Storyline
Barney (Stallone), Christmas (Statham) and the rest of the team comes face-to-face with Conrad Stonebanks (Gibson), who years ago co-founded The Expendables with Barney. Stonebanks subsequently became a ruthless arms trader and someone who Barney was forced to kill... or so he thought. Stonebanks, who eluded death once before, now is making it his mission to end The Expendables -- but Barney has other plans. Barney decides that he has to fight old blood with new blood, and brings in a new era of Expendables team members, recruiting individuals who are younger, faster and more tech-savvy. The latest mission becomes a clash of classic old-school style versus high-tech expertise in the Expendables' most personal battle yet.
The third installation of the series has both of those things, but, sadly, not enough. The whole reason these movies exist is for us to enjoy the nostalgia exploding through the screen while we listen to crappy one-liners and bad jokes. This movie takes itself way too seriously and, even though it tries, it just isn't self aware enough for it to work. It spends a big portion of the plot introducing a bunch of young characters pretty much no one cares about, and then it tries to make us care about those people we've never seen in our lives before. Needless to say, it does not succeed. All of a sudden we're suppose to give a damn about these one dimensional characters, and I'm not saying that the main cast has more dimensions than one, but we don't need dimension. We don't need backstory. We don't need emotion.
We need to see old people doing over the top action, make old man jokes and reference their old movies. The movie just takes itself too seriously. There are jokes, but there are also dramatic moments which just fall flat. The acting isn't that good either, and neither are the new characters. It was cool to see Snipes back in action but his character was pretty much useless and didn't make any sense plot wise. Banderas was suppose to be annoying for the characters in the movie and funny for the audience, but he was just annoying. Gibson's role was pretty fun, even though he kind of just played the Joker. There's a scene taken straight from The Dark Knight, but I didn't really mind it, it was fun. Ford was just really plain and did nothing for the movie.
Overall it's one of the most boring action movies I've seen. It has literally every single action movie cliché ever made, and the performances were average at best. There are also moments where the CGI is terrible and takes you away from the movie even more. I don't recommend it unless you are a big fan ( a really really big fan).