Let’s get the difficult part out of the way first: Everyone who dies in The Expendables 4 deserves what happens to them, for no other reason than their tacet willingness to allow the film to be titled “Expend4bles.” That is some 2015 Josh Trank body-horror-Fantastic-Four garbage and capital punishment may be the only proportional deterrent.
Still, it’s never easy to say goodbye, and – ugh – Expend4bles sends a fair number of its lovable rabble rousers across that night camo rainbow bridge. It’s not a big number. It’s not four. God knows they had to save as many fours as they could for the title of the movie. Here’s a list of everyone who biffs it.
Agent Marsh
Andy Garcia? More like “Andy Gar-see ya never.” In a stunning third act twist, we learn that Garcia’s CIA Agent Marsh was secretly the villainous and enigmatic Ocelot the whole time. It was his fault that all eight of the Expend8bles got into the film’s high-stakes missile-y predicament in the first place. Like so many villains before him, he wanted to start a new World War and make a fortune via morally unconscionable profiteering. Like so many villains before him, he gets killed by Sylvester Stallone.
Suarto Rahmat
Expend4bles sees Iko Uwais joining the ranks of former action heroes filling their Celebrex prescription with Expendables money. Up until that big fat Andy Garcia-shaped twist from earlier, it sure looks like the The Raid franchise star is playing the main antagonist – a mercenary named Suarto Rahmat with a genuine love of stealing nuclear warheads. That sort of malarkey won’t stand where the Expend4bles are concerned, and he dies by the business end of a Jason Statham action scene.
That’s it?
And that’s everybody. Well, everybody with a name. Background goons don’t count as people, SAG technically considers them props. It’s frankly a little disappointing to find out how few legacy characters eat it in Expend4bles. Not J4son Statham. Not Dolph Lundgr3n, not even Sylv3ster St4allone’s B4rney R0ss – who smacks the audience upside the head with a fake-out death before heroically shouting “psych!” at the last minute so he won’t have to stop making these movies. Every single protagonist lives to fight another day, providing that their sciatica treatments keep working. It’s just an alarming lack of deaths. I was about to say “it’s like the word ‘Expend4ble’ doesn’t mean anything to these people,” and then I remembered that it doesn’t mean anything to anybody, because it’s nonsense.