Movie Review: The Expendables 3

by Tony Dayoub

Anyone looking for The Expendables 3 to provide summer's final hurrah at the box office might want to look elsewhere. Where the first Expendables played like a shaggy, small-scale reprieve from career oblivion for former action stars Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, and Jet Li, this one feels like it's lining up the burial plots. Where the second and best film in the series raised the stakes by bringing in Jean-Claude Van Damme as its villain and Chuck Norris as comic relief, The Expendables 3 overplays its hand amassing a cast of has-beens and future never-will-bes of such an unwieldy size that few get a chance at making any kind of impression.

Movie Review: Sabotage (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

Sabotage is a visceral (literally) new white-knuckler that often turns on some fairly surprising plot twists. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays John "Breacher" Wharton, a legendary DEA agent who leads a squad of unruly undercover agents that also happen to be about the best there are at what they do. The nervy prologue shows us the team in action. Lizzy (Mireille Enos) has infiltrated a party at a drug lord's mansion pretending to be a hooker. Breacher makes the requisite macho joke to her husband "Monster" (Sam Worthington) about how she may be the one with the bigger balls. The rest of the roughneck crew—Grinder (Joe Manganiello), Neck (Josh Holloway), Pyro (Max Martini), and Sugar (Terrence Howard)—all have a laugh before they get to work breaking in after her to confiscate the cash. They funnel $10 million of it down into the sewer by way of a toilet filthier than the one in Trainspotting, burn the rest, and manage to exit with the loss of only one life. Which is to say, drug enforcement is the dirtiest of jobs, and it takes this type-A boys club and the kind of woman that can keep up with them to get it done. But before they can retrieve the cash and tag it for evidence, it's already gone missing. Someone on their team can't be trusted.

Movie Review: Escape Plan (2013)

by Tony Dayoub

I can't ignore that my kneejerk reaction to just about any Sylvester Stallone movie is, "This is gonna be good." So I'm putting that out there. But Escape Plan is just the kind of well-executed high concept thriller that I believe demonstrates how canny the actor's instincts have become, especially in his middle age. Here's a man who didn't listen to casting directors who wanted to pigeonhole him in stereotypical thug roles early in his career, wrote the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for Rocky to showcase his leading man potential, then after working with some notable filmmakers got sidetracked by movie star excesses in the 90s before returning to late stardom with The Expendables, a franchise which he humbly shared with action star friends and rivals, figuring that a rising tide lifts all boats.