Quarantine Control #129: An Expendable Fugitive Leaps

It’s a definitively true statement that President Joe Biden has been better than former (and hopefully-never again) president Donald Trump when it has come to addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. But he hasn’t been perfect — far from it, in fact. Just this week during an interview with Scott Pelley for 60 Minutes, Biden mentioned that the pandemic is over, though also concluded that the virus was still around. You have to pick one, jack! It is very much not over, and it’s dangerous for anyone to say it is with the perpetual threat of more variants watching over us like bats above a meat market.

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Geoffrey Barnes

The Expendables 3 — Unrated Edition (2014)
Source: Amazon Prime Video
Episodes: 1 movie

I watched the first two Expendables movies shortly after they released, both of which were enjoyably dumb films that worked as perfect homages to 1980s and 1990s action movies. But I sat on watching The Expendables 3 for years, until, as I’m sure you’ve already understood, this week. Part of this was because of my once-insurmountable movie backlog, which I’ve largely tackled thanks to being at home more during the COVID-19 pandemic. But it was also due to the reception, only partially driven by this one being slapped with a PG-13 rating despite the previous films being R. It was a baffling decision on the surface considering these movies primarily star old action heroes way past their prime, and thus won’t be watched by most people under 30, let alone under 17. Perhaps the movie would still be enjoyable despite that, my reason for finally tackling it.

The movie’s earliest moments were an array of hope, with returning Expendables characters like Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone — also the movie’s co-writer), Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), and Gunner (Dolph Lundgren) on an action and stunt-suffused adventure to rescue Doc (Wesley Snipes — at this point available to star in movies and TV shows again after his tax evasion scandal). The grizzled fellas go on another adventure together shortly afterward, where the main villain is revealed to be Stonebanks (Mel Gibson — with a villainous role being the only one available for him after his damaging scandals). The earlier acts were mostly encouraging.

This was helped by the smaller roles, which were more than cameos. Arnold Schwarzenegger reprises his role as Trench for a few scenes, with several references to his biggest roles. The role of Drummer went from Bruce Willis to Harrison Ford this time thanks to a pay dispute between the former and Stallone, well before Willis’ current health scare. Ford segues into the role easily, in one slightly reminiscent of his time as Jack Ryan from Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. Fortunately, I could overlook Robert Davi’s appearance, who’s known for more dubious crap these days, thanks to his role being very small.

I said those earlier acts were “mostly encouraging,” and not “entirely,” because it’s immediately clear that several moments were compromised by the PG-13 rating. It’s still pretty violent, and remains a homage to older action movies in how most heroes cannot and will not take a scratch outside of those from bigger-name actors. But the over-the-top cheesy nonsense kills and enemy deaths from the earlier movies, themselves inspired by old action movies, are largely gone. I watched the Unrated Version, which made it clear that the movie was made for the PG-13 rating and not edited down after filming.

It’s also clear that Lionsgate and the creative team, which included Stallone, had a different audience in mind. The old guys are somewhat tossed aside about 1/3 of the way through the film for Stallone to hire a considerably younger crop. They include Mars and Luna, both played by actors, Victor Ortiz and Rhonda Rousey, who have more experience with mixed martial arts (and wrestling for the latter these days) than acting. Thorn (Glen Powell) is the standout among them, perhaps more known these days for his role in Top Gun: Maverick. It’s clear who the writers had more experience working with, and it shows with how little impact the younger cast has. Appeals to the younger audience should be best left to the Fast and the Furious series.

That said, I wouldn’t call Expendables 3 a bad movie. The acting didn’t have to be good, per se, considering the kind of movie this was and the era it’s an homage to. It was nonetheless dumb fun that entertained me for a Friday night, but I still wish it could have leaned in further with the violent and vulgar cheesiness the first two movies delivered. I don’t need that in every movie I watch, but some of them should thrive on it.

At least the production team, Stallone included, realized what went wrong with this film, and why going with a PG-13 rating wasn’t the best decision made for Lionsgate or the audience this was aimed towards. We’ll see if they fully learned the lessons when the fourth movie is fully revealed, which could be any time know considering it wrapped up filming about nine months ago.

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Joseph Daniels

It’s that time of the year again, when the new season of television begins, and among the new and returning shows comes a sequel series to a beloved science fiction classic.  Shall we see how it turned out?

Quantum Leap (2022)
Source: NBC, Peacock
Episodes: Ongoing

Do you remember when shows like MacGyver ruled the airwaves?  You didn’t need to give characters a long term goal to make viewers want to tune in week after week, you just had to make them likeable and make their skill set interesting to watch.  MacGyver was about a man who solved all your problems with his brain instead of a gun.  Instead of shooting and killing his enemies, he often used improvised weapons to incapacitate them, leaving them alive but hurt.  He was like a Comics Code Authority superhero, a more likeable and friendly version of Batman.

There was also nothing stopping you from watching the majority of episodes “out of order”.  One episode didn’t necessarily lead into the next other than the rare two part episodes, or the episodes where Murdoc returned to try to kill MacGyver.  Star Trek was huge as well, and episodes typically didn’t lead from one to the next, at least in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  There was still an overall sense that growth and change were coming to the characters gradually, but nothing that made it hard to keep up.

