I thinkt he saddest thing about the series is that the first two were R rated, and they went in knowing that, but aside from the fact that they drop a couple F-bombs and have a few bloody kills, there's not much there to warrant the R. It's like they put in barely enough to hit that rating because they promised an R-rated throwback movie, and then they stopped. They didn't experiment with it. It's the most generic action possible.

A lot of the time, the team with split up so they can all have their separate fights or whatever, but those sequences aren't tied together. Group A doesn't need to achieve a thing in order for Group B to move in. They don't raise the stakes by having Group A then fail that objective or get captured. That's the way those old awesome 80s flicks were written, and that's supposed to be the style they're trying to nail. People who like the first one claim it's some kind of throwback movie, but it's not at all. It's a generic modern action film that just happens to have old action stars in it.

Those old films had a much better structure to them, with clearly defined sequences that broke the film up into chunks. That's one of the reasons I consider The Raid to be one of the best throwback films, even though it's not really trying to be that. That film has one location, and yet there's a very clear set of lines drawn that separate the various little chunks of that movie, and you can name them off to people and people will know exactly what sequence you're talking about, even though the film all takes place in one building. When I say "The drug lab" or "The hallway fight" or "The elevator scene" you just know what scenes I'm talking about. The Matrix was the same way. They clearly define the places where the action happens, and those places comprise a sequence all on their own where they do everything they can think of in that one area. The setting for the action is as much a character as the guys fighting.

Can you do that with The Expendables films at all? I barely remember any of the scenes from the first film, and I've seen that flick twice. I remember they have a shootout in some tropical location, and there's a fight at the end between Stallone and someone else I'm probably supposed to remember. The locations all look like generic bunkers and courtyards where there are some sandbags and barbed wire fencing and crates full of C4 to blow up. I can't point to any one sequence and go "yup, that's that one scene". That one fight between Stallone and the other guy at the end (Lundgren?) is the only one that springs to mind.

I've not watched the other two, because I really didn't like the first one at all. They promised a hardcore 80's throwback action flick with lots of bad-ass old guys throwing down and fucking shit up, and they delivered a generic late-90's Straight-To-Video flick where the good guys point their guns at people and go 'pew pew pew' and the generic guys do that "oh no I'm being shot a lot" flailing thing and then fall over. Nothing genuinely interesting or fun. You gotta have those moments that stand out, and you have to delineate the sequences into little stand-alone chunks that all have their own little 3 act structure and raising of stakes and those little stand-out moments.

Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade is one of the best examples out there. The boat sequence. The tank sequence. The plane escape. The castle escape / motorbike chase. The tank sequence, especially. It's one of the best action scenes ever put to film.

The CG is terrible too. I don't know who does the effects for Millenium Films, but they suck really hard.