Katie Walsh | Tribune News Service
Back in 2010, Sylvester Stallone created the mother of all weirdo teasers in The Expendables, bringing all the action stars into one movie as if they were Pokemon—you gotta catch ’em all. Since then, our favorite monuments to masculinity have come and gone, but nevertheless, The Expendables continues to exist, whether we like it or not. A full nine years after The Expendables 3, we have the confusingly titled Expend4bles, with Stallone back in the cockpit with his trusty Jason Statham on shotgun.
Scott Waugh, the former stuntman and stunt coordinator who directed Need for Speed, helms this latest iteration, which follows a team of expendable villains who take on various secret missions, just like any other fast-paced franchise. The film relies on digital blood splatter, bootleg CGI, and jokes about genitalia, but the animus behind these films is nostalgia for the retro action films of the 1980s and 90s, where men were muscular and misogyny was cool. everyone – at least that’s the image we are presented with in the extremely stupid film “The Expendables”, a film that borders on self-parody.
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Waugh and cinematographer Tim Maurice-Jones give the film a bright, cartoonish look, and screenwriters Kurt Wimmer, Ted Daggerhart and Max Adams bring corny one-liners (Spencer Cohen contributed to the plot, Dave Callaham to the characters). This is especially evident in their first mission, where Barney Ross (Stallone), Lee Christmas (Statham) and the rest of the Expendables team attempt to retrieve a set of nuclear detonators from cunning thief Rahmat (Iko Uwais), who stole them from Muammar Gaddafi’s residence in Libya .
The action is disorganized, the geography is indistinguishable, and several frames seem stitched together with a single pixel and a prayer. Christmas is giggling on a rover holding a .50 caliber gun that looks like it could have been shot with rear projection, the green screen work is so cheesy. The scene is so incredibly bad and incredibly stupid that you just have to laugh in disbelief.
But this is much preferable to the rest of the film, which becomes dishearteningly boring. Stallone leaves and Gina (Megan Fox) takes over the helm of The Expendables, although Fox seems completely uninterested in the whole affair. Perhaps because this concert has Gina jumping into HALO and fighting bad guys in a crop top, full glam style and amazingly long and bulky hair extensions.
This look is laughably impractical in 2023, when even Hayley Atwell wore her hair in a ponytail for her big fight scene in Mission: Impossible: Deadly Reckoning Part One, and you can see Fox barely holding back an eye roll. It’s strange that despite distancing herself from her role as an object of desire in Transformers, she’s back in another testosterone-filled action movie with nothing to do but gawk. It’s not Fox’s fault, but rather these filmmakers’ failure to come up with anything more for her to do, even though she’s ostensibly in charge of the mission, delivering a few lines detailing the plan.
Now Gina’s team must free the same set of nuclear detonators from a container ship bound for Vladivostok. But they are quickly held back by Rahmat’s henchmen, and they spend most of the film standing in a small room or walking around the ship, trading old-fashioned jabs. Christmas is kicked out of this mission due to a minor infraction, but he sneaks on board nonetheless, and thank goodness, as he is apparently the only Expendable who has any pep in his step.
The Expendables is Statham’s show, but is it really the series he wants to star in? He bravely goes through the motions while Fox seems bored out of his mind, delivering every line laced with sarcasm. Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson is there too. Randy Couture and Dolph Lundgren are the other two original cast members to return, while Jacob Scipio and Levi Tran round out the team as Galan and Lash, respectively.
Even two of the most reliable action actors, legendary martial artists Iko Uwais and Tony Jaa, can’t help The Expendables take off. For most of the film, Uwais has to escalate his threats over the walkie-talkie, and there’s only one fight scene at the end (wasting Iko Uwais is an action movie crime). Jaa spices things up a bit, and when this film briefly flirts with being a martial arts film, there’s a spark of genuine potential.
But Waugh doesn’t use what he has to work with. “Expend4dbles” wants to be the kind of movie best watched on cable TV with commercial breaks or on a beat-up VHS tape, but there are much more fun action classics that can get the job done – no need to bring in a tired crew.
What “The Expendables” • 1½ stars out of four • lead time 1:43 • Rating R for strong/bloody violence throughout, strong language and sexual content • Where In theaters
Movie star Sylvester Stallone has admitted that he is “proud” of his acting career.