Expend4bles review – the liv­ing end

The blood is red, the screens are green, the lan­guage is blue and there’s a strange, juve­nile fas­ci­na­tion with yel­low liq­uids in Scott Waugh’s film that also hap­pens to recall the sub­stance whose colour derives from mix­ing all of those men­tioned above (clue: not chocolate). 

In this busi­ness, when you go and see a movie that ends up being bad, you kin­da just shrug it off and think, ​“Some you win…” know­ing there will be anoth­er one drop­ping down the chute immi­nent­ly. Yet there’s a whole lot of mate­r­i­al in this film that you can’t quite believe made it all the way past basic qual­i­ty check­ing. Almost every­thing about it betrays an insa­tiably vio­lent con­tempt for the intel­li­gence of a pay­ing audi­ence. It is, in many ways, a hor­ror movie. 

Expend4bles, for those gullible and needy enough to pos­sess the desire to see a third sequel to an already-reli­ably abysmal action fran­chise, gen­uine­ly feels like an exer­cise not in how a film can enter­tain an audi­ence, but what it can get away with in terms of cut­ting cre­ative cor­ners (and, one imag­ines, costs).

So what have we actu­al­ly got here? We got 240p stock footage estab­lish­ing shots that look like they were ripped from YouTube cir­ca 2003. We got dig­i­tal effects work that makes the pro­mo video for Dire Straits’ Mon­ey for Noth­ing look like Avatar. We got stab­bing. We got haunt­ing, soul­less, one-take per­for­mances that feel like the actors may have just received some ter­ri­ble news direct­ly before the cam­eras rolled (cf Cur­tis ​“50 Cent” Jack­son). We got one-lin­ers that play like they were hold­ing text in the script, await­ing a pol­ish that nev­er came. We got more stab­bing. We got action chore­og­ra­phy filmed in extreme close-up to give the impres­sion that the actors are doing some­thing spec­tac­u­lar. We got a char­ac­ter named Jum­bo Shrimp. We got even more stabbing.

Know­ing how dif­fi­cult it is to get any film into pro­duc­tion, let alone past the script stage, there is no log­i­cal rea­son for some­thing like Expend4bles to exist beyond the fact that it’s going to land its mak­ers a hand­some pay day. This is not a film about hero­ism and cama­raderie, it’s about mar­gins and bot­tom lines. The cal­cu­la­tion here is that reshoots, post-pro­duc­tion primp­ing, or even doing one more take to get the ener­gy up, have been vetoed from the off. You watch this film not so much in anger, but with the shrug­ging, piti­ful sense that each of its stars will be able to buy a new saloon car, or have their pool retiled. 

The orig­i­nal con­cept for The Expend­ables series involved band­ing togeth­er the action icons of yore and post­ing them off on a Dirty Dozen-style, impos­si­ble-odds sor­tie where, of course, they man­age to win out the day. They’re almost still cleav­ing to the for­mu­la, with Sly Stal­lone, who now at 77 has under­stand­ably accept­ed a role in which he has to do the min­i­mum amount of stand­ing, lead­ing a crew which com­bines the old guard (Dolph Lund­gren, Randy Cou­ture, Jason Statham) with a side of young(er) new­bies (Megan Fox, Tony Jaa, Iko Uwais, Jacob Scipio).

There are some stolen nukes and… well, you can pret­ty much fill in the blanks from there. The only thing that comes close to impress­ing here is Statham’s ath­leti­cism, and he’s the only one here who’s able to cred­i­bly fake his com­mit­ment to this long-lost cause. Jaa and Uwais, world-class mar­tial artists who actu­al­ly have some­thing to give to the cam­era, are so poor­ly filmed and chore­o­graphed that all we actu­al­ly see is a blur of flail­ing limbs. 

A gen­er­al ten­den­cy for crit­i­cal hyper­bole can often make a quite bad film, or an inno­cent­ly mis­fir­ing one, seem more offen­sive than it actu­al­ly is. In cin­e­mat­ic terms, Expend4bles is the encrust­ed leav­ings which sit at the bot­tom of the cul­tur­al drip tray, a work that doesn‘t even man­age to own its own camp val­ue. It should hence­forth act as a rel­a­tive yard­stick for how bad things can real­ly be.