In “Expend4ables,” the thoroughly disposable fourth entry in the turgid “Expendables” franchise, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson plays the newest member of the musclebound group of mercenary brutes.
“Is this the new guy?” is how 50’s character, Easy Day, is introduced as he saunters across the floor of a giant airplane hangar as the gang is loading up its weapons and preparing for its next mission. And that is all we get on him: nothing about his background, who he is, why he’s called Easy Day, how he found this giant airplane hangar or why he’s even there. He’s just the new guy. Nothing else to see here, moving on.
That’s “Expend4ables,” a movie that’s so unnecessary it doesn’t even bother coming up with characters, let alone motivations or backstories for those characters. This is a dumb-as-rocks exercise in violence and stupidity, which represents a low for a franchise that was already scraping the bottom of the barrel, and it’s on the very short list of candidates for the year’s worst movie.
The first “Expendables” was released in 2010 and was kind of a catch-all for aging action stars who were past their glory years but were still down to explode some stuff. Led by Sylvester Stallone, the movie featured Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke and more, along with Jason Statham, who never met a franchise he could turn down.