Top Five: Worst Action Threequels
5) Blade: Trinity (2004)
Most of us are disappointed with The Expendables 3, another dud threequel for the action genre. Today we are going to take a look at similar punches to the gut. Starting with Blade: Trinity. Blade III is a poor movie and most certainly an inferior sequel/threequel. In some ways it shares similar problems to The Expendables 3, with an attempt by David S. Goyer to shoe-horn people we didn’t give a damn about into it, such as Jessica “I want the body of a man” Biel and Ryan Reynolds, much like Ronda Rousey and Glen Powell in The Expendables 3. Wesley Snipes protested and eventually sued. He was a producer as well, and he was not consulted. So for many, there are only two Blade movies.
Eddie Murphy, how do you plead? Actually, the answer to that is guilty because he did have the fortitude to go on TV on The Actors Studio and tear this movie a new one, but soon he’ll right this wrong. This is one of the first sequels I distinctly remember hating, 20 years ago when I first was subjected to it. There is no humor. There is no Ronny Cox. There is no Taggart. In fact, they have some bald chump shamelessly fill in as a replacement Taggart. There’s barely any violence, only recently was a I shocked to learn this thing was actually rated-R. Only a pile of rancid, heaped shit like this would have a George Lucas cameo sticking out of it – like some undigested bit of food. I remember watching this with my friends an additional two times on VHS, because up to this point one of the big franchises of action hadn’t had a bad sequel, apart from RoboCop 3. We did not know how to take it. It was traumatising. But perhaps the biggest slap of all, the worst insult – they killed Police Chief Hubbard in the first 10 minutes.
2) Terminator 3 (2003)
This movie has a special place on the ManlyMovie shitlist. It was the first of the string of bad ’00s updates, adaptions and sequels. I was stupidly hyped for this movie. And then, when I saw it on opening day, it was like being forced to watch old people fucking. They fucked it up. It’s a rehash of a rehash, only shitter. They made the Terminator camp, with horrible one-liners here, there and everywhere. The villain is shit, a pathetic attempt to combine the brutality of the original T-800 with the slickness of the T-1000. John Connor is a pussy, 10 minutes into the movie he is cornered and caged by a veterinarian. That’s supposed to be the leader of humanity? The entire movie is made up of Connor whining like a bitch and Schwarzenegger’s ill-placed humor. Cameron was right, the soup was pissed in. I can’t think of a better way to describe this failure.
1) RoboCop 3 (1993)
Some people want to elevate The Expendables 3 above this as chief threequel turd. But that’s because their anger is still fresh. In some ways we could see what was coming for EX3. But not this heinous slop. It has been 21 years but the kidney punch of RoboCop 3 can still be felt. Even as children we knew. We knew that something was seriously wrong. Even the toys on the kids floor were so blatantly examples of product placement for the younger generation. The cheeseball humor that has infected many a sequel/threequel is there. The torn up Cadillac and that chase sequence was almost heartbreaking. This soft assed shit wasn’t the city Clarence Boddicker was running – they had ED-209 appear “loyal as a puppy”. I mean, fuck you. That thing growled at its handlers in the first movie. RoboCop 3 is quite possibly ground zero for the PG-13 virus that has been infecting action movies for years now. Is this where it all started, the source of the plague? Splatter punks and action figures. Dare I say it, even the TV series was better.
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