Expend4bles

Expend Thy Foibles
While Ye May

Expend4bles
aka The Expendables 4
Directed by Scott Waugh
USA Millennium Films 2023
UK cinema release print.

Warning: I’ve tried to write this with no spoilers but the way I try to dance around a certain scene might give things away when you see the movie... although you’ll probably figure that one out long before it’s revealed anyway.

Well now... I was really looking forward to seeing the fourth in The Expendables franchise, known at present by the silly title Expend4bles although, I notice on the IMDB they’ve already changed the listing to The Expendables 4 so, maybe the not-so-hidden numeral in the title is just for us audiences in the UK. However, the film has had a lot of bad word of mouth on Twitter and one of my favourite critics, Mark Kermode (the only person I know who, like me, loved Meg 2 - The Trench, reviewed here) really shredded it, citing a bad script and some terrible and confusing action editing... I’ll address all that in a minute but, well, let me say just this up front...

I loved Expend4bles right from the start and kept waiting and waiting for it to go sour on me... and kept waiting... and kept waiting. Heck... I waited until the very end for the movie to start becoming unwatchable and it never did. I had a blast with this movie.

Now, I quite liked the previous films in The Expendables franchise, it has to be said. I thought the first one was great and I liked the second one even more. The third movie would have topped them all except, the violence was deliberately watered down and, well, it was brilliant apart from having the edge taken off of it. Well the producers of this one took note of the audience reaction to the toned down viscera of the third and have brought it back for this fourth installment. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not talking Rambo IV levels of violence here but it’s not backing away from it either... to the point where the marketing for the film, at least in one of the US trailers, has used it as a selling point about how the filmmakers have listened to the audience and have loaded this one with the expected levels of violence. It’s maybe less than I was expecting but it’s appropriate to the kinds of violence depicted so, I’m certainly not complaining.

Okay, we have some of the old gang here who are now in all four films to date... Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren and Randy Couture, all doing their thing and acting the heck out of this. It’s broad acting but, it’s just right for the kind of film it is and I didn’t see anything in here which differed from the level of the performances in the previous movies. They’re doing what they do best and, guess what? They’re doing it well.

They’re joined by a bunch of newcomers, of varying ages and generations, most notably Megan Fox (who maybe seems a little too glamorous even in her fighty/stabby scenes but, again, I’m not complaining), Levy Tran (I could have done with more of her character in this), the brilliant Iko Uwais (from The Raid movies), the amazing Tony Jaa (who was maybe a little wasted, there should have been more action scenes with him in this, I think), 50 Cent, Andy Garcia and, in a strange role in terms of... let’s call it meta-continuity... Jacob Scipio. Now I’m pretty sure Antonio Banderas was probably asked to come back from his stint on the third movie and that this script probably had his character written in on an earlier draft. Instead, we have Scipio playing, unless I misheard, the son of Banderas’ character in the third movie... playing this character in exactly the same way as that original character would and serving exactly the same function in the group so... yeah, sometimes I believe you can see the history of the origin of a film hidden within its final release print and, I suspect this is one such occasion.

Okay, so the film starts off with a double bang... with an attack on an army of bad guys from a different army of bad guys headed up by Iko Uwais... followed by another scene featuring Stallone and Statham doing their ‘banter and action’ thing back in their home town (following Megan Fox dumping Statham’s character but, don’t worry, she’ll be back). We then, post titles, we get the group sent on a mission colliding with the first part of the pre-credits and, somewhat in Expendables fashion, the mission ends in failure and... well, something happens which affects the course of the rest of the movie. Kinda. I’ll try and address that without spoiling it soon. The rest of the film is about finding out the identity of an old enemy of Stallone’s Barney character, who seems to be tied up in the ongoing plot about stealing detonators to nuke part of Russia and make it look like the US has done it. It’s also a revenge mission... kinda.

Anyway, let me address the main criticisms of the film first. No, it isn’t terribly written. Some of the dialogue is, indeed, not to my taste but it’s all fairly appropriate to the characters saying some of these lines and, generally, I had no real problems with it.

Now, about that action editing. Yes, it’s fast and furious in its cutting but, surprisingly, it in no way gets confusing and I found I could follow the flow of it perfectly. And I say that as someone who can get easily confused by modern action editing. Frankly, there’s a lot worse out there. I could think of several slices of Michael Bayhem and various other action movies where these kinds of sequences... which are, after all, the bread and butter of such films... are just completely incomprehensible. Not so on this movie, for sure... again, I followed it fine.

My only slight problem was that there are no surprises in the movie. That ‘thing’ they do at the start of the film which I’m trying very hard not to spoil here was questionable in the first place... especially when you see the state that the ‘thing’ is left in. After a while, because the movie plays that sequence very close to its chest... I was almost convinced that they had done... ‘the thing’ after all but, no, I was right to trust my instincts. The thing is redacted by the end of the movie in no uncertain terms and is timed as a reveal in exactly the kind of deus ex machina way you would expect. Secondly, the other so called twist of the movie, the identity of a certain person... well, let’s just say that this person was very easy to unmask as soon as a certain character was introduced. So no surprises there either.

So, yeah, the one weakness of the film is that the audience can see the so called twists coming from a long way off but, luckily, in this kind of film that makes no difference as it’s what the audience is kinda wanting to see, to be honest. So I’ll say it again... I had a great time with Expend4bles and will certainly be grabbing the Blu Ray when it comes out. While also looking for news of when Expend5bles goes into production... one can hope.