Expend4bles (2023) Review

 "I got a prescription scope."
-Gunner Jensen



When a mission goes wrong due to Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) disobeying a direct order, he is kicked out of The Expendables.  However, when the team gets captured on a mission, it's up to Christmas to rescue them, but there may be a traitor among the team.


What Works:

As to be expected with a movie like this, there a few fun action beats.  There aren't as many as you would expect, but there are a handful of fun moments.

Finally, Jacob Scipio joins the Expendables playing the son of Antonio Banderas' character from the previous movie.  Scipio manages to match Banderas' energy and is the only actor who seems like he wants to be in this movie.  He's really the only fun part of the film.


What Sucks:

One of the big draws of The Expendables series is getting all of these different action stars into one place.  That's what makes these movies stand out.  This movie loses nearly all of the characters and actors from the first three movies.  There are only four returners and one of them, Stallone, doesn't have much screen-time.  The other problem is that they don't replace those characters with any well-known action stars besides Iko Uwais.  When they released the poster for this movie, I was like, "Who?" and that's not the reaction you want with a movie like this.

To make matters worse, some of the new actors give terrible performances.  Megan Fox and Andy Garcia are both terrible and give two of the worst performances of the year.  Fox is completely unbelievable in the role and very unlikable.  I don't even know what Garcia was going for, but it didn't work.

Most of the action is pretty generic and boing.  Most of the action sequences are just the Expendables shooting random bad guys.  Maybe I've gotten spoiled by the John Wick movies, but I just expect more from action movies these days.  The action in this movie is mostly a snoozefest.

The CGI looks terrible.  I wouldn't be surprised to find out that it wasn't finished.  The PlayStation 1 had better visuals.  This is an ugly-looking movie with both the visual effects and the cinematography.  The explosions are embarrassingly bad.

Finally, one of the main characters is seemingly killed off early in the movie.  It's a pretty well done moment with a bloody corpse left behind.  I was actually going to applaud the movie for pulling this off.  Unfortunately, it was all a fake out with the character just faking their death.  It's a dumb, cheap, and disappointing move.


Verdict:

Expend4bles is not only the worst movie in the Expendables series, but it's also the worst movie I've seen so far in 2023.  Jacob Scipio does a good job, but it doesn't feel like anyone else wanted to make this movie.  The acting is terrible, the action is boring, the CGI is ugly, and the plot twist is stupid.

 2/10: Awful 

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