2026 - WAR MACHINE, science fiction action junk which is entertaining

The latest streamer action movie and there are a lot of streamer action movies is War Machine.  It's an entertaining time waster and no one will confuse it with Wild Strawberries.  War Machine is essentially a remake of Arnold's Predator action classic and it does have as it's star another man mountain Alan Ritchson.

Ritchson plays a soldier who gets admitted to the Army Ranger training program although in real life he would probably be considered a little old.  Ritchson is suffering from PTSD from a previous tour in Afghanistan but he's still one tough SOB.  Anyway on the final test of his Ranger training he and his classmates get dropped into the middle of the Colorado woods although Australia is the substitute for Colorado.  They run into a robotic killing machine released from where else space aliens who apparently want to take over the earth.  So now the plot sequels into a rehash of that other space alien invasion epic Battle:  Los Angeles.

 

Lots of shooting, ray gun blasting and chases the usual stuff.  The War Machine seems unstoppable until Ritchson finally gets his hands on a bulldozer.  So now the film borrows from the climax of Aliens which had Sigourney Weaver battle it out in a mech suit with the prime Alien monster.  The War Machine looks a lot like the ED-209 from RoboCop by the way.

 

There are really no original ideas anymore or so it seems in the movie business.  Still this film does a decent job with the action stuff. Alan Ritchson has been kicking around the film business since 2004 until he finally hit the big time with the "Jack Reacher" series.  I'll say this for Ritchson at least he's young, it's getting a little hard to stomach all these geriatric action stars still working, I'm talking to you Arnold, Sylvester and Harrison.  Time to take your millions and maybe retire to a turkey farm or something.

War Machine was written by Patrick Hughes and James Beaufort, the running time is 107 minutes. 

2014 - THE EXPENDABLES 3, probably the last film in the series.

Apparently a DVD quality copy of this film leaked out to the Internet allowing for lots of illegal downloads.  The studio is blaming this for the poor box office performance of this film.  But the fact is,  this movie sucks.

Let's get the plot out of the way.  After a botched mission,  Stallone thinks that his team of oldsters is getting long in the tooth.  He unceremoniously dumps them and recruits some young pups who know all about the Internet and that digital stuff.  Sent on a mission by CIA guy Harrison Ford who is filling in for Bruce Willis after a salary dispute.  The new team goes after evil Mel Gibson (who can only get roles in movies if he plays bad guys).  The new team is captured by Mel so it's up to the old timers to come out of mothballs and save the day.  This is essentially the plot of the ABC TV movie The Over the Hill Gang from 1969.  Which compared to this was a lot shorter and lot more entertaining.

The very scary looking cast of The Expendables 3

There was much criticism of the PG-13 rating which allowed Stallone and his team to shoot and kill hundreds of guys as long as they didn't show any blood.  I would have to say that I would agree with this.  There is something almost offensively pornographic showing violence without ever showing one drop of blood being spilled.  

Since the box office returns were so poor, this film is considered to be a bomb which will probably be the end of this franchise. Frankly this film series was never very good to begin with.  The first film had the novelty of seeing all of these past their prime 80's action stars go through the fighting motions one more time but now by the 3rd film even that novelty has worn off.  (P.S., turns out I was wrong Expend4bles, will be released in September, 2023).

126 minutes, written by Sylvester Stallone,  Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt.