Critic Reviews

It took the franchise four tries, but with Expend4bles, they’ve finally made a solid and consistently effective action movie.

The movie is unsurprising and not especially ambitious, but it’s agile enough to vault over most of its flaws.

If Stallone has gone through long stretches of unrelatability in his worst movies, The Expendables 4 does bring him back him down to the common man with its flashes of dorky buddy-movie glee: Hey, I like Jason Statham too!

Expend4bles is an endless pyro/bang-bang show, with actors not mainly known for their acting (also including 50 Cent and UFC champion Randy Couture), sticking to the story as well as they can.

These days, it’s almost refreshing to see a big dumb garbage sequel that doesn’t have any other agend4.

The Expendables movies had one trick, and that trick has been played out. Director Scott Waugh has to resort to something else with Expend4bles: finally trying to turn one of these projects into a good action movie.

The gunplay is primary though there are some obligatory scenes of martial arts fights.

The Expendables is far from high art, but it’s safe to say the saga has never hit a lower point than it has here, a crushing disappointment for anyone genuinely hoping for the return to form that was promised and demanded.

Jason Statham is the only bit of genuine oomph in a tired tale whose digital effects could have been shot on an iPhone.

Apologetic sequel brings back franchise veterans Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren and ups the violence from ‘Expendables 3’ – but that’s not enough.