Expend4bles – or The Expendables 4, for people who know what “a” looks like, is an action movie sequel positioned as an apology. One of the first trailers began by declaring that “we heard you loud and clear” and then moved on to highlight tweets from fans of the franchise angered by the PG-13 rating given to Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and their previous killing spree in 2014. The Expendables 3. And of course, Expend4bles is cruel. But it’s hard to imagine any of these disgruntled customers quenching their thirst for guts and gore with a bunch of copy-and-pasted CGI blood splatter.
What they’ve been offered is essentially the Hollywood equivalent of a disinterested nanny leaving her little charge alone with a dead iPad, one box of Play-Doh and two bottles of Pepsi. Expend4bles has a vague idea of what you like, but is hesitant to make sure you have fun. You can find out for yourself.
Schwarzenegger has long since retired from the franchise and is apparently happy at home with his pet donkey and miniature horse. Bruce Willis is, of course, retired; but there’s also no sign of previous Expendables Jet Li, Harrison Ford or Chuck Norris. Stallone returned to the screen, but no longer had creative responsibilities behind the scenes (he directed the first film and was credited in the scripts of all three previous films). Instead, he seems to be marinating in some kind of post-Creed at this point in his career, he’s content to simply watch, bright-eyed and wistful, patting the next generation on the back.
To sum it up, Expend4bles there’s no crossover between action movie veterans, which was supposedly the whole point of these things. And since the next generation is, by process of elimination, Jason Statham, Expend4bles it was simply rebooted as a Jason Statham film. His flat cap-loving knife expert Lee Christmas is forced into battle with several mercenaries in search of a mysterious buyer of nuclear missiles. Throw in a megalodon or Dwayne Johnson and we might be on to something – Statham is a reliable star, always in on the joke to save his own skin. But Expend4bles is a Statham film made with minimal enthusiasm.
This time, his team includes not one, but two women (gasp!) – Christmas’s wife, Gina (Megan Fox), a highly trained CIA agent version of the woman who smokes in your face outside the bar, and Lash (Levi) Tran), whose characteristic, as far as I can tell, is “constantly horny.” Randy Couture and Dolph Lundgren return, and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson also joins for no particular reason. It appears that Antonio Banderas may have logged back in at some point only to change his mind, which explains why Bad boys for lifeJacob Scipio was hired to play his character’s son and give a flawless impression of him.
And since fans complained that a martial arts superstar like Lee was completely wasted in a non-martial arts role, Expend4bles threw both Ong-BakTony Jaa and RaidIko Uwais filled the film with hand-to-hand combat. However, it’s mercilessly cropped in a way that actively prevents us from seeing half of what’s going on: fights, explosions, stunts, even whenever Gina and the Christmas Kiss (does the movie think it’s going to catch chumps?). Presumably, this is done to hide the poor performance of the computer graphics, which could just as well have been compiled from clip art fragments. This is a $100 million movie with almost no trace of that $100 million on screen. Then really Expend4ble.
Director: Scott Waugh. Cast: Jason Statham, Sylvester Stallone, Curtis ’50 Cent’ Jackson, Megan Fox, Dolph Lundgren, Tony Jaa, Iko Uwais. 15, 104 minutes.
The Expendables is in theaters September 22.