ABSTRACT
Action movie is a rather broad and all-encompassing term for a type of film that, generally speaking, will cost a great deal of money to produce, and whose primary aim is to offer the spectator an endless rollercoaster of violent, action-packed images. It is not a genre but a type of film with a look that relies heavily on visual effects to thrill its audiences. Action movies have at their core fast action-packed fight scenes, chase and escape routines. Any top ten list of the ‘best ever’ action movies will count amongst its favourites, science-fiction, spy thrillers, fantasy films, disaster and martial arts movies. As Marshall Julius (1996: 5) puts it so well, action films are ‘vengeful cops and car chases, lunatic villains and martial arts masters, male-bonding, gun fights and super secret agents, swords and sorcerers, wartime Nazi-bashing, boys’ own adventures, casual destruction and general death-defiance’. In a word, the motivation behind action films is pure escapism. ‘Forget the plot … focus on the mayhem’ (1996: 13). Shoot-outs, car chases and crashes galore pack fast-action thrillers; climaxes of fireball explosions and destroyed buildings (even worlds) are the very essence of science-fiction films, disaster and hijack movies; explosive conventions of all sorts, flying bodies, tanks and planes on fire, torpedo point of view shots are all the familiar grist of war films. What a feast for the eyes! We thrive on the vicarious fear; enjoy being physically stimulated. Why else would we enjoy a paranoid terrorist action movie such as Rock (Michael Bay, 1996) with its threat of spreading the lethal Sarin nerve gas? As King argues (2000: 103), any sense of guilty pleasure we derive from the thrill of it all is compensated for by the fact that we go to these films to escape everyday ordinariness and, moreover, to experience plenitude as a way of making up for the scarcity in our own lives. Although the action movie is primarily identified with Hollywood,
it is worth making a couple of important points in this context. First, that the nec plus ultra of the action movie, the Bond movie, is first and foremost a British product (with seventeen Bond movies carrying the GB label from the early 1960s until the early 1990s – albeit with considerable financing from the American producer Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli and, later, his wife Barbara). Bond movies – with their awesome sets by Ken Adam, breathtaking stunts, lavish visuals, extravagant fantasy, to say nothing of Bond’s gadgets doing battle against the monster machines of the evil enemy – bespeak an almost overzealous love-affair with technology and design. Indeed, we are invited to sit back and admire the spectacle ‘based on lavish plenitude’
(King, 2000: 96). Each Bond movie boasts bigger production values than the previous one. As such, the Bond movie has set the tone for many of the subsequent action series or action franchise movies as they are also known (for example, the Rambos, begun 1982; Die Hards, begun 1987; or the Lethal Weapons, begun 1988 – three of the biggest grossing of Hollywood’s action spectacular series). However, whereas with Bond we are allowed to get the full picture-show of the action in a big frame (almost in the Bazinian sense of deep focus editing), including the special futuristic design of the sets and exotic spaces visited by Bond, the newer action spectaculars offer us a curtailed sense of space in that they are full of rapid editing and discontinuity (a sort of montage-style but without the montage-effect). There is an ‘unremitting battery of impact effects’ (2000: 96). In the end, the speedy cross-cutting editing can destroy any sense of reality because, literally, we get lost. The frenetic editing in the shoot-out in the Korean nightclub in Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004) is a good example of this, but so too are the battle scenes in Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004) and King Arthur (Antoine Fuqua, 2004). The second important point worth making is that the martial arts
action films from Hong Kong, China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea constitute a very important part of the action-movie heritage – dating back as it does to the early 1970s and before, with the Hong Kong movies by Lo Wei (The Big Boss, 1971; Fist of Fury, 1972, starring Bruce Lee); followed by Jackie Chan’s Police Story series (begun 1985) in which Chan also starred; and John Woo’s films of the mid-1980s (A Better Tomorrow, 1980, starring the Chinese actor Chow Yun-Fat, and one of Hong Kong’s top-grossing films ever). Interestingly, there has been a similar shift in film aesthetics to the one described above. According to King (2000: 97), whereas earlier films (of the 1970s and 1980s) favoured the single-shot perspective of a fight sequence allowing us to see the ‘real capabilities of the star Bruce Lee’ (see The Big Boss), now these martial arts/action films have come to rely increasingly on a ‘panoply of montage effects’. The integrity of performance shooting (in the dual sense of the word: the wholeness and authenticity of the performance) has been replaced in some instances by the flashing tempo of hyperviolence (as in Full Contact, Ringo Lam, 1992, or Bangkok Dangerous, Pang brothers, 2001). Alternatively, the special effects of wire-fu action have moved martial arts films into a new realm of the fantastic (see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee, 2000; Hero, Zhang Yimou, 2002). Not all films have succumbed to this speed or fantasy effect. Takeshi Kitano has taken this genre somewhere else in his almost poetic rendition of the action thriller (see Sonatine 1993).
