Lionsgate has released an action-packed new trailer for The Expendables 3. You can watch it here below.

This preview not only gives us a gander at the large-scale action set-pieces we’ve come to expect from the franchise but also provides us with some story details. Not much though. We already knew Mel Gibson was playing the villain and was a former friend and partner of Sylvester Stallone‘s character. The good guys get an infusion of young blood. Lots of stuff blows up. Corny jokes and cliched dialogue are exchanged. Rinse, repeat, roll credits.

The Expendables 2
Netflix | Amazon | Epix | iTunes | SEN | Vudu | Xbox
DVD | Blu-ray
Directed by Simon West
Starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Liam Hemsworth, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Yu Nan
Lionsgate
Originally Released: August 17, 2012

Oh, the glory of the ridiculous action delivered in The Expendables 2. This is vibrant popcorn-movie wonder, a kick ass explosive injection of testosterone straight to the stones, and enjoyable. The cheese is thick and hearty – after all, who doesn’t like a little cheese with their nachos?

Picking up sometime after the first Expendables movie, Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) comes back to claim a mission in place of the lost revenue from the last mission. Barney (Sylvester Stallone) rallies his team, accompanied by Agent Maggie Chan (Yu Nan), to retrieve sensitive computer data lost in a downed plane in Albania.

A while back, Nicolas Cage was said to be in the mix for a role in The Expendables 3, but nothing ever came of it. Instead, it’s being reported that Kelsey Grammer has joined the cast, and will be playing the role that Cage was rumored to be up for.

Grammer will be playing an ex-mercenary named Bonaparte who helps the Expendables with their mission. The actor also recently signed on to play the villain in Transformers 4.

Just being a badass doesn’t really mean you know what’s a good videogame, right? After all we’ve seen guys like Bruce Willis attach themselves to some sub par games in the past. Hopefully Jet Li can change all of that with this new game that he will be endorsing for the next two years. Age of Wushu is an interesting game regardless of whose name is on it. The game is already mega popular with more than 20 million players in China. Snail Games introduced an early build of the North American version last week at E3.

A few things make the game unique, including the fact that characters aren’t progressed through the game by setting up classes and levels. Instead, characters are customized by choosing one of eight martial arts school and working through the storyline based on that choice.

Yesterday no less an authority than President Camacho himself, Terry freakin’ Crews, promised us that a new trailer for The Expendables 2 would be arriving online today to put a blood-and-skull-splattered boot in our collective ass. Sure enough as I sit here with The Dirty Dozen, the original (and still best) of the all-star superteam action-adventures, playing in the background I sit here writing this: Today Crews’ loud and awful snarly promise was fulfilled.

You can watch the mighty new trailer here below.

I’m a huge fan of the first Expendables, but having re-watched it on Blu-ray recently it’s clear that the movie has serious problems when it comes to the narrative structure and the staging of the action sequences. Don’t get me wrong, Sylvester Stallone did a fine job directing the movie overall, especially when you take into account that he was also writing and starring in the movie at the same time (and taking some near-paralyzing injuries in the process). But when the aging but still active action hero announced that a new director would take the helm of The Expendables 2 while he stuck to acting duties I took a great amount of relief in that news.