Some movies exist just for the bullets, the bombs and the exploding bodies; this is one of them.  The Expendables series began as an all-star ode to mayhem, with every action star imaginable recruited to populate stories where dozens, if not hundreds, of bad guys, henchmen, thugs, soulless mercenaries and an occasional woman would be sent to Kingdom Come in the most spectacular ways possible.  That tradition continues in the fourth entry, minus most of the big name stars.

Scott Waugh’s story reverts back to the mysterious past of Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone), who accepts a job intercepting a nuclear bomb en route to some very bad people.  A lot goes wrong and soon his buddy Lee Christmas (Jason Statham) is leading the Expendables team to exact revenge and stop the bomb from being delivered.  Lots of stuff explodes and lots of tertiary characters (henchmen, thugs, soulless mercenaries, etc.) die in hideous ways.  Eventually there is a twist ending.

I guess there’s a place for these films, though I cannot imagine anybody really digging them.  Without the former megastars who made appearances (Gibson, Schwarzenegger, Willis, Li, Van Damme, Norris, Banderas, Ford, Snipes) the cast seems relatively sparse, despite the returns of Dolph Lundgren and Randy Couture and new faces Andy Garcia, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson and Megan Fox.  The characters have a nice camaraderie, bantering and joking before they kill, play-fighting each other to prepare for the real thing, yet I find the exercise artificial and curiously uninvolving.  If you like these, this one is certainly passable, if not particularly memorable.  ☆ ☆.  20 July 2024.