Get Some Action

I take far too much delight in the wanton absurdity of the modern action movie, so needless to say, I really like Empire’s list to Top 10 Crazy Action Sequences. Not all of their choices are perfect (I preferred the video-game style succession of increasingly more difficult, newly powered baddies in Ong-Bak’s fight house sequence to the flaming knees battle, and how Michael Bay’s awesomely over the top car-tossing on a Miami bridge sequence from Bay Boys II didn’t make the cut is utterly beyond me), but it also gets a lot quite right. I saw Terminator 2 again last week, and watching the mostly dialog free semi-vs-motorcycle sequence on a big screen with surround sound does indeed make you feel like you’re freebasing on undiluted cinemanliness. Thank the gods of Hollywood that James Cameron is coming back.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about action movies recently (well, okay—more than just recently), and as far as I’m concerned, the four best examples of the Hollywood action film are Die Hard, Aliens, Terminator 2, and The Matrix. I don’t count movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark or Star Wars, which are action heavy but are really better classified as adventure movies. Nor am I counting any of the really excellent Asian actioners—films like Hard Boiled and Ong Bak that are tremendously influential to American cinema and positively thrilling shoot-em-ups, but just don’t share the same brawny American action movie sensibility. One could probably argue that by this logic, The Matrix shouldn’t be included in my list, but part of what made that film so successful was the way the Wachowskis took Asian tropes and incorporated them into the traditional American action template so seamlessly. Watch the Wu Ping films (Twin Warriors, for example) that inspired The Matrix and you’ll notice an immediate difference, both in the way the action is stylized and in the way the story and characters are developed.

So what makes those four films stand out? For one thing, they all follow the standard action film model pretty closely: a few characters face down a seemingly unstoppable enemy in a succession of increasingly difficult, complex, and epic battles, along the way coming to a new understanding about their own life and its purpose. And they connect these two elements—the physical danger and the life lessons—in a way that feels organic. None of these movies veer off the path into the usual unrelated tangents or go-nowhere scenes shoehorned in to appeal to a some key target audience. The action and personal growth are one in the same.

Along those lines, each of these films give us characters with more depth and unique attributes than are typical in genre films. While few of the characters are exactly literary, they resist the broad, vague appeals-to-everyone (and thus no one) and instead give us specifics: the lonely foster kid with a tumultuous relationship with his mom; the gruff cop trying to deal with family pressure and a tech-savvy world that seems to be slipping away; the embittered ex-employee forced into a mission she doesn’t want by her clueless managers. These are people with clearly, specifically (if quickly) drawn lives.

What all this means, then, is that when the action kicks in, it matters, because the narrative has lived up to its initial promises, and the characters have acted like recognizable humans. And in these films, when the action kicks in, it also, well, kicks ass. This is due in part to the strong feel all of the filmmakers involved have for shooting action in a way that keeps up the energy without descending into incoherence, but it’s also due to the inventiveness with which the action scenes were conceived. Aliens, for example, was a relatively low-budget production, especially in comparison to the others, but its action scenes—especially the initial encounter in the hive and the final battle between the robosuit-clad Ripley and the ferocious Queen—were creepy and breathtaking in a way audiences hadn’t seen before. Die Hard’s action scenes may seem fairly conventional at first glance, but in part that’s because they’ve been so widely aped over the last two decades. The machine gun shootout with the broken glass; the exploding building; the initial entry into the building; forcing Willis to go through the movie without shoes—all of these were smart ways to build action scenes that weren’t merely guys with guns on one side trying to plug holes in guys with guns on the other. As for T2 and The Matrix, well, little needs to be said about their action scene innovations, many of which still awe today.

Other movies—Face/Off, True Lies, and War of the Worlds for sure, maybe Jurassic Park, maybe even The Rock—have come close to achieving the popcorn-perfection of these classics of TNT-laced pop cinema, but it’s tough to do, and it may be that the heyday of bombastic American action cinema is over. These days, I think the best hope for the action movie lies in atheletic low-budget wonders like Ong-Bak and District B13 and grimmer, more serious entrees like The Bourne Supremacy. Which is to say that I’m definitely going to be hitting up Tony Jaa’s awesome-looking The Protector this weekend, a movie that, incidentally, seems to be playing directly to the Daniel Larison/Pat Buchanan school of "blood and soil," at least from this summary:

His world shaped by ancient traditions, a young Thai fighter (Jaa) is called upon to defend his people and their honor after outsiders invade their home and destroy all that is sacred.

Because really, kids, when push comes to shove—or in this case, knee comes to face—who doesn’t love a paleocon-friendly Thai martial arts flick?