One of Our Best, Dumbest Action Franchises Is Dying. It Marks the End of a Great American Tradition.

The fourth installment of the action movie franchise The Expendables arrived in theaters on Sept. 22, under a ridiculous title, Expend4bles. But the film’s tagline, splashed in bold sans serifs across the lobby poster, is pure poetry: “They’ll die when they’re dead.” It is a koan, the kind of metaphysical puzzle you could spend years pondering. It’s also a wisecrack about The Expendables series, whose titular heroes, a group of well-muscled mercenaries led by Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone), are subjected in scene after scene to outrageous violence—beatings, stabbings, assault rifle fusillades, car and train and plane crashes, and bomb detonations, both conventional and nuclear—yet nearly always emerge from these clashes victorious, with superficial wounds, and with their hair (or, as the case may be, hair plugs) unmussed.

For nearly a decade and a half, The Expendables has been a study in survival against the odds. The films have provided steady work for Hollywood’s aging lunks—an affirmative action-hero program, if you will, allowing yesteryear’s stars to continue flexing pecs and spraying bullets, deep into midlife and beyond. The original Expendables (2010) featured a phalanx of actors, professional wrestlers, and martial artists—Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, Gary Daniels, Terry Crews, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, Eric Roberts, and an uncredited Arnold Schwarzenegger—whose combined age, if I’ve crunched the numbers right, totaled 616. Subsequent films pulled in Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Mel Gibson, Wesley Snipes, Harrison Ford—more or less every leading man who trudged through an action-thriller in the 1980s and ’90s.

Conceptually, The Expendables was shrewd. It was a throwback, aimed at a  presumably vast audience that yearned for the blockbusters of yore. Early returns were good. The debut movie and its 2012 follow-up earned sizeable grosses and the kinds of negative reviews—complaints about leaden dialogue and too many explosions—that signal to fans “This movie is awesome.” There were spinoffs: Expendables comic books, video games, a deal for a Bollywood remake, and plans for an all-female version, The Expendabelles, whose cast, it was rumored, would include Sigourney Weaver, Milla Jovovich, and, for some reason, Meryl Streep.

But The Expendables 3 (2014) sagged at the box office, earning just $39 million domestically. And where the first three films appeared like clockwork every two years, it took nine years for Expend4bles to materialize. It landed in theaters with a thud louder than any heard in the movie itself, which is saying something, tallying a paltry $8 million in its first weekend. The second weekend brought worse numbers: about $2.5 million. In recent days, the internet has been abuzz with speculation that the dismal showing spells the franchise’s demise.

That would be a blow—to the personal fortunes of several steroidal senior citizens, but also, I daresay, to culture at large. The Expendables has given us some of the most aggressively trashy and retrograde major motion pictures in recent memory. But they occupy a unique category of trashy and retrograde: Never before has so much money and star power been lavished on such a gauche, aesthetically defunct, and socially regressive string of B-movies. They have their own mesmerizing brand of bad, a purity of vision and purpose that many better, more virtuous films lack. And they are instructive about those better films. The glare of the Expendables’ fireballs and firefights is illuminating, casting light on the shortcomings of Hollywood’s higher-minded fare.

If Expend4bles turns out to be a swan song, it’s a fitting one, since it so neatly encapsulates the series’ formula. Directed, after a fashion, by Scott Waugh, it opens with aerial shots of a remote compound—“Gaddafi’s Old Chemical Plant,” according to a subtitle. In short order, the Expendables parachute in. Their mission: to stop a group of commandos, employed by a shadowy megalomaniac named Ocelot, from stealing nuclear warheads. We later learn that Ocelot intends to reap billions—somehow, it’s unclear exactly how—by starting World War III.

In any event, the Expendables’ raid ends disastrously, with their vehicles blown to smithereens and Barney apparently dead in a plane crash, a screw-up that leads to the expulsion from the brigade of Barney’s loyal lieutenant, Lee Christmas (Statham). The group repairs to its home base, New Orleans, where Christmas broods, and a creepy CIA agent, Marsh, played by Andy García, lays out a plan to recover the warheads. There is a detour to Thailand. The scene then switches to a giant tanker, disguised as an American aircraft carrier, which Ocelot and a crew of goons are piloting to Russian-controlled East Asian waters. But the Expendables show up, reuniting with Christmas for an epic shipboard battle. The bad guys are filleted and flambéed, and our heroes flee, while a gigantic bomb blast mushrooms up in their helicopter’s rearview mirror.

Nothing here will surprise those familiar with previous adventures. The Expendables dispense justice brutally and perfunctorily, punctuating their work with terse one-liners. Mysteries—Who is Ocelot? Is Barney really dead?—are resolved predictably. Bullets whiz, grenade pins are pulled. The lead duo of Stallone and Statham is joined by old standbys (Couture, Lundgren), along with slightly fresher slabs of beefcake (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Jacob Scipio, the Thai superstar Tony Jaa), who add a soupçon of generational and racial diversity. The movie also nods to feminism, kinda, sprinkling in Megan Fox and Levy Tran as Expendabelles who have expert fighting skills but are basically ornamental, and in the case of Tran’s character, Orientalist.

