Two stars. Rated PG-13, despite relentless violence, brutality and profanity
By Derrick Bang
What an overcooked, overlong,
overloud waste of time.
Any semblance of the modestly
clever, “aging Dirty Dozen” scenario
— which the first film in this series possessed, to a minor degree, back in
2010 — has been buried in an endless, mindless fusillade of bullets, bombs and
badly delivered, grade-Z dialogue.
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| Little realizing that their mission is about to go pear-shaped, Barney (Sylvester Stallone, right) leads comrades Toll Road (Randy Couture) and Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) to their unscheduled appointment with a notorious arms dealer. |
I note star Sylvester Stallone’s
credit for this film’s story, with further input from scripters Creighton
Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt. The notion that three whole people were
required to write this laughable mess, frankly, defies belief.
Okay, granted, we’re not talkin’
Shakespeare here. This series’ sole raison
d’être is to gather a bunch of aging A-, B- and C-level action stars, feed
them tough-guy one-liners, and set them loose against some power-mad villain
with delusions of world domination. Cue the aforementioned bullets, bombs and
badly delivered dialogue.
But the cartoonish qualities,
admittedly present back in 2010, have devoured this tedious excuse for a
threequel. The first film’s modest efforts at actual characterization — such as
Charisma Carpenter’s presence as Lacy, tempestuous wife of Lee Christmas (Jason
Statham) — have been jettisoned. Carpenter is a no-show here, as is any
layering that might make us care a whit about these anti-heroes.
They’re simply well-muscled
point-and-shoot stick figures who have no more actual screen presence in this
chaos, than the army of uncredited stunt doubles who actually perform all of these
crazed action scenes.
Well, that’s not entirely true.
Mel Gibson makes a memorably crazed über-villain as psychotic arms dealer Conrad
Stonebanks; Gibson knows how to chew his way through all this nonsense. In
great contrast to Stallone’s morose, stone-faced non-performance as primary
hero Barney Ross, Gibson enthusiastically embraces every aspect of Stonebanks’
bad-bad self. More power to him.
Newcomer Antonio Banderas also is
a hoot as Galgo, an insecure chatterbox who threatens to bore everybody to
death with his ceaseless prattle. Banderas’ performance — and patter — are an
amped-up echo of his comic voice work as Puss in Boots, in the animated Shrek series; the irony is that this
approach succeeds better than most everything else in this pinball machine of a
movie.
