Review: 'The Expendables 3' Starring Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Mel Gibson, and More

Through two movies Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables has been nothing but unfulfilled promises. The mandate for the franchise was pretty simple: gather the greatest action heroes of the '80s and indulge in every silly cliché the genre had to offer. Action movies today are pretty terrible but their stars are even worse, so it should have been easy to have fun hyping the old guard while bashing the current one. For a lot of reasons Stallone was never able to make things click, but with The Expendables 3 he finally gets it right. This is the explosive old school flick we have been waiting for all this time.

One of the major problems was the bloated cast never really added anything of value. What good were the creaky bones of Chuck Norris and Jean Claude Van Damme? Especially when there were so many characters neither really did much, anyway? The Expendables 3 fixes that with the inclusion of Wesley Snipes, Antonio Banderas, Kelsey Grammer (!!!!) and Mel Gibson, all of whom attack their roles like they've been waiting for just this opportunity. Even the screenplay, which is rife with all the terrible one-liners we'd be disappointed not to hear, actually resembles a real story. Wha??? Heaven forbid somebody remember to give these muscled behemoths something to do.

And what they do is make blowing stuff up and killing folks look like more fun than it should. A daring train assault springs free Doc (Snipes), an original Expendable locked away for years after a botched mission. He's keen with a blade (how ironic that Blade is good with a blade! Oh, Sly aren't you clever?) and makes good with the quips, which makes him perfect to rejoin Barney (Stallone) and his team of grunting old mercs. And this time it's perfectly okay to call these guys a bunch of old fogeys because that's essentially what this film is all about. After taking down some random, vaguely Middle Eastern bad guy, the Expendables are shot to crap by international arms dealer Conrad Stonebanks (Gibson), leaving Hale Caesar (Terry Crews) in a coma. Stonebanks, who probably has the worst name in Expendables history, has an old beef with Barney that stretches back to the group's formation. He's dangerous; so dangerous that Barney decides to leave his aging team in the dust and recruit some new blood.

The junior league of modern hot shots consists of failed-Hercules Kellan Lutz, sexy UFC champ Ronda Rousey, boxer Victor Ortiz, and Glen Powell. With the exception of Rousey the new squad isn't nearly as interesting as the old crew and watching their recruitment is a serious drag. But it does afford us the chance to see Banderas as the chatty pest, Galgo, a mercenary nobody seems to want on their team. Banderas knows the score on movies like this (he was just in Machete Kills) and he's never been funnier. While he's too old for it now but he would have made for one Hell of a Deadpool twenty years ago, based on this badass and hilarious performance alone.

Whereas Harrison Ford, yes Han Solo himself, isn't given a whole lot to do he has a good time while doing it. Whooping and hollering while manning a rescue copter, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jet Li spraying bullets dementedly by his side, it's easy to see that this is what The Expendables always should have been. Another bright spot is Gibson, clearly indulging in yet another chance to play a ridiculous bad guy (he was also in Machete Killsin a similar role) who resembles the maniacal Martin Riggs if he went full-on nuts.  It's great stuff, slickly directed by Patrick Hughes who keeps the pace moving while edging out the gory stuff that would have upset the MPAA apple cart. For once the PG-13 rating didn't seem like an obstacle to be overcome, and that's with more action than in the first two films combined. The final sequence alone, a massive tank onslaught where every Expendable struts their stuff, is a cornucopia of violence, terrible jokes, and amazing vehicular feats that would make the Fast & Furious cast blush. Jason Statham (kind of in the background this time) and Snipes measure their...knives...in the middle of a firefight, Banderas hits on Rousey while she just hits people, and Stallone is still somehow faster than artillery fire. Even the final showdown lives up to expectations with Stallone delivering one truly amazing, groan-worthy catchphrase that is destined to end up on t-shirts. In short, it's pretty awesome.

