Sylvester Stallone | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

Going into any 4 of the Stallone produced Expendibles movies, you expect them to have no logic, no plot, no plausible story, and just a series of excuses for action to fight, stab, shoot, blowup any number of people. Then the question eventually becomes, when does very stupid become too stupid?

The latest and hopefully last of the Expendibles franchise is easy the dumbest of the 4, with an attempt of “surprise movie ending trickery” that is actually insulting to the audience. Movie trickery, “trying to fool the audience” only works when the logic of the story supports the trick ending. With this very bad and very stupid movie, the end of the story suprise is completely absurd and not supported by the story in any way. With an attempted explanation at the very end that holds no water.

With this 4th installment, only four previous cast members appear in this new version. Jason Statham who plays a character for some reason is named Christmas, Dolph Lundgren, who plays Gunner, and Randy Couture plays Toll Road and of course Sylvester Stallone who plays Barney. Some of the character names are as idiotic as the plots of some of these movies. The new cast includes Megan Fox, who is miscast, Andy Garcia, how much was he paid for this bad role, Tony Jaa, who plays the villain and Jacob Scipio, who is the comic foil in this story, and his role mostly fails throughout this film.

My guess is that so many of the action stars from the previous movies actually read the script and decided – no way. Considering how bad this last movie of the series is, this decision to not make the final movie could be career-saving.

The other problem is that the action scenes are not nearly as good as the previous 3 movies, almost as if they phoned in the simplest action scene ideas. Then decided to save on the budget, with Jason Statham doing almost all the action scenes in the end. With the rest of the cast, stuck in a make-shift prison. What were they thinking with this idea? High paid actors standing around in a prison for most of the last act of this movie?

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Expend4bles an extremely low and correct at 17%, My rating is 10%, and a big-time miss on this end of a movie franchise that was completely killed by the 4th and last installment.

One can only wonder about the timing of the release of the new Synvester Stallone movie “The Samaritan” and the announcement of his divorce after 25 years from Jennifer Flavin. As this movie was ready for release for probably months, it would obviously be known in advance that there is nothing new about this super-hero-like film, and the odds were high that it would be mostly panned by the critics. Unfortunately movies like this one are reviewed before they are released, and in just about all cases, this greatly reduces the number of people who will see the movie. Having a major associated news story like a celebrity divorce just might save the box office and it seems that might be the case with this film.

For this story, Stallone plays some kind of a twin brother superhero duo called Samaritan and Nemesis. There was an epic showdown between the two brothers some 25 years earlier in this fictional city called Granite, and they were both presumed dead. This story is about a young boy of about 12 years old who discovers that Samaritan is still alive. There are numerous gang members who both employ and terrorize this boy, leading to the depressing and poor environment-crime-ridden scenes that always result in violence and Samaritan coming out of nowhere to save the boy from the gang members. The violence involves lots of people flying in the air from the extreme strength of Samaritan who has the ability to survive being shot by many bullets and even being hit by a car. Other than this there is nothing innovative or unforgettable here and this turns into a low-grade super hero movie rather quickly.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings of 38% are accurate this time around, and this movie should be rated a miss.