I suppose it was around the time when Star Trek: Deep Space Nine started to nurture an ongoing storyline that things began to change in the television industry.  I don’t know the exact point when Americans started to want this sort of storytelling, but gradually there were less shows with a “monster of the week” focus and more shows with an overarching plot tying everything together, where every week progressed the story a little bit more and if you were unable to tune in for a week or two, you were… well…

Lost.

Lost certainly wasn’t the first show to keep a single storyline going all throughout the series.  You could argue that classic shows like The Fugitive did this, due to Richard Kimble having an ongoing mission to clear his name by finding the one-armed man and bringing him to justice, but the show more often than not used an episodic style of storytelling where every week, he was in a different city helping out random people with their problems while taking on various jobs.  It was a lot closer to MacGyver than Lost, and I’m sure the writers could’ve kept it going for another few years if they were allowed.

Quantum Leap was a series which gave Sam Beckett a goal to strive for, but typically didn’t develop the plot of the series beyond what was established in the pilot episode.  Each episode basically began by stating that Sam was leaping into various points in history to make right what once went wrong, all while hoping that the next leap would be his leap home.  That was all we needed, we watched because we wanted to see if he would ever return home, and after five years, we received our answer: Sam did not leap home, but he gained the power to control his leaps, so after the series finale, he chose to keep correcting history.

Apparently, history wasn’t fully corrected, because this past Monday, a new Quantum Leap series premiered, one which attempts to inject a lot of modern ideas into the formula.  Sam has been replaced with a physicist named Ben Song who has been trying to revive the Quantum Leap project and Sam’s best friend Al has been replaced by Ben’s romantic partner Addison.  Unfortunately, Ben’s memory is fragmented as a side effect of time travel, and he doesn’t remember anything about Addison.  This tension between Ben and Addison has the potential to get old very quickly, so the writers need to tread carefully, otherwise viewers will probably not like Addison at all.

We’re also being given more of a look at the Quantum Leap project, including several regular cast members working with Addison to try to bring Ben home.  It reminds me of when they chose to make a new MacGyver series and instead of just two regular cast members, they had several.  MacGyver also replaced one of the cast midway through the first season, and this may be what Quantum Leap will need to do if Addison’s character proves to not be the best fit for the series.

Another choice which I hope doesn’t end up being a strike against the series is that the daughter of Al is potentially involved in secret conspiracy shenanigans, working with Ben in secret for reasons that have not been revealed yet, and which Ben no longer remembers.  This appears to be the start of an ongoing storyline, but we’ll see if the series commits to going the route of slowly revealing Ben’s plan over the course of the season, or if we get our answers within the next week or two and the series instead fully commits to the original premise.  I really don’t think it needs a continuous story drip fed over the course of a season to keep our interest, but maybe they’re worried that audiences won’t take to Raymond Lee as Ben Song like they did Scott Bakula as Sam Beckett.

Part of this will be the fault of the series itself, because by placing some of the focus on the people Ben left behind at the Quantum Leap project, it takes away some of the focus on Ben and the situations he finds himself in.  Scott Bakula had to carry most of the original series, but it almost feels like most of the heavy lifting is being done by Caitlin Bassett as Addison Augustine.  It’s interesting that Addison was supposed to be the one who stepped into the accelerator if Ben hadn’t jumped the gun, because as the only character who we see both in the present and the past, it almost feels like she’s the main character and Ben’s part of the supporting cast.  One of the strengths of the original series was watching Scott Bakula have to play the part of many different people in history per season, and by shifting the focus to Addison, it’s like they’ve got no faith that Raymond Lee can slide into others’ lives as easily as Bakula could.

Time will tell if this is a successful reboot that lasts for several seasons, or if it runs out of time after just one.  Ever since the original series ended, time travel has been hard to market to television.  Many shows that are listed as time travel shows on Wikipedia (like Star Trek: Discovery and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) didn’t start out that way and introduced time travel much later.  Others that featured time travel from the start (like Timeless, Journeyman and Terra Nova) didn’t last long despite their quality.  It kind of feels like getting a series that lasts as long as Legends of Tomorrow is nothing short of a miracle, let alone the television juggernaut that is Doctor Who.

Oh, and since I brought up The Fugitive and it’s the year of the tiger…

The Fugitive (1963)
Source: You may need to get creative for this one, sorry…
Episodes: 120

Tiger content: Kimble receives aid in his escape in the season two finale from a tiger, but sadly the tiger is shot dead because writers in 1963 didn’t care.  At least now I have a show I can blame for how heavy handed and hamfisted the “save the tiger” message in A Tiger Walks was.

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We’re still in a pandemic. If anyone looks at you funny or gives you any shit for still wearing a mask, tell them that Damage Control said they can stuff it. Don’t feel bad about wanting to protect yourself, your relatives, and, hell, other people in general from a deadly contagion that feels like it will forever swirl around.