As always, the politics are Reagan-flavored, harkening back to the Rambo movies and other jingoist parables that rocked the multiplexes in the ’80s. Villains of indeterminate ethnicity speak with thick accents. Battle scenes are laid in the Global South, where defenders of the American empire can torch and pummel without concern for the local scenery or populace.

What distinguishes The Expendables is the refusal of everyone involved to take the enterprise seriously. The movies are first and foremost comedies, reveling in the quips its stars lob back and forth and in the inherent slapstick of the ultra-violent action genre. The Expendables is good at combining macabre and madcap. It knows that a scene of a man getting shot in the chest is banal. But when a volley of automatic gunfire sends the fellow’s torso flying across the room, leaving his legs upright and in place—that’s a joke that kills.

This embrace of burlesque stands in contrast to prevailing trends. From the cyber-spiritual woo of The Matrix, to the brooding noir of John Wick, to the Star Wars and Marvel films, with their myths and multiverses, our era’s action-adventure franchises strive to deliver not just thrills and spectacles but Big Ideas. Even 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, a shameless ’80s-nostalgia exercise in its own right, piles on arty cinematography—shots of jet bombers piercing the firmament in the twilight gloaming—insisting that something profound, even sublime, is afoot. (No wonder it snagged a Best Picture nomination.)

The Expendables has no time for this froufrou stuff. The movies do some rudimentary scene-setting, offer a few grunts of dialogue, then segue swiftly to orgies of blood and flame. The hackery of the filmmaking—the barely-there plotlines and terrible CGI—feels like fan service, jettisoning everything inessential. There is a model for this mix of brisk, violent, and funny: the great martial arts pictures of Asia. (When Statham first rose to stardom, in the excellent Transporter and Crank movies, he looked like Hollywood’s answer to Hong Kong’s screwball stars.) Of course, The Expendables has little of the wit, visual and otherwise, of Asian action cinema. The new film includes a lot of close-combat sequences, full of kicks, flips, and flashing knives. But Waugh has no real feel for the choreography that can turn a fight to the death into a ballet and a sight gag.

Still, The Expendables holds charms. It has always had fun with its brutes-of-a-certain-age gimmick. Expend4bles wrings laughs from the goofy surfer-dude haircut that Gunner (Lundgren) sports to please a woman he’s met on a dating site but never in real life. In the biker bars and garages where the guys spend their downtime, the aroma of late-middle-aged male putrefaction hovers heavily. Unlike their younger, turbocharged counterparts in the Fast and Furious movies, Barney and Christmas et al. favor vintage pickup trucks and prop planes that sputter and snort. They have an arsenal of high-tech firearms but prefer whenever possible to mete out punishment with brass knuckles and other older-school weapons. In the new movie, a pivotal role is played by a broadax that appears to have been filched from the set of a film version of Beowulf.

The most impressive antiques are the Expendables themselves, and the films never cease to fetishize their square jaws and gym-pumped—possibly pharmaceutically and surgically enhanced—dad bods. One of the more erotic moments in the series takes place early in the first movie, when Barney and an ex-Expendable named Tool (Mickey Rourke) meet for an inking session in Tool’s sepulchral tattoo parlor. While the pals croak reminiscences about the times they were “ass-deep in that mud and blood”—a practically Éric Rohmeresque stream of badinage, by Expendables standards—Tool bends over the shirtless Barney, inscribing a skull on his back. The camera slurps up the fleshly scene, savoring Rourke and Stallone in all their buffed and Botoxed glory.

Stallone, in particular, is a sight to behold. At 77, his still-hulking physique is topped by an unnaturally smooth, florid, and inexpressive face; it looks less like Sylvester Stallone than a Sylvester Stallone mask that has half-melted in a furnace blast, perhaps at Gaddafi’s old chemical plant. One can scarcely conceive how many hours the actor has logged, on the weight bench and in the cosmetic surgeon’s office, to keep himself fighting fit. It’s testament to the life force, to Stallone’s refusal to go gently. He seems capable of keeping this shtick going indefinitely, pushing out line-readings and galumphing into enemy territory in Expendable5, Expenda6les, and on.

But movie biz reality may intervene. In Hollywood, bad box office is a foe few can vanquish. At the screening I attended, on opening day, I was one of just three viewers in a windswept 4DX theater. Blame the failure on The Expendables’ shoddiness, or chalk it up to changing times. (As the creators of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny recently learned, the public’s appetite for ’80s revivals may be tapped out.) It’s clearly a good thing—for humankind, I mean—that we have less patience these days for the, uh, forceful version of masculine heroism that The Expendables enshrines. Yet I can’t help but grieve a little: It’s possible that moviegoers will never again be served such truly mindless pleasure along with their jumbo tubs of popcorn. They’ll die when they’re dead? Alas, for those of us who like our action flicks big and dumb and unrepentant, the Expendables may die sooner than that.