So what are the odds of there being an Expendables 4? Hopefully there won't be any passing of the torch going on but with Stallone finally finding the winning formula these can go on as long as his aging bones will allow. There are still too many stars out there who need their moment in the napalm. One guy you won't ever see is Bruce Willis, who had a very public spat with Stallone over money and quit the movie after appearing in the first two. For a good time, count the number of occasions in which a character calls Willis' character, Mr. Church, an a-hole or disparages him in some way. Clearly the smoke has not cleared on that feud and hopefully the smoke hasn't cleared on The Expendables just yet.

 Rating: 3.5 out of 5

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Sylvester Stallone, Nelly, and Terry Crews Look for Answers in 'Reach Me' Trailer

"There's no stopping someone that will stop at nothing", begins the trailer for Reach Me, a dramatic ensemble that features Sylvester Stallone in the rare role that doesn't require him to blow anything up or punch someone in the face. It's been nearly two decades since Stallone put on his drama hat in Cop Land, a film that was ripped at the time but has since been recognized as one of the actor's finer performances....at least compared to his latter Rocky, Rambo, and The Expendables efforts. And now Stallone is ready to show what he can do again but the trailer suggests the film may not be up to par.

Stallone is surrounded by a cast that immediately pegs this as something headed for Redbox with the quickness. Kelsey Grammer and Terry Crews (Sly's buds in The Expendables 3), Cary Elwes, Thomas Jane, Ryan Kwanten, Tom Sizemore, Tom Berenger, Kevin Connolly, The Walking Dead's Lauren Cohan, Agents of SHIELD's Elizabeth Henstridge, Kyra Sedgewick, ex-New York Giants fullback Jarrod Bunch, Nelly, and Danny Aiello star as a group of people who are all connected by a self help guru's book, but little do they know he's just a reclusive former football coach with his own problems.

John Herzfeld (15 Minutes) directed and wrote the script so if it looks like a poor man's Crash then he's the one to hold responsible. Reach Me will open on October 24th.

Reach Me Official Trailer (2014) Sylvester Stallone, Tom Jane HD by Newest Trailer

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Review: Michael Bay's 'Transformers: Age of Extinction' Starring Mark Wahlberg

Any hope of seeing the Transformers millions of fans grew up watching on Saturday morning long ago dashed, Michael Bay's films are now little more than a licensing expo masquerading as a Hollywood blockbuster. The fourth film in the franchise, the aptly named Transformers: Age of Extinction is a thundering assault on the aural and visual senses and a marketing agent's wet dream of product placement overload. In other words: same energon, different chassis, right? In terms of sheer brazen spectacle Bay delivers maximum action; big and loud as ever but also lacking the passion he usually brings to every single project.

It wasn't that long ago Bay had planned for Dark of the Moon to be his final time chronicling the ongoing war between the heroic Autobots and evil Decepticons, but a last-second deal with the studio got him back for at least one more. And part of that deal was he would get to direct his passion project, the crime comedy Pain & Gain, before jumping into 'Age of Extinction'. That bit of arm twisting may have done something to Bay enthusiasm, or at least it feels that way. The result is a film that sees Bay burning through his usual bag of tricks at an accelerated pace and employing a visual style best described as uninspired. Surely, a Transformers movie that doesn't look all that good would be an utter disaster, right? Well, not exactly, because Bay and franchise scribe Ehren Kruger have come up with a story that is surprisingly effective, easy to follow, and tailor made for new star Mark Wahlberg. That's right, no more of Shia LaBeouf's stuttering and getting pushed around by Megan Fox, this film has a genuine tough guy in Wahlberg and it's a drastic improvement.

