‘Expend4bles’ Review: A Few of the Old Boys Are Back, Now Joined by Megan Fox, but the Series’ Appeal Feels Increasingly Expendable
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Expend4bles,” the action is more digitally propulsive than it was in “The Expendables” (2010), “The Expendables 2” (2012), or “The Expendables 3” (2014).
Yet the preferred mode of killing is reassuringly primitive. In scene after scene, characters use knives to slit people’s throats, or they’ll sometimes jam a knife directly into the throat (the villain does this in the opening sequence, which is the movie’s way of saying “Welcome!”). “Expend4bles” is punctuated by those quick homicidal bursts of blood spatter.
They’re effective, but because they feel a lot like the video-game slashings in a “John Wick” movie, the defining spirit of the “Expendables” series — the aging action heroes of the Reagan era all gathered together for a big dumb neo-’80s marathon of old-school combat destruction — now feels nearly as far as away as the ’80s did when the first movie came out.
The first two “Expendables” films had a relatively stable cast, with Easter Egg cameos by folks like Chuck Norris and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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