The Most Expendable Movie from Every Star of ‘Expend4bles’
This weekend sees the release of the fourth entry in the Expendables franchise… um, Expendfourbles?
Clearly, this series is showing no signs of slowing down and will presumably keep going until we get Expend28bles starring a geriatric Tom Holland, A.I. Jason Statham and the embalmed corpse of Sly Stallone.
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We’d like to celebrate Hollywood’s latest cinematic ode to testosterone/stylish berets that hide male pattern baldness by finding the most expendable movie for each star of Expend4bles. In other words, which film would be the least missed on each actor’s IMDb page, starting with…
Jason Statham: ‘Homefront’
Homefront stars Statham as an ex-DEA agent battling a redneck meth dealer named “Gator,” played by James Franco for some reason. Homefront isn’t the worst movie Statham ever made, but it’s easily the most expendable thanks to the cringey opening flashback scene, in which Statham sports a laughably unconvincing Criss Angel wig, best described as an affront to human decency.
Furthermore, Stallone wrote the screenplay intending to star, which may shed more light on Statham’s awkward fit. And speaking of James Franco…
Megan Fox: ‘Zeroville’
Fox has starred in several terrible movies, but to her credit, she’s fantastic in the underrated Jennifer’s Body and exited the disastrous Transformers franchise after comparing Michael Bay to Hitler. Still, there is a special place in Movie Hell for James Franco’s godawful adaptation of the Hollywood satire Zeroville. Fox co-stars as Franco’s actress love interest in a film critics hailed as a work of “staggering incompetence.”
50 Cent: ‘Home of the Brave’
Home of the Brave is a 2006 film exploring the struggles of soldiers returning home from Iraq, and was 50 Cent’s bid at becoming a legit dramatic actor — hence why he’s billed as “Curtis Jackson.”
But the sweatily Oscar-baiting movie — 50 lost Christian Bale-levels of weight for the role — opened to Gotti-tier terrible reviews and subsequently bombed at the box office, earning just less than $500,000 (on a $12 million budget). The surviving footage of Fiddy struggling to promote the film is far more entertaining than the movie itself.
Dolph Lundgren: ‘Kindergarten Cop 2’
After concluding that any 1980s muscleman is capable of yelling at small children about tumors, producers replaced Arnold Schwarzenegger with his (likely more affordable) Expendables co-star Lundgren for the straight-to-video nightmare Kindergarten Cop 2. Not only is this movie bad, it robbed us of any hope that we will ever get a proper, Arnold-starring sequel.
Andy Garcia: ‘Against the Clock’
We’re guessing that a lot of you probably haven’t seen the low-budget sci-fi thriller Against the Clock, starring Glee’s Dianna Agron, but rest assured, Garcia does some of the most baffling accent work in any movie since the time Keanu Reeves battled Dracula.
Sylvester Stallone: ‘Rambo: Last Blood’
While the Rambo franchise quickly devolved into ultraviolent, jingoistic nonsense — not to mention cartoons co-starring Santa Claus — the original entry, First Blood, is a thoughtfully sensitive film about a drifter with PTSD beating up jerk-ass cops. Hell, the climax is literally just Stallone breaking down, sobbing, and hugging his father figure.
The final film in the series tries to directly mirror First Blood but drops the ball big time. Rambo: Last Blood feels as if weird fanfic and a paranoid Fox News segment collaborated on a screenplay, with Rambo going full Jason Voorhees on evil Mexican sex traffickers who have kidnapped his teenage niece after she spends a single night South of the Border.
At least the movie didn’t end with Rambo personally constructing a border wall out of the bodies of his victims.
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