Cinemas are currently showing the movie “Expend4bles”, which is the fourth part of the series of the same name, and in which – since its first film in 2010 – a large number of the most important action stars have participated.
But unlike the first parts, which achieved commercial successes, the fourth part flopped at the box office, and since its debut, it has only achieved $50 million, with a budget exceeding $100 million. So how and why did this series fall?
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In its first part, the movie “The Mercenaries” presented something different from the popular action movies since the beginning of the millennium, and star Sylvester Stallone revived the generation of action movie legends from the 1980s.
The stars of this generation appeared, albeit in small roles, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis in the first three parts, and Jean-Claude Van Damme and Chuck Norris in the second part.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the stars who contributed to the success of the “The Expendables” series (Associated Press)
As for the third part, its team also included Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, and Antonio Banderas, and included with them younger generations of action actors, led by Jason Statham and Jet Li.
The first films in the series seemed as if they were a cry from these legends saying that we are still here, and that we are able not only to star in cinematic films, but to present action scenes very brilliantly, despite our advanced age, and even to mock our old films and nostalgia for them at the same time. .
The films relied on a simple, recurring plot from one action to another. It concerns a team of “mercenaries” who carry out dangerous operations on behalf of anyone who pays money. However, in the context of the four films, American intelligence asks them to engage in suicide operations instead of its men in exchange for huge sums of money. The commander accepts the mission. The mercenary “Barney Ross” (portrayed by Sylvester Stallone), and then the battles he fights with his men begin fiercely, blowing out the enemies’ brains and slitting their throats while making jokes here and there.
A simple plot, bloody action scenes, and old stars. This equation ensured the success of the three parts, especially the first and second, while the third was unable to achieve the expected revenues, but the makers of the movie “The Expendables 4” did not pay enough attention to that equation, as they got rid of the most important part in it. They are the stars who returned to the screen, bringing viewers back to the cinema three times.
The mercenary team changed in the fourth part, abandoning its familiar faces, and none of the names that achieved success appeared only by their presence in a scene or two, but the most important absence was of its hero, Sylvester Stallone, who disappeared after the first quarter of the work, which made the series lose its most important characteristic.
Actor Sylvester Stallone is one of the stars participating in the series “Mercenaries” (Anatolia Agency)
The tyranny of visual effects
Watching more than one film by the same director is the closest way to understanding his artistic style, and in 2023, director Scott Waugh presented two films that had many commonalities, the first of which was “Hidden Strike,” starring both Jackie Chan and John Cena, and the film The second is “Mercenaries 4”.
Both works belong to the action genre and feature celebrities in this type of film. They also both enjoyed a significant commercial loss and a low rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website, which specializes in film evaluation, which is 24% and 14%, respectively. But these modest results are an inevitable result of the director’s severe inadequacy in using the resources available to him, which in this case are beloved action stars and a relatively large budget.
Movement was absent from most of the scenes of the movie “Mercenaries 4” except for the last third, which is a small percentage for a movie in which action scenes are the basis, while it was dominated by the extensive use of visual effects even in scenes that do not need it, so the entire movie seemed as if it had been filmed. Against a green background, the actors moved in front of it, and it seemed as if they had not even met during filming, as the interaction between them had reached the minimum.
There is nothing wrong with using visual effects – in and of themselves – for any film. Rather, they are often necessary to convey the creator’s imagination on the screen, that is, as an auxiliary artistic tool, but what director Scott Waugh did was overuse this tool so that it ultimately worked against him. Not to its credit, and the movie feels like a mediocre video game.
The first three films of the Mercenaries series cannot be considered distinctive works of art in general, as they did not present anything new in the cinematic genre like the “John Wick” or “The Equalizer” series, but rather they are old and repetitive “action” in which there is a constant resort to lightheartedness and blood scenes. To hide the simplicity of the very predictable plot, but the fourth part of the series makes the previous parts seem as if they are worth celebrating from the excessive decline that the series has witnessed.
Although there are 9 years between the third and fourth parts – which is a relatively long time to develop a cinematic film – this did not help the makers to provide a real addition to the previous parts, or even exploit their success, making this film the worst conclusion to a series that deserved a better ending.
Nostalgia for the past is an important attraction in cinema, as the Mercenaries series relied on this factor for years, and when it was neglected due to the relaunch of the series, it lost its identity and compass, and presented one of the worst films of 2023.
