The Expendables 4: The franchise’s death marks the end of a great American tradition.

The fourth installment of the action movie franchise The Expendables arrived in theaters on Sept. 22, under a ridiculous title, Expend4bles. It’s also a wisecrack about The Expendables series, whose titular heroes, a group of well-muscled mercenaries led by Barney Ross, are subjected in scene after scene to outrageous violence—beatings, stabbings, assault rifle fusillades, car and train and plane crashes, and bomb detonations, both conventional and nuclear—yet nearly always emerge from these clashes victorious, with superficial wounds, and with their hair unmussed. The original Expendables featured a phalanx of actors, professional wrestlers, and martial artists—Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, Gary Daniels, Terry Crews, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, Eric Roberts, and an uncredited Arnold Schwarzenegger—whose combined age, if I’ve crunched the numbers right, totaled 616. One of the more erotic moments in the series takes place early in the first movie, when Barney and an ex-Expendable named Tool meet for an inking session in Tool’s sepulchral tattoo parlor. It’s clearly a good thing—for humankind, I mean—that we have less patience these days for the, uh, forceful version of masculine heroism that The Expendables enshrines.