It’s hard to explain the extent to which Expen4bles – a pale imitation of its kick-ass good-time predecessors – is an unrelentingly disappointing movie. Anyone who’s already exited the action-movie all-star franchise, either by their own choice or at the hand of the writers, should consider themselves lucky.
Those they leave behind deserve better than Expend4bles’ flimsy nuke-chasing plot and clumsily staged combat. In the nine years that passed between The Expendables 3 and Expend4bles, Hollywood and its international counterparts have generated some of the best action films and TV shows since the ’80s and ’90s heyday ostensibly celebrated by Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) and his team of seasoned mercenaries: John Wick, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Wu Assassins, to name but a few. Yet Wu Assassins star Iko Nuwais gets nothing approaching the visceral brawling of that 10-episode Netflix showcase in Expend4bles. The sequel also frustratingly and frivolously squanders Barney and company’s return to their R-rated roots.
This fourth entry in the franchise puts The Expendables on a mission to stop a terrorist organization headed by Uwais’ Suarto Rahmat, which is smuggling nuclear warheads that could start a war between the United States and Russia. On top of that, there may be a mole in their midst, and a faceless nemesis of Barney’s known by the codename Ocelot may be pulling the nefarious strings behind it all. There’s a little more to the story, but that’s more than enough to know going in. Nobody sees these movies for their intricate plotting, right?
The Expendables are still Barney’s crew, but for the first time in the franchise, Stallone gets second billing behind Jason Statham, returning as Lee Christmas. Of all the times to get a promotion, this isn’t the best one: Statham tops a cast that, no disrespect to Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Megan Fox, or Andy Garcia, aren’t exactly the shoot-'em-up titans of the first three films. Expend4bles wastes the throwback talent it does have, doing a disservice to their contributions to the genre: Gunner Jensen (Dolph Lundgren) is depicted living a sober and centered life, but at one point falls off the wagon in order to take a stiff drink. Watching Expend4bles, it’s almost impossible not to follow his example.
From the get-go, it’s clear that the bar is set low. But Expend4bles looks and feels so cheap and inauthentic that it didn’t so much take me out of the movie as it virtually pushed me out. Whether it was green-screened or created on a dime store version of the Volume, so much of what’s in the final cut looks fake and/or stagy. And that’s before you get to the special effects, which look either unfinished or just so bad that it’s sad. Exploding heads and blood splatter look like they were ripped from the graphics package of a mid-to-low-budget video game from the early 2000s; the slow ensemble walks to the camera couldn’t look less realistic and janky if they were shot in a “photo experience” in a suburban mall.
The clunky and uninspired dialogue, as awful as it largely is, is delivered with all the conviction and enthusiasm of a damp towel. The actors often look almost embarrassed to say the lines they’ve been given; the sex toy glimpsed on a bar shelf in one scene delivers a more animated performance than some of the big names assembled here. While there has always been a tongue-in-cheek cheesiness to the franchise’s scripting, past casts seemed to embrace it and almost revel in it. In Expend4bles, it seems they’re over it. There’s not even much of the knowing, self-deprecating snark that made previous entries appealing. There are nods to Sly’s previous onscreen action endeavors, such as Barney’s history of thumb wrestling (rather than arm wrestling, à la Over the Top) prompting Christmas to dub him “Thumbo.” But it lands as weakly as it’s delivered. A run of half-hearted gags about Toll Road’s (Randy Couture) wrestling-related ear injury and a wig that Jensen dons runs out of steam almost as quickly as it starts.
The popularity of the Expendables movies has as much to do with banter and action as the names on the posters, and what’s on display in Expend4bles plays like a stunt show at an under-funded theme park. Either the execution is weak, the effects are shoddy, or the editing misses the mark, wildly swinging between messy to the point of confusion or sloppy to the degree that it looks barely convincing. All too frequently, the kicks and punches land as poorly as the jokes. When any of the elements hit their target and give the audience hope of things improving, those hopes are quickly dashed. Even the props – like the detonator that looks like an inhaler fused to a Happy Meal toy and the bomb that resembles a fan-made replica – come across like cheap knockoffs.
