The Expendables 3 and Getting Older Among the Youth Obsessed Culture

by Christopher Barr

The Expendables 3 is about the same thing 1 and 2 was about, it’s about bringing back musty action stars from the 80’s and 90’s into a pastiche world of corny one-liners and endless gunfire, except this time it’s PG-13, which means the only good stuff about the last two has been removed to bring in a wider audience.  Sylvester Stallone is the front runner of this muscle extravaganza, he wrote and directed the first one and co-wrote and produced the last two.

The movie was about…I actually don’t know what it was about other than Mel Gibson’s baddie and Sylvester Stallone’s moral high-ground had it out for each other.  That’s not to say the movie is cryptic in the David Lynch sense, it was actually so simple that it was transparent, even an actual plot was unable to hang off its pulsating bicep.  These movies are for your insecure machismo male adolescent, who dream of steely mighty men by night while he struggles to prove his masculinity to any female in breathing/texting distance by day.    

I don’t know if it’s just me, and I’m inclined to think that it isn’t, but the young ‘talent’ coming out of Hollywood these days are wooden, lifeless people.  Products of a generation of Facebookers and Tweeters that have been lost on the fundamental requirements for human connection, people that have developed relationships through text messaging and not face to face.

The young stars that are introduced in The Expendables 3 are so forgettable that I have to type this fast to get my thoughts on them down before they drift into nothingness.  They were dull and they were boring, they lacked any charisma, they lacked personality, oh and did I say they were boring.  This makes me think of The Goonies, Stand by Me, it makes me think of Back to the Future and The Breakfast Club, I can throw in Clerks and Dazed and Confused, even Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels for that matter.  These were all films with a cast of young people that had heartbeats, they had verve and actual character.

Today, according to same who believe we live in the best of times, we have Twilight, Divergent, The Mortal Instrument: City of Bones and The Maze Runner, all movies filled with card-bored cutout iTeens that have taken the Zombie craze to a whole new level, with this method acting de-animated CGI-teared fake-fest.

There has been a mass epidemic of arrested development in the last couple of decades in North America and now spreading to other parts of the world.  Recently this phenomena has been downloaded in an Apple update to a mass arrested of underdeveloped people.  This is the state of things today where animated concepts like a sense of humor and the ability to understand metaphor has been dis-‘Liked’ and discarded for cool concepts like #hashtags and WTF’s.

Watching The Expendables 3 made me sad that these grizzly old men, in order to stay relevant in the modern age, have to include such ‘dial-tones’ to their cast.  And to think that the cast was not already crowded enough they add these….wait, who was I talking about?  My train of thought drifted back to Ferris Bueller talking his way into a Chicago fancy restaurant so he can show his best friend Cameron a good time in the city.

The Expendables 3, like many Hollywood movies, is a money grab.  The concept of bringing all these action stars together got boring by the second act of the first movie.  I say thank goodness for Eric Roberts for getting what they were really trying to do with that first movie.  Also, there is something sad and pathetic about seeing men that were so alive in films like Rambo, The Terminator, Lethal Weapon, Blade, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Desperado and Rocky 4, and at this point are all trying to send the message that they still all have it.  They don’t all still have it because they are old, and in modern society, being old is death ;)  They are trying to push the sand back up the hourglass and coming off as desperate for doing so.  Empires rise and fall, nowadays we live in a superhero saturated environment, where wielding a gun at the enemy isn’t good enough, it comes off as too simplistic, today there needs to be something multi-dimensional about the proceedings, something super-human.  Watching older men pull the trigger at faceless, nameless enemies is truly a thing of the past.  Watching Rocky, Predator and The Empire Strikes Back is all the enjoyment I need to know that these men were once great at what they did.  The point being, it’s sad we live in society that has done away with the traditional ‘right-of-passage’ of getting older as a part of life and getting wiser as a hopeful consequence of getting older.   

I’ll be back.