Review of The Expendables 3 Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

The Expendables 3

Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Bam Bam Barney Ross and the rest of The Expendables are back! This time around Mad Mel Gibson joins the cast! As a former Expendable! Here’s a review of the score by Brian Tyler!

The Expendables 3…. some like it, some love it, but most from what I can tell in my circle of friends loathe it. I myself thought the film was damn good, but it’s not better than the second film. What I’ve noticed with The Expendables Franchise is that they focus on one film cliche, and that’s the plot of the film. DO NOT MISUNDERSTAND me here I do enjoy all three films, but looking at their plots…. They have all been done to death before. EX 1 is saving an island nation or if you wanna boil it down it’s save the girl. EX 2 is avenge a fallen comrade’s death, and stop the villain from getting his hands on nukes. EX 3 is HEY guess what here’s the former creator of the team who is now a super bad guy! Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I view this franchise as pure fun. I’m not looking for an inception type plot from these. The whole point for me is to see the classic action stars team up!!!!

So Brian Tyler’s score for this one brings you in hot and heavy. Like some screaming “Fire in the hole!” The crazy thing is after Track 1: “The Drop” we get a slow emotional track in Track 2: “Lament” Then for Track 3, we are “Right On Time” for another high action thrill ride. Brian Tyler has been a master of combining emotionally charged music with action packed music for awhile now. Expendables 3 is no different. I have seen several iTunes reviews from others saying that EX 3 is recycled from the first two films. I don’t hear that at all. There might be one thing that gets reused and that’s the main theme of the Expendables. With scoring like what’s on Track 10: “Infiltrating the Block” I’m not sure if you can hope for better action film music. This is yet again a score I can listen to outside the film, but I do have to say that when watching the movie for some reason I felt the score wasn’t present enough. Which is kinda sad, but still love listening to it on it’s own. With Track 11: “Threat Doubled” there are some wonderfully sinister cues and that is what makes this uniwue out of the three scores. Because they brought Mel in and made him the badest of the bad guys. And let’s be honest I was NEVER expecting to see Mel Gibson in another action film. He brought his A game to this.

Final Thoughts:

I love this score. It captures the evloution of The Expendables team while building up new villains, and team members. I’d say this might be the darkest score Tyler has done for this franchise. You should really go give it a listen. You can get it from LA LA Land Records directly, and see the track listing there.