What's the opposite of a must-see? The tired 'Expend4bles' is close to definitive
Katie WalshSept. 21, 2023
Back in 2010, Sylvester Stallone created the mother of all geezer teasers in The Expendables, collecting every over-the-hill action star in a single movie like they were Pokmon gotta catch em all. Since then, our favorite monuments of masculinity have come and gone, but nevertheless, the
Expendables franchise
persist
s
, whether we want
them it
to or not. A full
nine9
years after The Expendables 3, we have the confoundingly-titled Expend4bles, with Stallone back in the cockpit with trusty Jason Statham riding shotgun.
Scott Waugh, a former stuntman and stunt coordinator who directed
2014’s
Need for Speed, helms this latest iteration, which concerns a crew of
easily expendable
baddies who take on various secret missions like every other juiced-up action
seriesfranchise
. This one happens to run on digital blood spatter, bootleg CGI
,
and japes about genitalia, but the animus behind these films is nostalgia for the kind of
retroaction
pounding marquee movies of the 1980s and 90s, whe
re n
the men were muscly and the misogyny was cool with everyone
a . A
t least thats the kind of image were presented with in the profoundly silly Expend4bles, a film that verges on self-parody.
Waugh and cinematographer Tim Maurice-Jones bring a bright, cartoonish look to the film, while
screen
writers Kurt Wimmer, Tad Daggerhart
,
and Max Adams deliver the corny one-liners (Spenser Cohen contributed to the story, Dave Callaham the characters). This is especially evident in their opening mission,
where in which
Barney Ross (Stallone)
,and
Lee Christmas (Statham)
,
and the rest of the Expendables crew
,
attempt to retrieve a set of nuclear detonators from a crafty thief, Rahmat (Iko Uwais)
,
who has stolen them from
Qaddafi Kadafi
s compound in Libya.
The action is messy
and hard to follow, the geography indiscernible
, and a few shots seem stitched together with but a single pixel and a prayer. As Christmas chortles atop an all-terrain vehicle while wielding a .50 caliber weapon, it looks like
the whole thingit
could have been shot with rear projection, the green
–
screen work is so shoddy. The
momentscene
is so incredibly bad and unbelievably wacky that one simply has to laugh in disbelief.
But that
i ‘
s far preferable to the rest of the film, which
isbecomes
mind-numbingly dull. Stallone dips out
,
and Megan Fox
‘s
Gina
(Megan Fox)
takes over leading the Expendables, though
sheFox
seems exceptionally disinterested in the whole affair. Perhaps because this gig requires
FoxGina
to HALO
–
jump and
waste opponentsfight bad guys
in a crop top, full glam
,
and astonishingly long and unwieldy hair extensions.
The look is laughably impractical in 2023, when even Hayley Atwell tied her hair into a ponytail for her big action scene in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One, and you can see Fox barely holding back her eye-roll. Its strange that even though shes distanced herself from her role as the lust object in Transformers, shes back in another testosterone-fueled action movie with little to do other than be ogled. Thats not Foxs fault, but rather these filmmakers
,
who cant imagine anything more for her, even if she is ostensibly in charge of this mission, delivering a few lines detailing the plan.
Ginas team now has to liberate the same set of nuclear detonators from a container ship en route to Vladivostok. But they are quickly confined by Rahmats henchmen, and spend most of the movie standing around a small room
,
or sauntering around the ship trading stale jabs.
Statham’s
Christmas has been left out of this mission for a minor infraction, but he makes his way aboard nevertheless, and thank goodness, as hes seemingly the only Expendable with any pep in his step.
Expend4bles
is becomes
the Statham show, but is this really the show in which he wants to star? He gamely goes through the motions, while Fox seems bored out of her mind, delivering every line dripping with sarcasm. Curtis 50 Cent Jackson is also
on boardthere
. Randy Couture and Dolph Lundgren are the two other original cast members to return, while Jacob Scipio and Levy Tran round out the team, as Galan and Lash, respectively.
Not even the two most reliable action movie ringers
, in
legendary martial artists Tony Jaa
Iko and
Uwais
and Tony Jaa,
can help Expend4bles achieve lift-off. Uwais is relegated to growling threats into a walkie-talkie for most of the movie, getting only one fight scene at the end (
wasting underutilizing himIko Uwais
is
an action cinema an international
crime
against action cinema
). Jaa jazzes things up a bit
,
and when this film briefly flirts with becoming a martial
–
arts movie, theres a spark of genuine potential.
But Waugh doesnt take advantage of what he has to work with. Expend4dbles wants to be the kind of movie thats best seen on cable with commercial breaks
,
or on a beat-up VHS tape, but there are far more entertaining
action
classics that can get the job done
t . T
heres no need to enlist this tired team.
Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.