The Expend4bles are back again, this time with a new team–but still headed by Barney (Sylvester Stallone) and Christmas (Jason Statham). The team is now tasked with saving the world from nuclear disaster–and the stakes are higher than ever. With newbies and seasoned teammates thrown together, this should make for one of their most interesting missions to date.
Expend4bles is once again rated R, after franchise head Stallone expressed his malcontent over attempting to widen the umbrella of potential viewers with the previous installment. With this installment the team attempted to go back to basics in a sense and include crude language and a series of blood-soaked scenes that proved they weren’t afraid to dive back into the uber-mature content from earlier in the franchise. This is one of the best parts of the film, once again appealing to a more mature audience and understanding that these things appeal to fans of the aforementioned Stallone and Statham. At least they got this right.
The rest of the film is a veritable shit show–as just about everything fails to work. Starting with the ridiculously cheesy one-liners, Expend4bles fails to develop effective dialogue, anything that makes any sort of sense. The dialogue is fractured, and it never finds its footing, often causing the characters, even the beloved ones, to seem inept and incompetent. The characters regress and they become unlikable in a lot of ways. I’m not asking for much here, I just don’t want characters that have been effectively developed over three films look like complete assholes. Unfortunately, however, that seems to be the case–and Director Scott Waugh fails to create anything intriguing in regard to the characters.
The story may have just been the worst part–and that’s not just a result of the writing. Sure, the writing is complete shit, a fucking mess really–but there are even more issues that I can’t seem to understand. At the start of the film two stories run parallel to one another. One takes place over the course of just a few minutes, the other takes almost an entire day–and yet, they manage to run perfectly linearly in the film. Waugh and Writers Kurt Wimmer, Tad Daggerhart, and Max Adams have no sense of time, and in just the first few minutes of the film, Expend4bles suffers massively.
The casting doesn’t do anything to help the film, only hinder it. Megan Fox (Gina) and Levy Tran (Lash) aren’t made for these rolls. I can’t see them as action heroes, and the only purpose they ultimately serve is to be eye candy. They are great actors, more than capable of holding their own in other settings–but Expend4bles just doesn’t seem to be for them. In a film made primarily for men, I can at least understand that they are nice to look at–and that seems to be their purpose. At least they have a purpose (superficial as that purpose was), however–because Andy Garcia (Marsh) looks out of place, and he serves no purpose in the grand scheme of the film. Again, the casting is horrible–and it manages to hinder the overall film even further.
As the film crawled toward its finish, someone in the theater booed. Normally I’d be half tempted to tell him to “shut the fuck up,” but I couldn’t help but agree and laugh. He was right–Expend4bles was effectively a waste of time, a poorly constructed attempt to make money. The twenty-or-so people that sat through the almost two-hour film with me left wondering why we spent our Thursday night in the theater, suffering together over a truly terrible film. The only legitimate answer (at least the only one that makes sense to me) is nostalgia. There was something from those previous installments that pulled us back to the theater for a fourth time–but this was a far worse experience than before. Stallone has promised that this is the first of a new trilogy of Expendables films–but with how terrible this one is, I’m not sure the studio can justify making any more.
P.S. Expend4bles is a dumbass name.
Directed by Scott Waugh.
Written by Kurt Wimmer, Tad Daggerhart, Max Adams, Spenser Cohen, & Dave Callaham.
Starring Jason Statham, 50 Cent, Megan Fox, Dolph Lundgren, Tony Jaa, Iko Uwais, Andy Garcia, Sylvester Stallone, Randy Couture, Jacob Scipio, Levy Tran, etc.
⭐⭐⭐½/10
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