The Expendables 5: The Final Contract is not a swan song; it’s a full-throttle, nitro-injected resurrection, a film that acknowledges the weathered, iconic brawn of its legends while gleefully introducing a new, hyper-kinetic breed of warrior to shatter the mold. Director Scott Waugh (of Need for Speed infamy) orchestrates a symphony of controlled chaos that feels like a love letter written in C4 and blood-stained snow. Sylvester Stallone’s Barney Ross and Jason Statham’s Lee Christmas are the grizzled, familiar heart—a pair of aging lions who know every trick in the book of conventional warfare. Their chemistry is as reliable as a well-oiled machine gun, full of weary banter and mutual, unshakeable loyalty. But the icy, unforgiving Alps present a problem that brute force and experience alone cannot solve: speed.

Enter Cristiano Ronaldo as “Sniper 7.” This is the film’s masterstroke. Ronaldo isn’t just a new recruit; he’s a force of nature from a different action era. He treats the vertiginous, frozen battlefield as his personal extreme sports arena. His movements are a blur of terrifying efficiency—scaling sheer ice faces with piton-like precision, using thermal drafts to glide between outposts, and repurposing the environment itself as ammunition. The image of him launching a razor-sharp ice shard with a spinning kick into an enemy’s throat is the film’s thesis in a single, brutal frame: a new, fluid, and lethally elegant form of combat has arrived.

The action is a breathtaking, often absurd escalation. Waugh stages each set-piece with a clear geographic logic, making the impossible stunts feel strangely plausible within the film’s own bonkers reality. While Statham engages in gloriously messy, close-quarters brawls in claustrophobic bunkers, Ronaldo operates in the vast, silent openness above, a ghost rewriting the rules of engagement. This all converges in a climax of such sheer, audacious spectacle that it cements the film in action legend. The sequence of Ronaldo, one ski pole in hand, the other gripping a wounded Barney Ross, carving a path down an actively exploding mountain is pure, unadulterated cinematic madness. The tactical “Siuuu” landing onto a waiting VTOL aircraft is the perfect, crowd-pleasing punctuation mark—a moment of athletic hubris that somehow saves the day.

The Final Contract is a 9.3/10 adrenaline overdose. It is pure, unadulterated action chaos, executed with a surprising degree of finesse and a palpable joy. It doesn’t pretend to be high art; it is a victory lap and a baton pass all at once. Ronaldo doesn’t just join the Expendables; he evolutionarily leaps over them, breathing explosive, gravity-defying new life into a franchise that was running on fumes. It’s the most fun you’ll have watching a mountain—and several action movie conventions—blow sky-high.

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