Not quite a reboot but forging a new path forward, the story takes place a few years after Chicago was devastated in the prior movie. The city has been rebuilt remarkably well, almost as if nothing happened at all. In fact it looks exactly same. In the time since, the world has cooled on the idea of giant killer robots hanging around, and that includes Optimus Prime and his Autobot. Kelsey Grammer plays Harold Attinger, one of those non-descript government guys who always have some black ops unit doing their own thing behind the President's back. He's been out there slaughtering Autobots, including some old favorites, with the help of Lockdown, a mercenary Transformer who desperately wants to find Optimus. In exchange, Attinger will receive a giant Macguffin"the seed", a powerful object responsible for the destruction of the dinosaurs and not the "Big Bang". Trust that this reworking of history is only there to introduce the fan-favorite Dinobots and not as any part of the story that matters in any way. What's Attinger's deal? Plain old human greed as he's hoping to gain a big payoff by working alongside Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci), the temperamental head of KSI Industries who have begun building superior models of Transformer for military use.

Wahlberg, playing the same sort of homegrown lunk/intellectual he played inThe Happening, is lowly robotics expert Cade Yeager. His Paris, Texas business has been hit hard by what looks like the worst economic depression ever, and he's basically struggling to make ends meet while keeping track of his hot and rebellious daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz). She's got a thing for bad boys, though, and has secretly been dating a race car driver (Jack Reynor) whose skills come in handy when everything goes to Hell in a hand basket. And it takes a good stretch of time before that happens as we're treated to the Yeagers' financial woes and familial squabbling; even though we know it will be forgotten once Bay starts blowing stuff up. When Cade buys a beat-up old truck at a bargain it turns out to be an in-hiding Optimus, bringing Attinger's goons and Lockdown to his doorstep.

There's never been an excuse for how convoluted the earlier movies have been, especially since...HELLO!!!....this is Transformers and the primary audience is kids. So it's somewhat refreshing to have a story that's fairly simple and straight forward with Optimus looking to protect a humanity that has constantly stabbed him in the back. Does he finally reject humanity and leave them to their fate? He'd be justified to do it, and the dilemma raging within him is probably the most interesting development of the entire series.

But as stated before, nobody comes to these movies for insightful character development. They want to see stuff blowed up real nice, and as stated before Bay just doesn't seem all that into it. Sure, there's more slo-mo and gratuitous flag waving than ever before, not to mention an abundance of glass buildings ready to be shattered, but what else? You can count on two hands the number of times the Transformers do the "drop and roll" maneuver and Bay shoots them exactly the same way every time. Same cars getting bowled over, same skyscrapers toppling, it all just gets repetitive and deadening after a while. By the time the action heads to China for the final stretch you've seen it all, ad nauseum. Every critic on the planet is going to talk about the 165 minute runtime so why bother joining in? You know it's too long. I know it's too long. The only one who doesn't know it and doesn't care is Michael Bay. There are a couple of great scenes that really leap off the screen, both car chases set in the middle of falling debris, leaping robots, blasting lasers, and everything else Bay could think of. There's still that difficulty in finding something for the humans to do while the Autobots fight, and for the most part Peltz and Reynor are left to hide in the background, occasionally stopping to make out. Wahlberg wasn't brought in to be on the sidelines and is wisely thrown in the middle of every battle, something they simply couldn't do believably with LaBeouf.

Some curious decisions were made in the choice of Transformers to follow this time, too. While the Dinobots have been demanded by fans since the beginning, they're more monstrous than any previously seen version. Ken Watanabe voices the samurai-esque Autobot, Drift, while John Goodman is the cigar chewing Hound, neither of which you'd call "first stringers". Hardly any Decepticons appear at all but the one who does is the only one that really matters, setting the stage for the second chapter in what is to be a brand new full-metal trilogy. Every Transformers movie has been a greater success than the last and even if this one doesn't continue the streak this franchise isn't going anywhere for a long time. That will make a ton of fans very happy but everyone else may want to stock up on Excedrin.

Rating: 3 out of 5

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Kelsey Grammer Hopes to Play Beast Again in Future 'X-men' Film

Kelsey Grammer: Franchise Superstar? That's what it has been like lately, or it will be in the coming weeks when the former Cheers and Frasier star is seen in both Transformers: Age of Extinction and The Expendables 3. And that's on top of a very brief cameo he made only weeks ago in X-men: Days of Future Past, reprising his X-men: The Last Stand role as the older version of Hank "Beast" McCoy. And as it turns out, Grammer was so gung-ho to play the mutant genius again that he reached out to Bryan Singer in requesting the cameo. He tells Collider....

