2023 has been a really, really fucking good year for action movies. John Wick: Chapter 4, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3, TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, Sisu, Dead Reckoning Part One, the new Dungeons & Dragons movie, even Transformers has really started to turn back around.
In light of all that, while it’s been a long-ass time since anyone paid any heed to the Expendables, it at least makes sense that the ultimate action team-up fantasy would get another crack during this time. The third film may have come woefully short of what the first two accomplished, but even that had its moments. Unfortunately, with this fourth instalment… can this even be called an Expendables movie at this point?
The high concept core of the franchise, the enticement of seeing action hero legends old and new get a chance to throw down together, is marginal at best here. Stallone stays well out of the spotlight for most of the film, letting Jason Statham take leading man duties, and while some of the original cast return like Dolph Lundgren and Randy Couture, they weren’t exactly the most magnetic personalities to begin with, let alone when they don’t have anyone to bounce off of.
As for newcomers, we get a couple solid inclusions in Iko Uwais and Tony Jaa (Jaa in particular really kicks some arse in the fight scenes), and Megan Fox gets a chance for further cred after proving she can play an action star in Rogue, but otherwise, it’s 50 Cent and a shoddy replacement for Antonio Banderas in Jacob Scipio as his character’s son Galan. I know this series tends to be cute with meta-references, but when Statham shouts “Barney hated cover bands”, I don’t think they meant for that to be quite so fitting.
The noticeable lack of charm this time around is evident in the main action as well. There are some solid moments of carnage to be had, don’t get me wrong, but between the diminished cast and the frankly pitiful attempts at macho snark in the dialogue (Kurt Wimmer strikes again!), it’s not as joyous as this franchise should be. It feels way more disorganised, turning the dialogue into just connective tissue between the action rather than their own entertaining diversions, which makes even the returning characters feel bland, let alone the new faces.
Hell, even when the film finds its groove in delivering bullets, blades, and bloodspray, the technical side of things keeps finding ways to get in the way of the fun. The effects work is gross to look at, and I’m not even talking about the gore (although that too isn’t pretty). No, I’m talking about the glaringly obvious green-screening and dodgy CGI. Where the other films in this series emulated the old guard of B-action flicks in a fun way, this just does it in the incompetent way. Not only that, but Michael J. Duthie’s editing is so shoddy, and Tim Maurice-Jones’ cinematography gets a little too close to the actors, even the admittedly-good fight choreography can be hard to make out at times. Too many times.
It doesn’t help that Guillaume Roussel’s soundtrack seems to have escaped a GuguFoods video; fine for YouTube, not so much for a film with a $100 million budget.
As much as I’ll admit to having some fun with this every so often, it’s difficult to look past the glaring production issues, both in the film craft and in the casting. It looks and sounds pretty damn ugly, obscuring the work put in by the stunt team much to the film’s detriment, and with how lacking in star power this is, we’ve officially drifted as far away from the main selling point of The Expendables as we can get. Even the third film, which focused primarily on new (and uninteresting) blood, still understood the pull of getting big names like Wesley Snipes and Harrison Ford. This is just a bog-standard action flick with some unnecessarily recognisable names.
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