mini-reviews: Expendables 3/ Lucy/ As Above, so Below

The Expendables 3: For once, the ads ain't lyin' -- The Expendables 3 is indeed the best one yet. After a fun first entry and a disappointing sequel, this "homage to 80s action films" series redeems itself with Expendables 3, and it's the writing that makes all the difference. After a mission goes awry near the beginning of the movie, resulting in a serious injury for Hale Caesar (Terry Crews), team-leader Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) decides to disband the Expendables. He claims that he just thinks his team of mercenaries is getting too old, and can't bring himself to admit that he fired his friends only because he loves his teammates and couldn't stand if any of them were to die on one of his missions. To replace them, he hires a new team of younger recruits, but when that mission also goes FUBAR, he has to bring the old team back together to rescue the young'ns.

With the sole exception of Jet Li, who appears only in a cameo and never even gets off the helicopter (it seems a crime to put Li in an action movie and not allow him to fight anyone hand-to-hand, which, of course, is what he does best) every action hero, famous and obscure, young and old, gets at least one moment to shine in this film. And I don't just mean that in terms of the action scenes; the sequence in which the "old" Expendables struggle with their emotions over being fired invites real empathy for all these tough dudes.

As with the previous two Expendableses, the cast is a who's who of action stars, everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Harrison Ford. Mel Gibson clearly has a lot of fun as the over-the-top villain, and Wesley Snipes gets most of the cool "bad-ass" lines and moments, but it's Antonio Banderas's "Galgon" character who is the real treat, as the comic relief. Only the movies could bring us a character who loves to kill people, but still comes across as a cuddly-nice-guy.

Lucy: Compare Lucy to its own movie trailer, and it's safe to say you get what you pay for -- plus just a little bit more. The ads give you the gist of the story, which is completely dependant on the erroneous but popular myth that humans use only ten percent of our brain capacity: Lucy (Scarlett Johansson), an American college student in Taiwan, accidentally ingests an experimental mind-altering drug, and as a result, suddenly gains the ability to access a larger and larger percentage of her brain, which in turn gives her increasingly fantastic mental and physical capabilities. As Lucy has a vendetta against the drug cartel that tried to force her into becoming a mule, Lucy utilizes her new powers to make mince-meat out of the army of gun-toting drug dealers. Meanwhile, evolutionist/ neurologist/ philosopher Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman) wants Lucy to share her amazing abilities and insights with the world, but the very drug that's giving her such amazing powers is also killing her. This is a fun and visually inventive action/sci-fi/ special effects picture, and despite the inaccuracy in the very notion that drives the story's concept, the movie seems to have an earnest love for science.

As Above, so Below: A look at the IMDb pages of brothers Drew and John Erick Dowdle will reveal that they've been bringing us some of the best, most intelligent horror films of the past decade. They continue that trend here, telling the story of a multi-national group of young urban adventurers who get more than they bargain for while exploring the catacombs beneath Paris, France. I do have a minor bone to pick with the story, as the screenwriting brothers go to so much trouble to root their supernatural story in reality, and then sorta muck it up with the unnecessarily unrealistic detail that the main character is in search of the Philosopher's Stone.

Still, the Dowdles manage to side-step both the cheesiness of the concept (the Gates of Hell itself!) and their own decision to use the over-used "found footage" format to bring genuine scares. Masterful command of atmosphere and darkness helps, but the real master stroke is in the brothers' decision to leave so much to our imaginations. Usually, we see unanswered questions in a movie as a negative, and rightly so, as "unanswered questions" too often translate into "sloppy screenwriting," but here, the brothers' consistent refusal to answer any questions is clearly deliberate, and skillfully plays in to the real horror of this movie, fear of the unknown.

I have devoted several previous blog entries to how tired I'm getting of "found footage" movies, so if you see me praising one, you know it's worth a look.