Grammer: “Actually I called Bryan. I bumped into Hugh Jackman and he said, ‘Oh you’re gonna be in another X-Men, mate!’ and I said, ‘No I’m not, I don’t know anything about it.’ So I made a couple of inquiries, got a hold of the script, found out that it’s primarily dealing with the past and that timeline I don’t have a place in, but I saw that at the end there was this coda where he made an appearance. I said, ‘Listen, I really want to be involved,’ so Bryan arranged for it and I had a lovely time.”

While we know X-men: Apocalypse will be set in 1983 and largely focus on the younger band of mutants, the door has clearly been opened for more movies with the present-day team. And if that turns out to be the case Grammer wants to be part of it...

Grammer: “I hope to do another. I hope they find some way to come up with a new story that involves Beast in my timeline.”

X-men: Apocalypse opens May 27th 2016. 

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Humans Take Center Stage in First 'Transformers: Age of Extinction' Clip

How is it that Optimus Prime and the other Autobots haven't figured out how much easier their lives would be without pesky humans running around? In this summer's Transformers: Age of Extinction, it's greedy, power-mad humans who are once again making their lives miserable and opening the door for the Decepticons to do something terrible. And while their schemes eventually fall into the background in favor of Michael Bay-style spectacle, it's the human cast at the center of the first official clip.

Featuring a leaden and (probably) inconsequential showdown between Dirk Diggler and that guy from Cheers, the clip has the two making vague threats at one another about something. Bay essentially jettisoned the entire cast of the prior films and brought in Mark Wahlberg, Nicola Peltz, and Jack Reynor as the core trio. It's an odd scene to release first, as if Bay is trying to convince us there might be an actual plot to consider this time. Sorry dude, nobody cares so just make with the giant robots and the smashing and the blowing stuff up.

Transformers: Age of Extinction opens June 27th.

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Review: 'Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return' Starring Lea Michele, Patrick Stewart, and Martin Short

Oh the Wizard of Oz. That first story about the little Kansas girl and her dog being swept away to a magical land has surely lasted the test of time. A completely American fairy tale it’s been able to spawn so many books and adaptations. Last year we got the live action prequel Oz the Great and Powerful and this past season on TV with Once Upon A Time added the Wicked Witch of the West (don’t ask me how that works with the Disney princess stuff). I guess with this whole resurgence of interest in Oz someone decided they needed to also combine with another trend of 3D CG animated family movies and that’s how we got Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return.

Now here’s the thing; this isn’t based on any of L. Frank Baum’s many books that happen after The Wizard of Oz, it instead uses some out of canon story by his great Grandson Roger Stanton Baum. Now I can’t say if that book is good but I do notice that no one talks about many of the sequels that aren’t considered canon and I don’t think many people will be talking about the movie either. This movie is a mess and to be honest a lot of CG films this year just haven’t been that good but this might be the worst one I’ve seen all year. This film is completely forgettable and really uninteresting to look at with some of the flattest 3D to be done in the cinema all year.

The story of the film is that in Oz time a few years have passed and Oz has fallen prey to a new threat called the Jester, who is using the Wicked Witch of the West's broomstick and a magical Orb to terrorize all of Oz.  The Jester also captures all the leaders of Oz and turned them in marionettes. The Scarecrow, along with his friends the Tin Man and the Courageous Lion, find a way to contact and bring Dorothy back to Oz. For Dorothy the entire original adventure in Oz just happened a day a go but once she returns to Oz she has to complete another journey and make a new trio of friends to defeat this new magical bad guy.

