Sometimes a person wants to watch a smartly written drama featuring Oscar-winning actors acting their hearts out, and other times, you want to watch a man throw knives into people’s eyes. Since its initial release in 2010, The Expendables franchise has catered to the latter category, excelling at dumb action that leaves the audience howling with laughter and clapping for more. Featuring a who’s who cast of some of the greatest action movie stars of all time, The Expendables has a simple mission statement: What if we put all of the greatest action movie stars together in a movie and let them go wild?
There’s hardly any logic to the series, but that’s the beauty of it. It’s a callback to action movies of the ’80s, where the entire point was excessive and ludicrous action, and at times, it’s a perfect replication of the period. The Expendables is just dumb fun, and if you want to give the series a try and see some of the greatest action movie stars of all time unite for increasingly stupid and over-the-top jobs, then here’s how to watch every Expendables movie in order.
The Expendables (2010)
The Expendables follows the aforementioned team, consisting of several Hollywood action legends, led by Sylvester Stallone’s Barney Ross, a no-nonsense tough guy, but also features Jason Statham, Jet Li, and Terry Crews, as support members. The team accepts jobs from an enigmatic man named Mr. Church, played by Bruce Willis, and it usually involves them doing extremely dangerous tasks that will most likely result in their deaths. And if they die? Who cares. They were all expendable anyway.
The team’s mission in the first film is to overthrow the tyrannical government of an island nation in the Gulf of Mexico. Of course, the mission isn’t as it seems, and the team will not only have to fight against the island’s regime, but also a former Expendable who was kicked off the team for being too extreme, Dolph Lundgren’s Gunner, as well as a rogue CIA agent assisting the dictator. There’s plenty of drama underneath the surface as well, mostly involving Jason Statham’s relationship ex-girlfriend, but the film effectively balances drama with action, making it a respectable debut.
The Expendables 2 (2012)
If The Expendables was about trying to find a balance between drama and action, The Expendables 2 goes all in on action. This time, the team goes to Albania to retrieve a lost item, but immediately upon finding it, they’re ambushed by the international arms dealer Jean Vilain, played by Jean-Claude Van Damme, who steals the item from them, kills one of their members, and runs away, forcing the team to hunt him down not only for the mysterious item, but also for vengeance.
Yes, The Expendables 2 is stupid. Its main antagonist is literally one letter away from being named “villain,” but it is single-minded in its pursuit of violence. Most of the original cast reappears, with new actors like Chuck Norris and Liam Hemsworth earning respectable action scenes, and more developed roles for returning characters like Gunner. This is the kind of action movie where you turn your brain off and just watch the fireworks go off, and it's arguably the most successful and popular entry in the series because of it.
The Expendables 3 (2014)
While earlier Expendables movies had a large cast of action stars, The Expendables 3 goes above and beyond in adding new characters to the team. The third entry in the series offers a shift in style and tone, like being rated PG-13 while the first two films were rated R, and focusing on younger aspiring action movie stars, like Ronda Rousey, Victor Ortiz, and Glen Powell. Some veteran actors appear, like Wesley Snipes, Harrison Ford, and Mel Gibson, but it’s clear that the film tries to appeal to younger audiences for franchise sustainability.
This time, The Expendables are sent to capture one of the original co-founders of the team (Gibson), whom they encountered recently and betrayed the team, injuring several of them in the process. The set-up is relatively similar to the second film, and it captures a lot of the same beats, delivering an action movie that still satisfies, especially when showing off the diverse skills of the younger action stars.
Expend4bles (2023)
Released nine years after the last Expendables movie, Expend4bles sees a big shift in the team dynamic. Sylvester Stallone’s Barney Ross is killed in a plane crash during a mission that went south, and now Jason Statham’s Lee Christmas is in charge of the team. Not being used to leadership, he assembles a new team featuring talent like Tony Jaa, Megan Fox, and 50 Cent, in order to avenge Barney’s death and avert World War III. The film returns the series to an R-rating and features plenty of action scenes, making this a stylistic return to form compared to the third movie.
Where To Watch All 'Expendables' Movies In Order Online
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