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The Expendables 3

“It ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”

— Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) in Rocky

THAT sentiment happens to be the driving philosophy behind The Expendables 3.

It does not pertain to the story. In this trilogy, it’s about hanging in there as a movie star. The whole premise behind this fightin’ franchise was to show there was life in the old name-above-the-title action stars of the ’80s, giving more seasoned moviegoers the thrill of seeing Stallone (Rambo), Arnold Schwarzenegger (The Terminator) and Bruce Willis (Die Hard) sharing the same film frame.

In this third entry, Stallone sets about the task of resurrecting the careers of a couple of movie stars wounded in action, albeit via self-inflicted wounds.

Wesley Snipes appears early as “Dr. Death,” a former medic/killing machine whose sentence in a prison facility is intended to remind us that Snipes did time for income tax evasion. Later, Barney and his two-fisted friends (including Jason Statham, Terry Crews, Randy Couture and Dolph Lundgren) launch an assault to steal a bomb, only to discover the arms dealer is one Conrad Stonebanks, Barney’s Expendables co-founder. Stonebanks is played by Mel Gibson.

In the ensuing firefight, one of the key Expendables is seriously wounded. Barney is so distraught, he disbands the group, even when a new CIA handler named Drummer (Harrison Ford) assigns him the highly unlikely task of capturing Stonebanks to be tried for war crimes at the Hague.

Barney gets the horrifying idea that, for this mission, it would be better to hire an all-new crew of young fighters, (including Twilight vet Kellan Lutz, the sublimely named MMA fighter Ronda Rousey, and boxer Victor Ortiz) presumably because their deaths won’t matter to him as much. Yikes.

Director Patrick Hughes directs the action in competent, uninspired fashion. (This is the guy attached to do the remake of the extraordinary Asian action movie The Raid?) As for Gibson, he at least doesn’t embarrass himself playing the bad guy, as he did in Machete Kills.

Given that Expendables 4 is happening, Stallone evidently wasn’t stung by negative reviews and lacklustre North American box office. Apparently, it’s not about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep creatively stationary. **

 

The November Man

WITH stars Pierce Brosnan (Golden Eye) and Olga Kurylenko (Quantum of Solace), The November Man deliberately tries to resonate a James Bond vibe in its kiss-kiss-bang-bang milieu of international intrigue. But like a gunpowder-scorched Brioni jacket discovered in a Goodwill store, it just feels like a Bond cast-off.

Brosnan’s character is not so much a blunt instrument as a scalpel. Peter Devereaux is in the assassination business, and in this movie’s Russian-Eastern European locales, brother, business is a-booming. (We learn that he is dubbed the “November Man” by an admiring colleague who observes: “After you passed through, nothing lived.”)

But in the film’s prologue, Devereaux is getting sick of it all, especially after his brash protegé Mason (Luke Bracey) disobeys an order that gets an innocent bystander killed on a CIA mission.

Devereaux’s retirement is interrupted when he is called to help extricate a Russian double agent with damaging intel on Federov (Lazar Ristovski). a vicious war criminal with unseemly political ambitions. It turns out Devereaux has an especially close relationship with said double agent, and when she is senselessly killed, Devereaux goes on his own rogue mission of vengeance against his former masters.

As per Bond formula, the key to the mystery is a beautiful woman. That would be Alice Fournier (Kurylenko), a relief worker with a specialty of rescuing Chechen women forced into sexual slavery. One such girl could provide evidence against Federov, and both the Russians and the CIA are entered in the race to find her.

Director Roger Donaldson maddeningly botches the opportunities that come his way. For example, we are introduced to a cool, lithe Russian assassinatrix (Amila Terzimehic) who promises to be a formidable opponent for Devereaux. Then she seems to drop out of the movie altogether before a climactic showdown that spectacularly fails to live up to its promise.

That pretty much sums up The November Man, suggesting another reason for the killer’s colourful monicker: After he passes through, you’ll just feel numb. **

 

The Giver

FOLLOWING in the pop template of The Hunger Games, Divergent and Ender’s Game comes The Giver, a science-fiction fable in which a lad named Jonas, like Katniss, Tris and Ender before him, rocks his world.

When Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) comes of age, he expects to get a regular job in “The Community,” the clean, peaceful, fascist, suburban future-world he calls home. From birth, citizens are expected to obey the stringently enforced rules: tell the truth, use “precision of language” when communicating and take their daily medication to tamp down an array of pesky feelings and emotions … including sexual desire.

Passed over for more conventional duties, Jonas is designated as the next “keeper of memories,” which places him under the tutelage of current job-holder the Giver (Jeff Bridges). By merely gripping Jonas’s arms, the mysterious elder can transmit a library of hitherto unknown experiences into Jonas’s consciousness: music, excitement, communal joy, and also violence, war, and pain.

Pressured to maintain the status quo via the steely matriarch Chief Elder (Meryl Streep), both Jonas and the Giver start to give vent to their mutually growing conviction that the Community’s robotic ideology is not as perfect as it is seems. Upping the ante, we learn that Jonas’s predecessor Rosemary (Taylor Swift) rebelled 10 years earlier and — uh-oh — we don’t speak about that now.

This adaptation of Lois Lowry’s book makes some risky moves. Much of it is in black and white to reflect the Community’s drab, conventionalist world-view. One scene, involving a medical procedure on an infant, is stunning and very disturbing in its matter-of-fact execution.

But even with its distinctive qualities, The Giver is ultimately tepid stuff, with Oscar-winning heavyweights Bridges and Streep looking and acting like antagonistic hippie cultists.

Mostly, the movie is a maddeningly poor excuse for science fiction. After going to the trouble and expense of creating an elaborate dystopia, the movie degenerates into goofy, anti-scientific fantasy of magic and miracles. **

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca