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.

Jennifer's Body

Body Of Every Dense

Jennifer's Body
USA 2009 Directed by Karyn Kusama
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone B/C

Yeah, okay. This is a much unsung gem of a movie as far as I’m concerned. I literally put this on because I didn’t need to watch anything further for a while where I’d have to write another review of it... the list is long enough at the moment. I just wanted to put on something to relax with and I remembered unexpectedly liking this a lot when I saw it on its initial cinema run. However... this is what happens when you get old and cranky, folks. After I finished the movie I went to have a look at what I had to say about it at the time and... it turns out it’s actually older than my blog and I hadn’t actually reviewed it before, after all. Since this is such a great little movie though, and something you don’t hear much of from people at present, I figured I should at least try and do it some justice on this column so... here we all are.

Jennifer's Body is writer Diabolo Cody’s next script to be filmed and released after her breakthrough script for Juno and... I have to wonder why it’s not more well shouted out by enthusiasts of the horror genre. It stars Megan Fox as the titular character, coming out soon after her second and final Transformers movie and, although she plays exactly the kind of ‘high school prom queen’ stereotype you almost expect her to be playing, she’s actually not the main protagonist of the film... that part is played by the amazing Amanda Seyfried as Jennifer’s ‘best friend forever’, Needy. The story starts with a framing device of Needy telling us her sad story as to why she is locked in a mental hospital with a reputation of being a violent ‘patient/prisoner’. Megan Fox is actually the main ‘antagonist’ of the movie and, frankly, she also does a great job of hitting all the beats you’d possibly expect her to as a credible movie villain and, although she is kinda overshadowed by Seyfried’s absolutely blistering performance as the cute nerd turned psycho avenger... Fox deserves a lot of credit for her turn here too and the chemistry between the two of them here is a testament to both them, I think.

The story tells of a small time rock band who play a concert at Jennifer and Needy’s hometown of Devil’s Kettle, with the real agenda of making off with one of the local virgins and sacrificing her in a bloody ritual to Satan as an exchange for rock n’ roll fame and fortune. However, when they burn the place down and make off with Jennifer, thinking she’s a virgin, they make a big mistake because, it turns out, if you sacrifice a non-virgin to the Devil, then the corpse later returns to life hosting the powers of a succubus but retaining the basic personality of the original host. That means she becomes a superpowered demon who has to seduce and kill men in order to keep her vitality. That being said, this version is a little toned down from the traditional succubus of legends in that, instead of killing men by taking their sexual energy (constantly draining them of semen etc), it’s more of a Hollywood demon style of deal, with lots of vampiric goriness, gut ripping and innards munching, on the part of Jennifer.

So of course, when Needy finally figures out what’s going on, thanks to a mostly unexplained, semi-psychic link she seems to have with Jennifer (as a lot of best friends seem to have, methinks),  she then has to read up on the occult and become a kick ass femme fatale in order to stop the evil that Jennifer has become. However, will she have worked it out in time to save her own boyfriend from becoming the next in Jennifer’s long list of tasty morsels?

The film is a great character piece with some wonderfully self aware dialogue and a strong shot of black humour running through it. If you want to see deadpan comedy masquerading as one of the many community victims of tragedy, then you have to see J. K Simmon’s performance as Mr. Wroblewski, which becomes even funnier when you realise that he has a hook for a hand at the end of his first scene. I don’t know why this detail amuses but the timing is impeccable and the irony of the reactions to the situations some of the teacher and parental figures in this movie find themselves in are bound to bring a smile to the face of even the most humourless audience members. I’ve said it about just a few films over the last 5 years on this blog but this movie is very much a Heathers or even Harold And Maude for the generation of moviegoers it’s aimed at. A smart and ironic black comedy which doesn’t back down from being just a little edgy in the majority of the places where that would matter. I think Diablo Cody’s screenplay is hitting the cross genre high school/horror/comedy nail right on the head with this one and, thankfully, the performances and direction on it really live up to the quality of the script.

And I don’t really have much else to say about Jennifer’s Body, I’m afraid. Can’t think of any real problems to highlight here and, although the shot design isn’t all that flashy, it’s very clean and leads the eye in nicely to where the director wants you to focus in the film. Definitely one for fans of horror and/or the teen comedy genre (which is a genre I usually like to stay away from, truth be told). Despite it’s sharp dialogue, it’s a bit of a switch your brain off and relax movie, really... but that does nothing to diminish the fact that it’s a tremendous amount of fun and well worth your time if your fun quotient isn’t already in overload. This is not the film it looks like it's going to be if you're one to judge a book by its cover (or a film by its advertising promotion) but you won’t go too far wrong with this one, it has to be said, and most people will find themselves ‘in’ on the joke for the running time of this movie, I would suspect. Definitely worth some time.