10 Massive Movie Franchises With No Interesting Characters

5. The Expendables

Resident Evil 2002
Millennium Films/Nu Image

The Expendables movies sold themselves entirely on the back of rounding up some of the biggest names that the action genre had ever seen, handing them enough hardware to overthrow a continent and just sitting back and letting them do their thing.

While it succeeded on that front, a lot of these guys are ten times more charismatic than you'd gather from watching them saddle up as members of the titular team, and the only interesting thing about any of the crew is their names, which is a little ironic considering that the Expendables are led by a man named Barney.

Lee Christmas, Toll Road, Yin Yang, Hale Caesar, Tool, Billy the Kid, Conrad Stonebanks and a villain that was genuinely called Jean Vilain are all monikers so preposterous that they're actually awesome, but the macho interplay is so bad and the focus so narrow that the series never made the most of it, leaving a bunch of old-timers playing shadows of their best selves without bringing anything new to roles that were literally written for them.

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