Expend4bles

The Rusting of the Action Figure

I have a soft spot for the cinematic retirement home. When Sylvester Stallone first assembled his crew of aging muscle in 2010, the joke was obvious, but the affection was real. You paid to see analog men doing analog damage. Thirteen years later, *Expend4bles* (a title that actively resists being spoken out loud) arrives like a grim transmission from a franchise that forgot its own core appeal. The sweat and practical pyrotechnics have been replaced by the very digital sheen these movies originally positioned themselves against. Director Scott Waugh comes from a legitimate stunt background, which makes the floaty, pixelated weightlessness of the combat here genuinely puzzling. You'd think a former stuntman would insist on feeling the dirt under the tires. Instead, everything plays like it was filmed in a green-painted void.



There is a moment late in the film that perfectly captures this strange dissonance. Jason Statham's Lee Christmas is driving an all-terrain vehicle—complete with mounted machine guns—across the deck of a massive cargo ship. In theory, this is exactly what you want from a late-night action romp. Still, the execution is baffling. The background smudges into a blurry, indistinct night sky, and the blood that erupts from the nameless henchmen looks like a cheap smartphone filter. It does not look like a man fighting on a ship. It looks like an actor sitting on a stationary rig in an Atlanta soundstage, waiting for the digital compositors to build a world around him. (Which, of course, they barely did.)

Statham, bless him, is trying. Stallone bows out early in the narrative, effectively passing the torch, leaving Statham to carry the emotional and physical weight of the picture. I have always admired Statham's brutalist charm; he has this coiled, irritable energy that makes him endlessly watchable. He recently proved in *The Beekeeper* that he can still anchor a massive hit with just a scowl and a right hook. Here, though, his shoulders seem to slump under the burden of carrying a script that mistakes crassness for camaraderie. He is surrounded by newcomers like Megan Fox and 50 Cent, who both look like they are reading their lines off a teleprompter located just behind the camera. The original films felt like a high school reunion for guys who used to punch each other in the 80s. This just plays like a contract negotiation.



Maybe it is intentional. Maybe the sheer exhaustion of the enterprise is supposed to mirror the exhaustion of the mercenaries themselves. I doubt it, but it is the only way to make sense of the squandered talent on the margins. Throwing martial arts legends like Iko Uwais and Tony Jaa into an action movie and largely confining them to holding assault rifles or barking into walkie-talkies is practically a cinematic crime. When Uwais finally gets to move in the climax, you get a brief, agonizing glimpse of the kinetic electricity the film could have had. Still, the camera cuts away. It always cuts away. Courtney Howard of the AV Club nailed the grim reality of the whole affair, noting that "the most dangerous foes in this movie are boredom and obsolescence".



It is hard not to feel a pang of sadness as the credits roll. There is a specific joy in watching old dogs refuse to learn new tricks, relying entirely on the blunt-force charisma that made them stars. Still, *Expend4bles* does not let them be old dogs. It traps them in a sterile digital cage, muting the very physicality that used to define them. I am not entirely sure where the genre goes from here, but I hope it involves real dirt, real squibs, and actors who are actually in the same room.