Yahoo Movies Expendables 4 takes itself too seriously for too long
It's been almost a decade since the release of The Expendables 3 and given that the dire threequel marked a series low at the box office, the question is whether anybody was asking for a fourth Expendables movie.
Even though the action genre has reached new heights with the likes of the John Wick and Mission: Impossible franchises, there's potentially still a space for a violent throwback action offering. After all, Chris Hemsworth's Extraction movies are essentially the one-man-army movies we saw so often in the '80s and '90s.
Expend4bles (yes, that's really the on-screen title) aims to recapture that spirit, even down to bringing back the R rating after the bloodless third movie. The problem is that it takes until the final act to actually realise what made those movies work: a sense of fun.
Like the third movie, Expend4bles sees the team deal with a previously-unknown shadow from Barney Ross's (Sylvester Stallone) past. It turns out that he's been haunted by somebody codenamed Ocelot, who was responsible for one of Barney's past teams being slaughtered.
Ocelot is now in the business of acquiring some detonators for nuclear missiles and is using Rahmat (The Raid's Iko Uwais) to get them from Colonel Gaddafi's "old chemical plant" in Libya. (This is exactly how it's announced on screen, hinting at a ludicrous tone that never quite comes.)
Something dramatic happens and the Expendables, including new team members Gina (Megan Fox), Easy Day (50 Cent) and Galan (Bad Boys for Life's Jacob Scipio), are soon on a mission to uncover Ocelot and avert World War III in the process.
And that is basically it in terms of the plot of Expend4bles. You couldn't accuse any of the previous movies of complex, layered plots, but things are really stripped back in this fourth outing. Even the action is focused into two extended set pieces in the first act and the final act, with a lean middle act to add some exposition to connect the dots.
This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing as it's really what Expendables fans are after, but even their patience will be tested by the turgid first hour or so. With forced 'banter' and uninspired, murky action, it's a slog to get through and added CGI blood for that sweet R rating doesn't improve matters.
It's almost as if Expend4bles, at this stage, thinks it's a serious, gritty action movie rather than the cheesy action star team-up that the first two movies revelled in. The Expendables 2 literally had a villain called Vilain; it knew what it was, where the fourth movie has an identity crisis.
Perhaps it's because the sequel had Simon West as director and he just used his debut movie Con Air as the tonal blueprint. Expend4bles director Scott Waugh, whose other 2023 movie was the dreadful Hidden Strike, struggles to hit that same tone and doesn't have engaging action set pieces to distract from the shortcomings.
Something clicks in the extended final act of Expend4bles, set entirely on an aircraft carrier. Perhaps it's Jason Statham's Lee Christmas taking centre stage or the arrival of Tony Jaa, but whatever missing ingredient there is in the first hour is added and proceedings become genuinely entertaining.
The sense of cheesy throwback fun is restored in both the gleefully violent action and the script. It becomes hard to be bored by a movie that now has Statham calling Uwais's villain a "sneaky little sausage" and acting like John Wick, wiping out an entire army singlehandedly and pulling off motorbike stunts.
Sure, there are still obvious issues – including not one, but two blatantly obvious reveals treated like major surprises – but you'll actually be having enough fun to accept the shortcomings. When things are capped with an analogy about the Expendables being like "genital warts", you'll know that Expend4bles finally knows what it was meant to be.
It's absolutely not enough to save a movie that is two-thirds boring, but it does at least elevate Expend4bles above the irredeemable third movie. You'll be left on such an adrenaline high that you wouldn't be surprised if – like the aforementioned STI – the Expendables will be back for another round.
Expend4bles is out now in cinemas.
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