September 25, 2023 · Watch the trailer
When people complain about unnecessary movie sequels that waste their time and money, they usually aren’t talking about big budget comic book films from Warner Brothers and Disney, even if those arguments would apply.
It’s most often flicks with the same title and a new number to indicate the next installment, like a new chapter in the same book people never finished reading.
Such is the case with “Expend4bles,” a return to tired intellectual property ten years after the begrudgingly made “The Expendables 3” in 2014 saw aging action stars team up in “Ocean’s 11” fashion to kill a bunch of nameless baddies.
The hook of the original trilogy was seeing numerous heavy hitters share the screen together, putting Rambo himself Sylvester Stallone with “The Terminator” Arnold Schwarzenegger, “The Transporter” Jason Statham alongside martial arts legends like Jet Li and Chuck Norris.
Niche nostalgia for action stars of yesteryear is practically gone now with “Expend4bles,” as headliner Stallone takes a major backseat to Statham and numerous D-tier “stars” like Megan Fox and 50 Cent, who have no track record as action heroes and lack the charisma or draw to bring in new audiences.
For a film franchise in the loosest terms possible, “Expend4bles” is a clear sign that replaying the same basic story over and over again only works when there’s enough talent behind it to make the action compelling.
“Expend4bles” follows the formula of prior installments with Stallone’s Barney Ross and Statham’s Lee Christmas leading a team of mercenaries into Libya to prevent the theft of plutonium by a vigilante group hoping to ignite World War III.
Stallone really commits to his leadership role while also bringing a self-deprecating sentimentality to Barney that works in small doses but requires audiences to have a clear memory of his earlier work in the series to be effective.
The film is primarily a showcase and transition to push Statham into the spotlight as the dry wit of the talented Brit also helps bring levity while allowing Statham to dazzle with an array of increasingly technically proficient fight sequences. The close quarters combat skills he and martial arts stars Tony Jaa and Iko Uwais bring to “Expend4bles” almost make up for the bizarre plot and mismatched cast.
In fact, the entire film is better served as being a launching point to revive Statham’s “Transporter” series rather than another team-up movie as he’s leaps and bounds better than all of his on-screen counterparts, most notably Megan Fox, whose inability to create plausible chemistry with Statham significantly hinders the film’s ability to move away from Stallone’s character.
While the hand-to-hand combat sequences have some allure to them, the larger set pieces are laughably bad and it’s routinely clear when scenes are shot in front of a green screen rather than on a soundstage. Nameless villains in action films have always been terrible marksmen, but “Expend4bles” is so comically bad at making plausible decisions by bad guys that the unintentional comedy of it all ruins the experience entirely.
There’s absolutely no need for audiences to spend money on seeing “Expend4bles” in theaters when it doesn’t pack the necessary punch visually to see it on the big screen and its inevitable run as filler for the action genre of the Peacock streaming service makes it a hard pass.
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