By Chiara Piacentini
Staff Writer
Warning: This review contains spoilers. Read at your own risk.
Expend4bles, the fourth movie in the The Expendables series, is out now, but the content made for a disappointing watch. As soon as the camera started rolling, I was met with a round of explosions, military tanks and shootings. But that was what made up the majority of the movie. If I remembered anything, it was the guns, explosions and fight scenes, and that’s about it.
To give some context, The Expendables are a team of elite mercenaries who carry out missions for government agencies. One of the main protagonists, Lee Christmas (Jason Satham), is on the team along with his brother, Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone).
In Expend4bles, the Expendables are sent by CIA Agent Marsh—a longtime friend of Barney’s—to track down a Libyan mercenary, Suarto Rahmat, to prevent the theft of nuclear warheads for a mysterious villain codenamed Ocelot.
Despite the plot sounding somewhat interesting on paper, it is lackluster in action. The characters have minimal development, and there is little meaningful dialogue, which made it hard for me to form a connection with any of them.
I noticed that the movie relied heavily on action. Maybe a little too heavily. On top of that, the filmmakers used cheap special effects which made the explosions look fake and took any excitement out of the action scenes.
The fight scenes were also highly unrealistic. At one point, Lee was facing five angry muscle men in a bar and managed to take them all down with a pair of knuckle dusters. The only way he could manage this is because the thugs came at him one by one. Lee wouldn’t have stood a chance in real life if they all came at him at once.
You’ll notice the director used the same technique when Lee tried to rescue the Expendables team who got trapped on an aircraft carrier. Suarto Rahmat had more than enough men to kill Lee, but somehow Lee managed to kill nearly half of his men with barely a scratch. By the time it was revealed that Agent Marsh is the Ocelot, I had already lost interest because of the snoozefest fight scenes on the ship.
To make matters worse, Barney, who appeared to be killed in a plane crash earlier in the movie, makes a return to save Lee by gunning down Agent Marsh. Back near the start of the mission, when Rahmat shot down Barney’s plane, we learn that Barney faked his own death by leaving an enemy mercenary (he secretly brought him aboard the plane before takeoff) to burn in the cockpit before parachuting out of the hatch. This completely ruined the ending by having no emotional casualties in the movie.
I was also disappointed that the female characters were reduced to minor roles. Gina (Megan Fox) is mostly remembered for her role as Lee’s attractive girlfriend. Although I appreciated that she was made as the leader of the Expendables for the second half of the mission, this role was downplayed as she was not given much screen time or dialogue. Lash (Levy Tran) had an even smaller role as a female fighter—who was introduced to The Expendables team in this fourth movie—as she had even less dialogue and screen time compared to Gina.
So unless you like a film filled with a bunch of testosterone and an action-packed adventure defined by guns and cheap explosions, then this movie might not be for you.
