It stands to reason that if you liked the Expendables 1 and 2, you’ll probably enjoy the third; though you may wonder if you had been duped into re-watching one of those two instead of seeing a new movie. This installment sticks to the formula of its predecessors down to the minutest detail. The one refreshing addition is Mel Gibson’s chilling turn as the depraved villain. It made me anxious to see him in a villainous role in a more serious film.
One way this movie attempts to shake things up is by adding a woman into the mix. UFC fighter Ronda Rousey is introduced as the first female Expendable. They are trying to make a statement here, as her character constantly reminds the disbelieving others, “I can take care of myself.” She certainly can. She gets as many action sequences as the rest of the crew and never needs saving – other than when her whole crew, including three males, needs saving.
However, the movie ultimately fails in its statement for a couple reasons. For one, only her outfit is slowly ripped off due to the action in the film. By the end, her sleeves are ripped off and her “body armor” is curiously unzipped enough to show cleavage; something particularly alarming for a movie that stresses the importance of body armor. (Mel Gibson’s villain survived three shots to his chest thirty years ago because he was wearing body armor. One shot to Ronda Rousey’s exposed chest would have been fatal.) Additionally, despite fending off sexual advances from most of the crew, the end the film has her tell Stallone, suggestively, “If you were thirty years younger…” Sigh. They made an effort to have a female Expendable hold her own, but the film still gradually undresses her and exploits her femininity to sexually validate the lead male – vehemently slapping the feminist flag from the films hand.
This mixed message is a microcosm of the larger issue this trilogy has faced. The Expendables series has tried to take its 80’s values and action and dress them up in ill-fitting modern clothes. We don’t make action movies like this anymore. Our heroes these days are reluctant to kill if they can help it (see the Bourne Trilogy, in which Jason Bourne tries to escape a lifestyle of violence). Even the villains tend to die of their own doing. Maybe it’s because of 9/11, maybe it’s a lot of things, but I have a suspicion that most of us aren’t interested in redemption-less violence anymore. As a pacifist, I don’t believe in redemptive violence. Most people disagree with me. I wonder, though, is our society at least ready to let go of violence that has no redemptive purpose?
The Expendables 3‘s body count is exceptionally high. Most of the dead are not even technically “bad guys.” In the film’s climax, we’re told that the villain’s “soldiers” are the army of a small country of which he has seized control. These soldiers aren’t “evil doers” then, they’re victims. But this film doesn’t have time for those kinds of debates. The script just needed an army for the Expendables to kill.
The title itself betrays this movie’s ultimate tragedy; it features a group of people that believe they are so far gone that the only thing left for them in this world is violence and a death-wish. At first, it seems that Stallone’s character rejects this, as he fires his Expendables team and tells them to go lead normal lives. He then puts his moral foot in his mouth by going and finding younger people whose lives he can ruin by confirming their suspicions that they are, indeed, expendable. He seeks out young people “with a death-wish.” Later, we see the former Expendables are not able to acclimate to normal life, so they come back and form a larger team, young and old, to fight and likely die together at a later date.
The movie paints this as camaraderie, and possibly even heroism: if I’ve lost too much or done too much evil, all I’m good for is to die among others like me or take a paycheck if I survive. This message is actually profoundly sad. Some might see this as the formation of community around shared loss, life experience, and skills. But after three movies, it just comes across as tragic that this many people could be considered expendable, worth nothing to anyone except each other, and that such a group is not hard to join. I hope that we don’t truly believe that.
The Christian message is exactly the opposite. The Bible is full of stories of people who have gone too far, lost too much, done the unthinkable, and become “expendable” – and yet God calls them to do great things. Some of the biggest names in the Bible—Moses, Paul, David—were murderers. But we believe that God upholds the dignity of human life so much that nobody is too far gone. Anyone can experience resurrection and new life.
We desperately need to recover this message as a Church in a time when young soldiers are coming back from war and believe that they are expendable. We need to recover it in a time where our prisons and even death row are standing-room-only. We need to recover it in a time when lines are being drawn in Israel and Palestine and people are not seen as image-bearers of God but as enemies standing in the way of a birthright. I don’t believe The Expendables 3 is evil. I just think it’s wrong. No human life is expendable. Nobody is beyond transformation.
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