I was not much of a fan of any of the previous Expendables franchise, though there were none that I truly hated. I did not want a fourth film, but you never know. Perhaps it is a good one after all.

Well, after seeing this, I can say that it is not a good one. Not even close. In fact, it is easily the worst of the franchise.

The Expendables are off on a mission to try and prevent a terrorist from getting his hands on nuclear detonators. When that mission goes south, the team deals with a loss and Christmas (Jason Statham) has to go rogue to prevent the dangerous situation.

There really is not much of a story. There is a mole inside the organization, but it was painfully apparent whom that was. Something happened in the first act that was so clearly not what happened that you were just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The dialogue of this movie was utter crap. It was legitimately some of the worst written dialogue that I have ever heard. It was meant to make Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham seem like they have fun banter, but it was so eye-rollingly bad that it only served to make me dislike these two characters all the more.

And the remaining characters I couldn’t care one thing about because the movie didn’t give me any reason to care for any of them. Megan Fox looks great, but her character is lacking any sort of personality. Andy Garcia, the new boss, is a nothing character. Randy Couture and Dolph Lundgren were old and looked it. 50 Cent, Jacob Scipio, and Levy Tran all have newer characters that I have no idea who they are or why I should care about them. The only one with any sort of characterization is Tony Jaa, and that was basically because he looked cool.

The green screen was obscenely noticeable for a film from 2023. The action was consisting of a lot of shaky cam and boring gunplay. Even some of the martial arts was not up to par, considering some of the top notch martial artists that they had in the film.

I would have considered this the worst movie of the year, but I did watch Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey this year and, while this is horrible, it does not reach that level of bad.

0.5 stars