Delivers precisely what it promises: which is to say the cinematic equivalent of a rocket fuel-laden tanker truck plowing into the mixing room of a nitroglycerine factory.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 16, 2023

The Truth In Advertising award for 2010 went to The Expendables, which employs (however unintentionally) its own title to push the fact that this is a disposable action film.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 27, 2023

Audiences expecting what the hype has promised will be sorely disappointed by the humdrum reality of what Stallone has put together.

| Original Score: 1.5 | Aug 9, 2023

Yes, it does feel like a party thrown by Stallone for his friends and fellow action heroes aging out of mainstream leads, but... the old school action direction is more satisfying than it ought to be.

| Apr 14, 2023

Give us guns, violence, and babes and you might as well bottle it as male Kryptonite.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 14, 2022

But while the "bad Shakespeare" (as Roberts' uber-bad guy describes it) plot can be forgiven, fans of the genre will struggle with the flat, flabby bits in between the cleverly executed set pieces...

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jun 27, 2022

It's difficult not to cringe, albeit nostalgically, at the vast gap between what they're trying to achieve and what they actually manage to accomplish.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 19, 2021

Sylvester Stallone's 1980s-style Guys On a Mission throwback is boneheaded stuff indeed, but it coasts along from one explosion to the next on the nostalgic goodwill that fans still feel for its roster of ageing stars.

| Dec 4, 2020

Stallone certainly knows action.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Nov 29, 2020

Stupid. Dumb. Silly. Moronic. Sub-Moronic. Imbecilic.

| Original Score: 2.0/4.0 | Sep 7, 2020

Unfortunately, The Expendables does nothing to update anything for the new millennium.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 28, 2019

Treats its audience as a friend, inviting one and all to share in the fun; the dialogue, as atrocious as it is, is recited knowing wholeheartedly the very audience sharing the joke on the other side of the screen.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 5, 2018

A minor film on this sort of scale is always a major gesture.

| Nov 19, 2017

The Expendables is more than just your average action movie; it is the action movie of the year uniting the grittiness and soul of the old genre with the special effects and coolness of the new genre. See it.

| Original Score: A | Sep 11, 2017

Trust me, [there's] a scene you need to witness with a crowd that whoops and cheers, which is really what this film demands of its audience throughout.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 22, 2017

Some kind of meatheaded masterpiece, it's cinematic junk food of the highest order.

| May 9, 2015

What The Expendables does right is it caters to its fans. It knows exactly what they want and it delivers a a pure, adrenaline-fuelled thrill ride with some great action.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 9, 2013

The action scenes are huge and excessively violent on a scale not seen since the closing scenes of Commando. At one point, in the absence of any buildings to detonate or ammunition depots to destroy, I think I saw an explosion explode.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 28, 2012

What we end up with is an incomprehensible, overly-long explosion-fest that could have easily been retitled "A.D.D.: The Motion Picture."

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 23, 2012

the kind of all-out, over the top action movie they just don't make anymore, which is probably a good thing because the human brain can only take a movie that provides the equivalent to getting three consecutive adrenaline shots so many times.

| Original Score: 8.5/10 | Aug 15, 2012