Let me give you a brief run down some of the titles that have come out this year.  Going back to February, we have had Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Creed III, Scream VI, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, John Wick: Chapter 4, Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3, Fast X, The Little Mermaid (2023), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Haunted Mansion, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, The Equalizer 3, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, and now Expend4bles.  There have been thirty-eight weekends since the start of the year including this last one.  Not all of them have had a theatrical release, though it is rare when there is not a new one.  Also bear in mind that there are often two premiers.  One of these gets the majority of the press coverage, and the other is typically a horror, or some other nonsense.  So, conservatively we will say there have been roughly seventy major motion pictures to come out this year, though “major” might be an exaggeration in some cases.  Next, count the number of films I have already mentioned.  I will save you the trouble.  I gave you sixteen.  Also, if you did not notice a pattern in that list, it is that all of them are a sequel or reimagining of an existing title.  I have no idea if this is connected to the ongoing writer’s strike in Hollywood.  What is does point to is an alarming lack of creativity in the movie industry when nearly a quarter of their productions lack originality.  If this makes you not want to continue reading, you would be blameless.  I am not sure I want to write this review of Expend4bles.  At the same time, I am just getting warmed up.

Instead of starting with the title team, Expend4bles takes you to the Libyan dessert, to the country’s late dictator Mummar Gaddafi’s “old chemical plant.”  That is exactly how the film describes it, and already I was laughing at the absurdity.  The rotting industrial complex (which is probably an old furniture warehouse outside of Phoenix) is being raided by men under the command of Suarto Rahmat (Iko Uwais).  He is the villain of this week for this silliness, and he has come to take possession of set of nuclear detonators lying around at the plant, apparently.  Meanwhile, in New Orleans, series regular John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone), oh, I mean, Barney Ross, hops on his motorcycle to visit his good buddy and co-leader of the eponymous group, Lee Christmas (Jason Statham).  Barney arrives at Lee’s house in the middle of an argument with Lee’s girlfriend, Gina (Megan Fox).  Though Lee sarcastically appeals to his friend for help, Barney remains neutral because Gina is also employed by the Expendables.  Nonetheless, Barney manages to convince Lee to help him retrieve a favorite ring from a bar in a sequence that has only tangential relevance to what I will laughingly call the plot.  Later, we finally get to what these mercenaries are known for: taking on dangerous missions.  There are some new editions to their set, but their only reason for being there is comedic relief, so, whatever.  I also could not tell you for sure because I have yet to see the previous two films.  Anyway, they have received intelligence that the ongoing situation in Libya (in a timeline that makes little sense) is the work of a mysterious person named Ocelot, somebody that Barney has been tracking for years.  The Expendables are there to put a stop to Suarto taking the nuclear devices and giving them to Ocelot.  They get there in miraculous time and are on the verge of making this happen when Lee decides instead to act to stop Barney’s plane from being shot out of the sky, despite being ordered not to do so.  Lee fails at this, too, and he not only watches his friend die, but misses out on preventing Suarto from escaping with the material.  When they return to the United States, Gina is given command of the Expendables and Lee is dismissed.  This is upsetting to him because he knows their next move will be to go after Suarto.  Lee briefly tries being a private security guard, but then decides to go after Suarto alone.  Lee knows where Suarto will be because he plants a tracking device on a knife he gives to Gina to take with her.  He learns that it is somewhere in Southeast Asia.  Again, this is as specific as the film gets.  He also knows that it is on a boat.  To get to the vessel, he hires Decha (Tony Jaa), a long-time friend of Barney.  Once they are about to board, Decha decides to stay behind due to his desire to no longer kill people.  Conversely, corpses are what Lee expects to find aboard the ship.  Instead, he figures out that, as we have already seen, his former comrades have been captured.  Lee goes about doing action stuff before running into the others in one of the corridors.  The important thing here is that Suarto has rigged a bomb with the detonators, and Ocelot has ordered him to sail into Russian waters and start World War III with its explosion.  However, when they finally take down Suarto and demand the codes to stop the bomb, we find out that Ocelot is Marsh (Andy García), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer who gave them the mission.  This betrayal should surprise nobody.  An equally underwhelming revelation is that Barney is alive.  This comes after Lee has gotten everyone onto Decha’s boat and Lee offers to stay behind to do something about the bomb.  At the last moment, Barney appears in a helicopter, blowing up the tanker they are on so that it sinks and neutralizes the atomic blast.  We thankfully close with our team back in New Orleans congratulating themselves on another successful mission . . . and hopefully their last.

If this is the last of this series, then hopefully there will be no more dumb titles like Expend4bles.  A “4” is not an “A,” making the name of this movie not a real word.  People tell me that complaints like this are evidence that I take movies too seriously.  With apologies, I cannot switch my brain off when I see Lee launch a dirt bike fifty feet in the air on a moving ship, kill someone on the deck, and then come back down for a perfect landing.  Call me crazy, but this is absurd, like the title.  What made it completely unbelievable and had me thanking God for the appearance of my bill as a signal that this mess was almost over has to do with the first twenty minutes.  How long are Suarto and his men in Libya?  In the first few minutes, we see him get the location of the devices he seeks.  It is the Expendables who are called upon to deal with this situation, but they are all apparently in New Orleans.  If you look at a map, you might notice that the Crescent City and Libya are not exactly neighbors.  Yet, we are supposed to just accept that Barney is able to collect his men, get everything on his plane, and fly across halfway across the Gulf of Mexico and Africa, not to mention the entire Atlantic Ocean, and arrive in time to potentially stop Suarto?  No.  Just, no.

Another no for me in Expend4bles is Megan Fox.  I wanted to say yes to Decha.  He originally did not want to come with Lee because he had given up killing.  He actually makes a decent pro-life statement in explaining his position, saying that every time you kill somebody you lose some of your humanity.  But, forget that, we need to see Tony Jaa do his special brand of martial arts stuff.  As such, this provides a brief interlude in a movie thin on themes for a Catholic to discuss. This is why I will talk about Fox.  I was already pre-disposed towards not liking this film, and then there is the fact that it stars a suspected satanist.  My cursory research on what the actress actually believes did not reveal any definitive avowals of worshipping the enemy.  At the same time, she has been candid about the fact that she has drank the blood of her fiancé, rapper Machine Gun Kelly.  He did the same with hers.  The occasion for this, as she adds, was a “ritual” done to commemorate their engagement.  Outside of vampires (which truly are not real), I cannot think of any other group that would ritualistically drink blood, let alone human blood.  Those sympathetic to these abhorrent practices, Fox included, say that it has something to do with the phases of the moon.  This is a load of crap.  Finally, there will be some among you that will say, wait a minute, Catholics drink the blood of Jesus at Mass.  I will answer that non-theologically by asking if that is what Fox and Machine Gun Kelly were attempting to do?  The answer is no.  In short, comparing them two is ridiculous.  This has nothing to do with the movie exactly, but I could not help but think of this stuff while watching it.

To put a fine point on all this, do not see Expend4bles.