Warning: Spoilers for The Expendables 4 Below!
The Expendables 4 arrived after a nine-year gap from The Expendables 3, and that extended break created two big problems that the movie could not overcome. Following the box office downturn of The Expendables 3 and the backlash to its PG-13 rating, The Expendables franchise spent several years on pause with numerous attempts to get the franchise up and running again. Unfortunately, The Expendables 4 failed to bring the franchise back to its glory days.
Although The Expendables 4 did make the wise decision to go back to the R-rating of the first two movies, the movie still feels surprisingly distant from The Expendables movie franchise as a whole. While it would be tempting to attribute that entirely to the nine years between The Expendables 3 and The Expendables 4, that only tells half the story. In truth, the nine-year wait for The Expendables 4 created two much larger issues in the movie’s story and place in the series.
The Expendables 4 Feels Like The Franchise Skipped A Movie
The Expendables 4 introduces a completely new status quo for the franchise’s mercenary team and their allies, with several Expendables mainstays no longer around, specifically Jet Li, Terry Crews, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. While there are various (and perfectly understandable) real-world reasons for the four not returning, The Expendables 4 makes no effort to explain or account for their respective absences from the movie. The same is true of the slew of new recruits brought aboard the team in The Expendables 3, leaving The Expendables 4‘s cast to jump right into action with a team comprised of a mix of franchise newcomers and veterans.
This same issue is also seen on a more individual level with Lee Christmas and his new girlfriend Gina (Megan Fox). The Expendables 4 makes absolutely no reference to Lee’s girlfriend in the first two movies, Sandra (Charisma Carpenter), so presumably Lee’s break-up with her, his new relationship with Gina, and Gina joining the Expendables all took place off-screen between The Expendables 3 and The Expendables 4. All of that is a radical change in events and characters for The Expendables franchise to undergo without explanation, and the result is that The Expendables 4 feels like it awkwardly comes after the Expendables 3.5 that never was.
The Expendables 4 Shows The Lee Christmas Spin-Off Would Have Worked
During the nine-year gap from The Expendables 3 to The Expendables 4, one idea that emerged was to continue the franchise with a spin-off centered on Lee Christmas, which even carried the tentative title of The Expendables: A Christmas Story. Some of the plans for that spin-off seem to have been retained for The Expendables 4, which makes Lee its central protagonist with Sylvester Stallone’s Barney Ross in a supporting role. Ironically, Statham’s performance as Lee in The Expendables 4 heavily suggests that A Christmas Story was the better option for The Expendables franchise’s comeback.
The strongest parts of The Expendables 4 are centered on Lee being booted from the team after they blame him for Barney Ross’s supposed death (though Barney returns in The Expendables 4‘s ending) while covertly following them on their revenge mission. Statham’s fight scene with Iko Uwais’s Suarto Rahmat is also the best action scene of the shaky cam-filled Expendables 4. In all, The Expendables 4 shows Lee to be well-suited for a solo adventure, which could still be an action ensemble with action stars like Tony Jaa and Iko Uwais on board. Inadvertently, The Expendables 4 makes the case for The Expendables: A Christmas Story being a much better movie.
How These Issues Show The Solution For The Expendables Franchise
The disappointment of The Expendables 3 made it necessary for The Expendables franchise to undergo some degree of recovery for any possible comeback, but taking a nearly decade-long break ended up doing more harm than good for The Expendables 4. Paradoxically, the two big issues that came out of that long break show the best way for The Expendables franchise to move forward was partially by showing the team gradually going their separate ways. That would have also made it possible for the essence of The Expendables 4‘s story and team roster to be used as the basis for The Expendables 5.
The Expendables: A Christmas Story might have also helped set up these changes to the franchise, with Lee departing on his own for a time, and later returning to the team to find many of his former brothers-in-arms gone. That combination of The Expendables 4 and A Christmas Story would have made it much less abrupt for The Expendables 5 to feature only a semi-recognizable version of the team from the first three movies. In the end, by waiting so long to get the franchise back onto the battlefield again, The Expendables 4 brought about too much change for the franchise with too little build-up for it to feel harmonious.
