The Expendables franchise is out of step with the present. These movies are supposed to serve as homages to the silly, low-rent action movies of the '80s and '90s, when many of our biggest action stars made their names. But if this franchise wanted to keep going after a nine-year break, Expendables 4 (officially dubbed Expend4bles) needed a meaningful change to how it operates--something akin to how Bad Boys for Life added a welcome streak of self-awareness.
Amusingly, Expendables 4 borrows a number of elements from that third Bad Boys movie--like casting the actor who played that film's sub-villain, Jacob Scipio; an "old guy needs glasses" subplot with Dolph Lundgren; the addition of an entire group of younger-generation folks to contrast with the old hats; and a fighter who doesn't want to do any fighting because it's traumatic for him. Despite that, Expendfourbles doesn't manage any kind of self-reflection. It does, however, have about 20 minutes of really solid action that almost makes the film's remaining hour and change of excessively incoherent plotting worth sitting through. Almost.
This fourth Expendables movie sees the gang, led once more by Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) and Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), but without a lot of the past big names from the series, go up against a mysterious terrorist named Rahmat (The Raid's Iko Uwais), who is doing a pretty standard "steal a nuke to start World War III" villain plan. The Expendables try to stop him from stealing some fancy high-tech detonators, but things go wrong and they lose one of their own on the way to failing the mission.
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