By: Takudzwa Makoni
Expendables 3 is the most irresponsible, inartistic, badly written movie in years- And it’s loads and loads of fun.
Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenneger, Wesley Snipes, Dolph Lundgren, Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, Antonio Banderas- basically, if you were an American 80’s-90’s Movie Star who averted nuclear crisis, single-handedly killed entire armies of ethnic people, saved the President, played the President, tried to assassinate the President or battled robot cyborgs from the future, you appear in this movie.

From the official movie promotion material- “Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) co-founded the Expendables with Conrad Stonebanks (Mel Gibson). After Stonebanks became an arms dealer, Ross was forced to kill him — or so he thought. Now, Stonebanks is back and he’s on a mission to end the Expendables. Ross decides that the way to fight old blood is with new blood, so he assembles a team of younger, faster, more tech-savvy recruits. The battle to topple Stonebanks becomes a clash of old-school methods vs. high-tech expertise.”

I MEAN C’MON!
If you were a teenage boy in the eighties or nineties, that plot-line ticks every box we were programmed to demand in our movie fare.
This cast started or perpetuated every cliché, trope and “go-to” move in the long and hallowed history of Action Movies- “I’l be back,” Eye of the Tiger, Yippe Ka-Yay Motherf….! To see them all in one movie means two things- firstly, a lot of cheesy one-liners, and secondly, a lot of Russian/North Korean/Middle Eastern goons are going to get shot up something fierce.
The Expendables franchise is built on squeezing every last bit of 80’s/90’s nostalgia out of the fans who spent their teens/early adulthood arguing over who would win in a fight between ‘Rocky’ and “Da Terminator.”

Absolutely terrible movie- greatest fun I’ve had in a movie theatre in years.