Posted in: Movies, Recent Updates | Tagged: expendables, expendables 3, film, mel gibson, sequel, sylvester stallone

Sylvester Stallone's Public Poll – Should Mel Gibson Direct The Next Expendables Film?

Alasdair Stuart writes for Bleeding Cool.

Not a hallucination! Not a dream! Quite Possibly joking!

Sylvester Stallone is in the middle of writing Expendables 3 and it seems to have led him to a very unusual possibility for the director's chair.

Mel Gibson.

Earlier today, Stallone tweeted;

What about Mel Gibson directing EXPENDABLES FIVE???

— Sylvester Stallone (@TheSlyStallone) April 11, 2013

Then:

No , I was kiddiing about , but seriously , what about Mel Gibson directing EXPENDABLES 3?Opinions anyone ?Curious…..

— Sylvester Stallone (@TheSlyStallone) April 11, 2013

The responses so far, five of them as I write this, have definitely skewed towards the positive. Which… well, let's spend a little time with this one, shall we?

If you can, or indeed, want, to separate Gibson's politics, faith and personal problems from his craft, then he's… actually a pretty good choice. The Passion of the Christ, despite being a near perfect summation of a Catholic mindset I want nothing to do with was, technically, a well put together movie.

I've not seen Apocalypto, but, likewise, I hear good things about it. Gibson likes a challenge, he likes to work outside the box and if he turns up for work then honestly I could see him giving the Expendables movies a sense of scale and bloody-knuckled intensity they've bounced off but never really landed on.

But if you take his politics, faith and personal problems and put them with his craft then, this is a match made in bullet-riddled hell itself. Gibson's hyper right-wing viewpoint is in keeping with the red blooded man-bickering and tango-killing of the movies but lacks all their amiable, lumpy charm.

I like the Expendables movies a good deal, in the same way I like really intense chilli. It's not something I can eat all the time but every now and then one's a big piece of chewy, spicy fun.

With Gibson at the helm, I worry that Barney would spend the entire movie angst-ridden over the loss of his family and Lee Christmas would be driven mad by the visions of all the people he killed.

Which, now I come to think about it, is pretty solidly inside Statham's wheel house…

In all seriousness, I could see this working though, I have to say, I might be choosing to adopt a specifically optimistic, altruistic point of view.

If this is Stallone reaching out to test the waters for a friend's possible rehabilitation, it's a little difficult to not look at that as a nice thing for him to be doing – especially as Gibson could make a decent fist of it.

Of course, if it's Stallone looking for publicity then the nice element goes away.

Regardless, he's talking about it, which means he's clearly thinking about it.

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