Expend4bles Review

"Oh, another Expendables, hooray!" said literally nobody. The first one was a fun little throwback to '80s action stars reprising their roles in '80s action films, the second one felt a little too much, but okay, maybe some people enjoyed it who knows? The third in the series was genuinely tiring. And yet we now have a fourth one!

With the fourth new director coming in in Scott Waugh for the fourth in the Expendables series, and a somewhat new cast, Expend4bles was supposed to hand over the reins of the motley crew of grizzled veterans (mixed with some young blood) to the youngest "old bloke" in the original group. While the previous three movies were churned out in a couple of years each, the latest one took almost ten years to release - and Statham himself is close to retirement age as it stands. The paragraph where we give a brief, spoiler-free summary of the movie is made redundant by the fact that Expend4bles fails to have any semblance of a plot or storyline. But since we care for you, the reader, we will still give it the old college try.

A mercenary, Suarto Rahmat (Iko Uwais), appears in Libya to steal a nuclear warhead, and the gang set out to thwart him. They fail, and Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) is blamed, and replaced by CIA operator and former lover Gina (Megan Fox) in The Expendables' attempts to correct their earlier botched mission. The reformed group consists of Gina and her new recruits - fellow CIA agent Lash (Levy Tran), Easy Day (50 Cent), Galan (Jacob Scipio) who is the son of Galgo in the previous film, and two of the old faithful in Gunner Jensen (Dolph Lundgren) and Toll Road (Randy Couture). Along with the group is senior CIA agent Marsh (Andy Garcia), who tags along due to their previous failure, as their babysitter.

The Expendables see their operation become doubly dangerous when it is revealed that a 25-year-old enemy of Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone), only known by his moniker "Ocelot", is involved, and will stop at nothing to start World War III.

Even if you're either an enjoyer of the Expendables franchise, or guns and explosions and loud "manly men" action is your thing, Expend4bles is just too full of nothing for us to recommend it in good faith. Even the effects aren't as good this time around, depending too much on lacklustre CGI to elevate its mediocrity - which we're sure is not going to please the fans of the much vaunted practical effects in some of the previous films. Nothing in the movie seems memorable - it is one gratuitous violence-filled scene followed by the other with some bad attempts at comedy mixed in.

None of the stars in Expend4bles has much chemistry with any others apart from Statham and Fox in a couple of scenes with each other, and even the latter is nowhere close enough to making any real difference. The cast could have been a bunch of people out playing laser tag instead of being covert operatives on a mission, and we probably wouldn't have noticed the difference. The music and the visuals do little to help as we fail to recall any memorable songs or action sequences or setpieces.

In one of the weirder moments in the film, Statham's Lee Christman is compared to genital warts, because he is a big bother and refuses to go away, much like the STD mentioned. We probably could say the same about the Expendables franchise at this point - it's time to let bygones be bygones.