The Expendables (4/10)

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[/caption]All about the flair and nothing about substance. But even the action was mediocre.A lot of the fault came from Sylvester Stallone's direction. He did fine with explosions and gun fights but when it came down to martial arts and car chase scenes, he wasn't good enough.During the car chase sequence it was difficult to tell what's going on because there wasn't a sense of direction on where the characters are going literally, and also there was a huge lack of sense of space so it was impossible to tell how many cars are involved in a scene and how close or far apart between two cars.And in the fight scene between Jet Li and Dolph Lundgren, again Stallone's shortcomings as a director was very apparent. Again there was no sense of space and no focus on making the choreography of the fight stood out. Even street brawling could have looked better than Jet Li here.Jason Stathman was probably the only one that came out with the best performance. And Li the worst. He was trying to be funny and each time failing miserably as the delivery of his lines fell completely flat.Stallone's writing as well was bad. Needless to say there wasn't any focus on creating a plausible storyline. Worst part of it all was how his character was able to assemble such a capable team but they always looked like they were going into a situation without any plan. Again, I feel it's another shortcoming of Stallone as a director for not being able to develop a storyline properly.