The Expendables 4 came after a nine-year hiatus from The Expendables 3, and that long hiatus created two big problems that the film couldn’t overcome. Following the box office failure of The Expendables 3 and backlash over its PG-13 rating, The Expendables franchise spent several years on hiatus with numerous attempts to relaunch the franchise. Unfortunately, The Expendables 4 failed to return the franchise to its glory days.
While The Expendables 4 made the wise decision to return to the R-rating of the first two films, the film still feels surprisingly distant from the Expendables franchise as a whole.
While it would be tempting to attribute this 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 problems with the film’s plot and its place in the series.
The Expendables 4 introduces a whole new status quo for the franchise’s mercenary team and their allies, with some Expendables mainstays, notably Jet Li, Terry Crews, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger no longer around. Even though there are various (and understandable) real-life reasons why these four don’t return, The Expendables 4 makes no effort to explain or account for their absence from the film.
The same can be said for the plethora of newcomers brought into the team in The Expendables 3, resulting in the Expendables 4 cast immediately going head to head with a team made up of newcomers and franchise veterans.
The same problem occurs on a more individual level with Lee Christmas and his new girlfriend Gina (Megan Fox). There’s absolutely no mention of Lee’s girlfriend from the first two films, Sandra (Charisma Carpenter), in The Expendables 4, so presumably Lee’s breakup with her,
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his new relationship with Gina, and Gina’s joining the Expendables all happened behind the scenes between The Expendables. “The Expendables 3” and “The Expendables 4”. All of this represents radical changes to the events and characters of the Expendables franchise that happen without explanation, leaving the impression that The Expendables 4 feels awkward after The Expendables 3.5, which never happened.
The Expendables 4 Shows The Lee Christmas Spin-Off Would Have Worked
(though Barney returns in The Expendables 4’s finale), secretly following them on their mission of revenge. Statham’s fight scene with Suarto Rahmat (Iko Uwais) is also the best action scene in the shaky, camera-filled The Expendables 4. Overall, The Expendables 4 shows that Lee is well suited for a solo adventure that can still be an ensemble action movie. stars like Tony Jaa and Iko Uwais are on board. Unintentionally, The Expendables 4 proves that The Expendables: A Christmas Story is a much better movie.
The disappointment of The Expendables 3 forced the Expendables franchise to undergo some degree of rebuilding for any eventual return, but the nearly decade-long hiatus ultimately did more harm than good for The Expendables 4. Paradoxically, two big problems After this long hiatus, the best way for the Expendables franchise to move forward was in part to show that the team was slowly drifting apart. This would also allow the essence of The Expendables 4 story and team composition to be used as the basis for The Expendables 5.
The Expendables: A Christmas Story could also help bring those changes to the franchise, with Lee going solo for a while before returning to the team to find that many of his former teammates had disappeared. This combination of The Expendables 4 and A Christmas Story would have made The Expendables 5 feel a lot less jarring if The Expendables 5 only featured a semi-recognizable version of the team from the first three films. Ultimately, after waiting so long to return the franchise to the battlefield, The Expendables 4 brought too many changes and too little buildup to the franchise for it to feel cohesive.