The Expendables franchise doesn’t fit well with today’s culture. These films are meant to be homages to the cheap, goofy action flicks from the 1980s and 1990s, which gave rise to many of our biggest action stars. But Expendables 4 (officially titled Expend4bles) needed to make a significant alteration to the way it functions if this brand was to continue after a nine-year sabbatical, similar to how Bad Boys for Life introduced a welcome streak of self-awareness.
Expendables 4 review
Amusingly, Expendables 4 borrows a number of elements from that third Bad Boys film, including Dolph Lundgren playing a “old guy needs glasses” subplot, casting the actor who played that film’s sub-villain, Jacob Scipio, and the addition of a large group of young people to contrast with the old hats. In spite of this, Expendables fails to engage in any type of introspection. The film’s final hour and a half of immensely confusing storyline is nearly made tolerable by the about 20 minutes of really good action that follow.
The Expendables 4 generally has more story than it can manage in the midst of all of that; throughout everything, there is a thread about Rahmat having a secret boss named Ocelot who is some sort of longterm personal foe of Stallone’s Barney. It’s basically an espionage narrative, complete with secret documents and tricks to entice Ocelot, but it’s all for nothing. Nobody is spying in this movie, no one ever discusses any hints as to who Ocelot is, and the character who plays Ocelot is never even given the benefit of the doubt. The movie’s non-action scenes are so poorly filmed and edited that it can be difficult to watch at times.
However, Expendables 4 isn’t entirely pointless. Everyone in the film eventually ends up on a large container ship, with the majority of the Expendables locked up while Jason Statham has to do Jason Statham things all over the place—rampaging through the ship and mercilessly killing everyone he encounters while cracking wise. The first hour of the film will probably have you groaning with boredom. The action is well-choreographed and the movie pretty much works for the next 20 minutes throughout this section.
Statham and Tony Jaa are engaged in back-to-back combat with a group of guys. We have a motorbike pursuit through the ship’s hallways with motorcycles that have guns mounted on them, and it culminates with a stunt that action fans will recognise.
