The Expendables 3 Review: 10 Things That Sucked

10. PG-13 Rating

Back in May, Sylvester Stallone made the disappointing announcement that EX3 would be rated PG-13 in order to attract a wider, younger audience. Unsurprisingly, this has become one of the movie's most complained about factors, and it is essentially what above all else is its ultimate undoing. After the graphic violence of the previous R-rated Expendables movies, EX3 just feels wrong. Numerous scenes involve the rag-tag team savagely murdering nameless bad guys en masse, yet there's pretty much not a drop of blood to be seen. This is particularly irritating given how many throats Wesley Snipes cuts throughout the movie, and as such it's clear that the movie was filmed as an R and then scaled back to appease Lionsgate. This also results in some painful editing, as director Patrick Hughes scrambles to cut away from the violence before it's too brutal, leading to a rather disjointed, awkward aesthetic that ruins the flow of the action scenes. We could live without the bad language, but the gory action of the previous movies was the whole point: for all of their flaws, they captured the unapologetically grisly essence of all those classic 80s action movies, but this has none of it. The irony of all this, as many Internet commentators have noted, is that while Stallone sought a PG-13 rating to bring the kids in, are kids really interested in watching a bunch of old dudes creaking around killing people? More to the point, aren't they much more likely to just torrent the movie, especially now that a DVD quality copy is out in the wild? These movies appeal to a very specific target audience that wants graphic violence, and in pandering to the kiddies, they may have shot themselves in the foot. Stallone also recently admitted that an R-rated cut of the movie was being prepped for the Blu-ray, but if he expects fans to shell out twice for the movie, he can take a hike.