'Let's go and see a movie! What's on?' came the message from my Anglo-Iranian Affairs consultant.

'How does Expendables 4 grab you?' I replied, not seriously expecting the very positive response this got. Anglo-Iranian Affairs is a thoughtful, civilised man and I really doubted he knew what he was letting himself in for – so I floated the idea of going to see The Creator on its opening day instead.

'No, I just want to see lots of fighting and people being killed,' was the response. I suppose three-and-a-half years of working from home will have that effect on you.

So off we went to see Expend4bles, as it has rather irksomely been restyled. It certainly made asking for a ticket a bit of an enunciation obstacle course, but the ticketeer responded to my talk of 'Expend Four Bles' like someone who'd been hearing it all day (which seemed a bit unlikely given how empty the screening was).

The inciting incident comes when international mercenaries led by Iko Uwais (he of The Raid and The Raid 2) swoop into what is described in the caption as 'Gaddifi's Old Chemical Plant'. Why is Uwais here? He is here to steal the detonators for a nuclear bomb. Why are they keeping the parts for a nuclear device in a chemical weapons facility? Congratulations: I can't give you an answer to that question, but the mere fact you are asking it suggests you are using your brain more than the team of writers on this movie.

Meanwhile, back in the States, it is time to re-acquaint ourselves with the Sylvester Stallone-Jason Statham bromance which was a key plank (or possibly two short planks) or the previous films. Much of this occurs while introducing Statham's new on-off girlfriend, who is played by Megan Fox. The general trajectory of the scene is that Fox rails profanely against Statham for his general alpha-bro insensitivity, while Statham and Stallone largely ignore her and trade wisecracks. (It's hard to avoid the conclusion that even when Statham is getting intimate with Fox, he's still thinking of Stallone.) Insofar as this film has anything like subtext, the subtext of this scene seems to be that while Fox's character may be a shrill, annoying shrew, the compensations speak for themselves. This is caveman thinking, obviously, but even so it doesn't quite work – whatever regimen Fox has put herself through to ensure she still looks 22 even though she's 37, it has robbed her of any sense of charm or naturalness; she looks more plasticated than anyone in the actual Barbie movie.

Anyway, the team (Statham and Stallone, plus an ill-looking Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Curtis 'Forty Pence' Jackson, and Jacob Scipio) are packed off to Libya by CIA dude Andy Garcia to stop Uwais from skedaddling with the nuclear detonators. As the film still has much, much too long to run, not all goes according to plan, and there are casualties amongst the ranks of the Expendables. Cue another rather mawkishly sentimental sequence in which the guys mourn their fallen comrade in such fulsome terms that you can't help thinking they should think about changing the name of the team from the Expendables to the Irreplaceables. (In the end it turns out the guy's not dead after all, of course; this is so obvious that it doesn't count as a spoiler.)

But, Statham gets kicked off the team for his part in the SNAFU in Libya, while everyone else flies off to the North Pacific to stop Uwais and his mysterious employer, a shadowy figure known only as Ocelot (who was obviously at the back of the queue when evil mastermind nicknames were being handed out). Part of me was hoping this would ultimately turn out to be Michael Flatley. But it isn't. Megan Fox is now running the team, and takes to the role of tough mercenary commander like a duck to lava.

Meanwhile, Statham teams up with Tony Jaa (from Ong-Bak, Tom-Yum-Goong, etc), who is basically playing the old Bruce Lee character. His character arc basically goes: I am mild-mannered. I refuse to fight. I have moved on to a higher spiritual level. I will not be doing any fighting at all. (contrived and spurious provocation) ...BLOODTHIRSTY RAMPAGE! Jaa also possesses a small fishing boat which can get from sunny Thailand (the same bit you always see in movies) to somewhere off the Russian coast in about ten minutes flat, so he and Statham can rescue all the others.

Most of the rest of the film takes place in the same location, which is a ship: this is another sign of. . . well, here's the thing, this film (we should probably still call it a film, even though calling it a festering pile of dung might be more accurate) actually has a $100m budget, which is quite generous by modern standards (it's about eight times the budget of Past Lives, for instance), and it still manages to look like an irredeemably cheap-ass piece of work, with rotten special effects, a constrained location, a production base in Bulgaria, and so on. This is a bit baffling to me. Possibly a lot of this money went on the appearance fees of the cast, or the salaries of the thirty-plus credited producers, executive-producers, co-producers, and so on, none of whom have really earned their money. Expend Four Bles: not so much a movie, more a sort of exercise in creative accountancy.

I never thought I would look back on the first three Expendables films, frequently grim and ridiculous though they were, with something bordering on nostalgia, but here we are. There was an element of purposeful cheesiness about them which made them, at best, a sort of ironic, guilty pleasure. This one is just like watching someone playing a substandard shoot-'em-up in the middle of a swamp of unreconstructed machismo – even the bits which you would have thought were impossible to mess up – the set-piece fight between Jason Statham and Iko Uwais, for instance – never quite land in the way you would hope for. The plot doesn't make sense, but you can get away with that in an action movie if the action is good enough. But the action is not even close to good enough.

Getting three Jason Statham movies within six months would, obviously, usually qualify as a bit of a treat in our house, even if he does basically just do an extended cameo in Fast X and Meg 2 finds the great man in as close to family-friendly mode as he ever gets. Both of them are still much better than this. We can only hope this marks the final nail in the coffin of a franchise which has lost whatever charm once justified its existence. Further offerings like this one might be more honestly presented under the banner The Execrables.

Awix

02.10.23 Front Page

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