Basically this whole story retreads the same type of journey seen in the classic 'Oz'. This time she meets a big, really brainy Owl named Wiser who really has no confidence. Then a solider of Candy County called Marshal Mallow who doesn’t know how to think for himself, and she meets the China Doll Princess, who must learn to not be so demanding and mean, a tired old princess trope seen many times before. Then the last person they encounter is an old talking tree who they turn into a boat called Tugg. The whole movie is 88 minutes of what feels like either a direct to DVD release bumped up to prime-time or three half an hour cartoons poorly tied together. Half the movie is singing with songs that really don’t help or move the plot along at all. There are points where you start to get into the story just a little bit before some annoying song starts blaring out of the speakers leaving you asking why and what’s happening. The vocal performances are decent with the singing all done very well since it’s by Broadway performers and people from Glee and Smash.

To what I said earlier the design of the movie is completely uninteresting. Most of the character designs are pretty generic or coming from old CG movies. Most of the lighting is very flat and the texture at time really didn’t bring any depth or sense of believability to the world or characters. It felt like watching in game cut scenes from launch era GameCube games. There was one short scene that the crew did a fantastic job and it’s where Marshal Mallow gets tricked into asking the China Doll Princess to marry him and even though it’s short it’s the only time I sat there and was like wow these folks did a bang up job making this. The 3D is also a waste if makes a lot of the film very blurry and darker than normal for 3D movies and again nothing really pops out. I took off my glasses a bunch of times while watching and it and I lost nothing. The 3D actually makes Wiser look the worst since his edges of his feathered body is always blurry.

So as you can see I’m not too fond of this movie at all. I don’t think you should waste your time with this unless you have a kid so into the Wizard of Oz that they will annoy you until you past out. This is something to me that so bad you shouldn’t even waste a red box on. With all the options out there just go watch the old movie or read them the book or even the comic adaptations. In the end when I walked out I felt like I just watched a failed Broadway musical that got turned into a failed animated movie that no one else should have to suffer through. 

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'The Expendables 3' Goes Big with 16 New Character Posters

Guys like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Jason Statham can't do much on their own anymore, but when they unite for The Expendables everything just comes together....sortof like The A-Team. The first two flicks in the tough-guy franchise have delivered exactly what they promised: over-sized action, and so it makes sense they'd go full-on overkill with the release of 16 posters for The Expendables 3.

These aren't your standard one-sheets of the expanding (both in cast size and waist lines) roster of heroes, instead giving us behind-the-scenes style looks at a cast consisting of the returning Stallone, Statham, Schwarzenegger, Randy Couture, Terry Crews, Dolph Lundgren, and Jet Li. Also enlisting for the next Dirty Dozen mission are MMA champ Ronda Rousey, Wesley Snipes, Harrison Ford (still !!!), Glen Powell, Kelsey Grammer (still ???), boxer Victor Ortiz, Antonio Banderas, Kellan Lutz, and Mel Gibson. Gibson, of course, is playing the bad guy who happens to be a former partner of Stallone's Barney Ross.

The Expendables 3 is directed by Patrick Hughes and opens August 15th. Hopefully this means a trailer is right around the corner. [Comingsoon/IGN/Joblo/Collider]

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Kelsey Grammer Lands Nic Cage's Role in 'The Expendables 3'

He's Frasier Crane, and he is listening. It's been a few years since Kelsey Grammer ended his multiple Emmy-winning run as radio psychologist Frasier Crane, and in that time we've seen him make other attempts at the small screen that haven't really panned out. Fortunately, he's found better luck on the big screen, taking the villain role in Transformers: Age of Extinction, and now by joining Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables 3.

Part of Stallone's master plan for The Expendables 3 involved bringing in Nicolas Cage for a supporting role, but like many of the others Sly reached out to (Jackie Chan, Milla Jojovich), things didn't quite work out. So it will be Grammer taking his place as Bonaparte, a former mercenary who helps the Expendables on their mission, whatever that is.

That's two straight franchises for Grammer. One more and we can start calling him the new Vin Diesel.  So add Grammer's name right alongside fellow action icons Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Statham, Wesley Snipes, Mel Gibson, Jet Li, and Harrison Ford. Yeah, sounds about right. The Expendables 3 opens on August 15th 2014. [Deadline]

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