EXPEND4BLES - Mark Reviews Movies

Expendables 4, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 22, 2023

Just imagine the increasing despondency of the producers of Expend4bles as 1.) they realized this was the actual title they had chosen, and 2.) their phone calls to likely every action star of the 1980s and '90s went unanswered. As some may recall, that was the original gimmick of these movies, which turned a revolving lineup of past generations' action icons into "has-been" mercenaries, and this fourth installment should give one a sense either of how tired those actors are or how tired they are with the concept of this series. The filmmakers should have taken the hint.

Instead, we get this slop—a wholly lazy, barely functioning action movie that brings back series mainstays Sylvester Stallone, Randy Couture, and Dolph Lundgren for what's hopefully one last go-around for them. Let's actually hope it's a last go-around for everyone involved at this point, because it's really just becoming embarrassing to watch. The bored faces on screen suggest it was embarrassing to make this thing, too.

Anyway, Stallone, who's killed off in such a spectacular manner and whose character's death is then treated as such a grisly joke that one can sense the big third-act "surprise" immediately, and Lundgren, who might as well have let his stunt double fill in for him for as incredibly little as he has to do here, are probably finished with this franchise, are here, along with Couture, who gets to explain cauliflower ear a couple of times. They and their absent ilk are being replaced by the next generation of "action" stars—the ones who were popular during the first decade of the current millennium.

Megan Fox, for example, plays Gina, the new leader of the Expendables, that group of unallied soldiers who do the deadly missions that governments don't want get involved in, after Stallone's Barney is completely, totally, and seriously killed in a fiery plane crash during a mission in Libya. Why would you doubt, even for a second, that such is the case, when the movie gives us a gruesome corpse and turns its severed, charred forearm into a conversation piece at Barney's favorite watering hole?

Also on board with the team is Easy, who's played by Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson—an actor who definitely starred in some action movies at some point, although it's probably a stretch to attach his star during the 2000s to that part of his career. Look, everyone else's agent declined in the most polite way possible, okay?

None of this is meant to slight these actors, of course, because their presence in this dud is a big enough insult already. Hey, it does give us Jason Statham, returning as Barney's pal Christmas, and even international action stars Tony Jaa and Iko Uwais. These three are currently famous for making action movies, and if this installment serves as the death knell for this series, that means they can get back to making other, hopefully better ones with that free time.

The plot here is, to put it nicely, rote. Uwais' Rahmat has stolen nuclear detonators for his elusive boss Ocelot for a goal that is literally overkill for the very minimal task the mysterious villain wants to accomplish. After Christmas is canceled as an Expendable (This is, sadly, a better pun than any of the ones in the movie—most of which are unintelligible, which is probably a great gift from the sound mixers if the ones we do get to hear are any indication), he goes rogue, looking to avenge his boss/friend's legitimately real death.

After a prologue that seems as if it will never end, we're basically thrown into the next mission, aboard a ship somewhere in some body of water approaching the coast of Russia. Christmas and his former team fight and kill a bunch of anonymous goons and henchmen, while director Scott Waugh depends on beat-by-beat editing and a green screen, which should probably have received third or fourth billing, to try to compensate for the lack of any cohesion or coherence to the action.

It's an ugly-looking movie, either over-lit when the actors are in front of fake backdrops or drenched in shadow to cheat the fact that there's no sense of where anyone is in relation to each other or anything. There are some explosions and plenty of digital blood, to offer the illusion that action is happening, but it's mostly just the actors shooting in some direction, pulling off one move per shot, and repeating the process. Nobody appears to be having any fun in Expend4bles, so at least we can empathize with the actors.

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