I liked the first two Expendables movies. They’re dumb but they’re good fun, and it was fun to see action movie stars from different eras interact with each other and trade catchphrases and punches. But the third Expendables movie, released way back in 2014, just felt flat, even though Mel Gibson played the bad guy (anyone remember that? I think that Harrison Ford and Wesley Snipes were also in that movie). The third movie tanked at the box office and the series appeared dead in the water. But for some reason, it was revived last year with the stupidly-named Expend4bles, which is dumb so I’m going to call it Expendables 4, or just E4 for short.
E4 flopped even harder than the third movie, only grossing $51 million out of a $100 million budget. It’s safe to say that if the Expendables franchise looked dead in the water before, its floating corpse has now been torn to bits by hungry sharks.
Lionsgate. “They’ll Die When They’re Dead” is a stupid tagline and I hate it.
E4 is a shockingly lazy piece of work. The first thing that I noticed about it was how bad it looks. Every single scene in this movie that takes place outdoors looks like it was filmed in front of a green screen, which if it’s done well is not a problem, but this movie does it extremely poorly. I’m not sure why, but all of the exterior shots in this movie look fake and cheap and awful. It’s very distracting, and makes me wonder where that $100 million budget went, because it sure as hell wasn’t to the special effects.
Most of the third act and climax of the movie take place on a giant cargo ship, and whenever they’re on the deck of the ship the sky and the water in the background look so bad. I can’t get over how bad it looks, I mean, District 9, for example, is a movie that cost $30 million and came out in 2009, and it still holds up visually (it also has a good story and characters worth caring about, but that’s beside the point). E4 had nearly a decade and a half of technological improvements and more than three times the budget, and it looks like a straight-to-video cheapie.
The movie’s plot, if you can even call it that, is simplicity itself. Some bad guys stole some nuclear warheads or whatever and the good guys try to stop them. The bad guys are working for some guy code-named Ocelot, and the Expendables are hired by a CIA guy named Marsh who is played by Andy Garcia to stop the bad guys and wouldn’t you know it, it turns out that Marsh actually is Ocelot! What a shocking twist!
Or maybe it would be if anyone cared, but nobody does.
Now am I going to rant for a bit about a plot point in this movie that is so stupid it has bothered me ever since I watched it. OK, so, early in the movie there’s a big action scene where most of the Expendables crew are on the ground fighting bad guys and Sylvester Stallone is flying their plane around. Stallone’s plane gets shot down and everyone thinks he’s dead, and for reasons that are stupid so I’m not going to get into them everyone blames Jason Statham’s character for his death.
So then the rest of the crew head to the cargo ship I mentioned a couple paragraphs ago to stop the dumb bad guys from shooting nukes or whatever. But the good guys are down a couple members because Stallone is (apparently) dead and they kick Statham off the team because they blame him for Stallone’s (apparent) death. But, of course, the team is promptly captured and have to be rescued by Statham, who, of course, secretly followed them. There follows a prolonged battle where so many faceless henchmen are killed that I started to wonder where they all kept coming from, like surely that cargo ship could only hold a certain number of henchmen. It was like the ship had an ant infestation, but with henchmen instead of ants.
Anyway, eventually all of the henchmen are FINALLY dead and the other Expendables have left the boat because it’s about to explode or something, setting the stage for a final showdown between Jason Statham and, er, Andy Garcia. The fact that the movie expects us to take Andy Freaking Garcia as a serious threat for Jason Freaking Statham, after we have spent a large portion of the movie watching Statham effortlessly dispatch scores of infinitely-respawning henchmen, is absurd. It’s like if Godzilla had to fight a giant teddy bear or something, it’s just dumb. Some part of me was hoping for a Statham/Garcia fight, because that would have been hilarious. But wouldn’t you know it, who shows up in a helicopter in the nick of time to blast Garcia into tiny bits, save Statham, and sink the cargo ship with missiles? Why, it’s Sylvester Stallone, of course! He faked his death and shows up just in time to save his best buddy! Yay!
Aside from being an enormous cliché, the method that in which Stallone faked his death is absurd. The movie reveals that after his plane was struck by a missile earlier in the movie, Stallone retrieved some guy that he had secretly stashed in the plane and puts him in the pilot’s seat so after the plane crashes everyone will find the body and think that he (Stallone) is dead. Stallone then parachutes to safety.
I have so many questions. Why in the hell would Stallone not tell his buddies that he had survived? Faking his death serves no purpose and makes no sense. Why would he do this? Because of this, the rest of the team goes after the bad guys minus two of their best team members and promptly get captured. And they spend a large amount of time blaming Statham for Stallone’s death, and at no point does Stallone ever see fit to intervene in this. He basically leaves the team high and dry for no discernible reason. The best I can figure is that maybe Stallone had a scheduling conflict or something so the writers had to come up with some half-assed excuse to explain his absence for three-quarters of the movie (although that is sheer speculation on my part).
But let’s go back to the method of death-faking for a second. You’re telling me that Stallone had some poor schmuck stashed away in the plane just in the off-chance that the plane would get hit by a missile and he would have to fake his death? It sure sounds like Stallone was planning to fake his death, but that doesn’t make sense either. Did he want the plane to get hit by a missile? Did he even know that the bad guys would have missiles capable of taking down his large plane? Did he have some other death-faking scheme in mind in case the plane didn’t get hit by a missile???
I am thinking about this way too much, and probably more than the makers of this movie did. The bottom line is that Expendables 4 stinks and Jason Statham deserves better. He does a good job carrying the movie and he kicks a lot of ass, but the storytelling is so shoddy and the filmmaking is so lazy that the movie sinks like a cargo ship stuffed overly full of ant-henchmen. That doesn’t even make sense, but it makes more sense than this crappy movie.
Anyway, now that I have gotten that out of my system by ranting about movies I didn’t like, it’s time to talk about stuff I do like. I’m not sure yet what my next post will be about but it will be about something I like. See you then.
thezombieroom 