Going back to Expandables 2, my problem with the first film is that it is everything I HATE about modern action movies. Just a bunch of shitty looking CG and shaky cam **** where you can't tell what is going on.
GOOD action movies SHOW you what the hell is going on. That's because good action movies have good fight choreography and impressive stunts. They WANT you to see it because it is impressive. CG is not impressive. You get no rush from seeing CG things explode. The rush is from the real object exploding. You want to see cars get wrecked and sets get blown up. The fact that that really happened is what blows you away. And shaky cam is just to hide the fact that nothing exciting is actually happening. You think Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan would have been as successful if the camera was shaking all over the place during their fight scenes? The whole point is they have all this cool **** that you want the best view of.
My brother and I love action films and we have identified what we consider the five crucial elements that make up a good action movie.
1. fights - it can have swords or knives, basically hand-to-hand combat.
2. shooting - ie: gun fights, anything involving projectile weapons and long-range combat
3. stunts - guys jumping from building to building, bailing from moving vehicles, etc.
4. chases - car chase is most famous, could be on foot though or with any vehicle
5. destruction - explosions, car wrecks, stuff gets destroyed
A great action film should ideally have all five elements. Any sort of impressive action movie set piece contains at least one of these core elements. If you kept the same Expendables script and just filmed it differently it would have been fine.
Regarding Batman. The reason to cast Anne Hathaway is because she is a big star. She's pretty and she can act fine but the reason they are casting her is star power. That is a big problem with blockbuster films. They think about the star-\ power first and the question of whether the person looks or fits the part is secondary. But then when I heard they were casting Heath Ledger as the Joker I thought that was retarded. I figured they cast him entirely because at the time he was hot and had star power. In the end it became an legendary performance that will forever be his most famous role. So you never know. Though hopefully Hathaway's Batman experience ends up better for her then it did for Ledger.