentally, that this is a cheeky reference by cowriter Stallone to the actual prison term that Snipes served fairly recently, for the decidedly non-macho crime of income tax fraud. If that is so, then it’s a shame the mischief stops there.
I enjoyed The Expendables 3 more than I thought I would, and it is slickly directed by Patrick Hughes, but it could have sent up itself and its superannuated action men with a little more verve.
Anyway, the springing of Doctor Death is part of Ross’s scheme to gather the old gang from previous outings. The objective this time is to help their CIA paymasters bring to book former Expendable turned rogue arms dealer Conrad Stonebanks (played loudly and with an impres-
sively straight face by Mel Gibson).
But are the old boys up to it? ‘I’m getting out of this business and so should you,’ says Trench (Schwarzenegger) to Ross, and although he’s talking about abseiling down the front of buildings and crashing boots-first through windows, he might equally be talking about playing the action hero past your 65th birthday.
That said, Stallone throws himself into the whizzbang mayhem with manifest enthusiasm. Arnie, on the other hand, l ooks positively petrified in this film, but only in the literal sense of wood eventually turning to stone. he has perfected a style of acting that is beyond wooden, and I suppose we should cherish him for it.
Back to what passes for a plot . . . when Ross unsurprisingly decides that he needs fresh blood, he engages the help of Bonaparte, a headhunter specialising not in merchant bankers but mercenaries, and nicely played by Kelsey Grammer.
Another who acquits himself well is Antonio Banderas, engagingly hammy as a neurotic assassin desperate for a chance to show his mettle. So that’s Rambo, The Terminator, Indiana Jones, Mad Max and now Zorro, all riding shotgun together.
happily, Grammer’s character, uniquely in this film, does not spend his time spraying bullets or chucking grenades. For those of us to whom he will forever be the effete Seattle psychiatrist Frasier Crane, that might have been too much to bear.
Bonaparte is pivotal, however, as an Exocet- age version of The Magnificent Seven unfolds. Ross gathers a new crew, with varying specialities all focused on killing, but then inevitably finds out that he still needs the old crew.
Stonebanks i s holed up with his gang in a vast disused factory in some former Soviet republic or other, and ol d and new Expendables all duly unite to grab him by the Urals. It’s fun, in an immensely noisy, explosive kind of way, but not to be taken too seriously. Or seriously at all.
The ROVER, by stark contrast, cannot be taken anything other than seriously. It is a moody, dusty film entirely devoid of fun, lacking a single laugh or even half- smile. A film to be watched with a grimace.
It is set in Australia ten years after ‘the Collapse’. We never discover what the Collapse was, exactly, but think back-to-back defeats in the Ashes and then double or even treble the sense of devastation.
And it has yielded an Outback where the rule of law has been replaced by the rule of guns and bad teeth. Our old friend Mad Max, if he wasn’t spending his week blowing up Expendables, would be entirely at home here.
Instead, our anti-hero is a man with no name and precious few words (wonderfully played by Guy Pearce, who is forced to act mainly with his eyes).
When three men fleeing a crime scene steal his car, he resolves to chase them for as long as it takes. Only at the end do we discover why he wanted the vehicle back so badly.
By then he has acquired an unlikely sidekick, the brother of one of the car thieves (Robert Pattinson as you’ve never seen him before), and encountered a gallery of grotesques, including a firearms- dealing dwarf and a woman willing to sell her grandson for sex.
It’s all relentlessly grim, but writer- director David Michod, who also used Pearce to great effect in his terrific 2011 film Animal Kingdom, orchestrates i t with considerable style.