Movie Review: Expend4bles

Going into any 4 of the Stallone produced Expendibles movies, you expect them to have no logic, no plot, no plausible story, and just a series of excuses for action to fight, stab, shoot, blowup any number of people. Then the question eventually becomes, when does very stupid become too stupid?

The latest and hopefully last of the Expendibles franchise is easy the dumbest of the 4, with an attempt of “surprise movie ending trickery” that is actually insulting to the audience. Movie trickery, “trying to fool the audience” only works when the logic of the story supports the trick ending. With this very bad and very stupid movie, the end of the story suprise is completely absurd and not supported by the story in any way. With an attempted explanation at the very end that holds no water.

With this 4th installment, only four previous cast members appear in this new version. Jason Statham who plays a character for some reason is named Christmas, Dolph Lundgren, who plays Gunner, and Randy Couture plays Toll Road and of course Sylvester Stallone who plays Barney. Some of the character names are as idiotic as the plots of some of these movies. The new cast includes Megan Fox, who is miscast, Andy Garcia, how much was he paid for this bad role, Tony Jaa, who plays the villain and Jacob Scipio, who is the comic foil in this story, and his role mostly fails throughout this film.

My guess is that so many of the action stars from the previous movies actually read the script and decided – no way. Considering how bad this last movie of the series is, this decision to not make the final movie could be career-saving.

The other problem is that the action scenes are not nearly as good as the previous 3 movies, almost as if they phoned in the simplest action scene ideas. Then decided to save on the budget, with Jason Statham doing almost all the action scenes in the end. With the rest of the cast, stuck in a make-shift prison. What were they thinking with this idea? High paid actors standing around in a prison for most of the last act of this movie?

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Expend4bles an extremely low and correct at 17%, My rating is 10%, and a big-time miss on this end of a movie franchise that was completely killed by the 4th and last installment.