A Generation of Action Films: From the 1960s to the 1980s
In the 1960s the first half dozen or so Bond films largely established the essentials of the genre, from their filmic structure (specifically, the packing in of more thrills, substantially through the use of multiple set pieces, if necessary at the expense of narrative logic), to the range of essential material (the variety of fight and chase scenes, from frogmen-with-knives to ninjas to pursuits on skis), to the associated cinematographic and editing techniques (the use of close shots, short takes, jump cuts and exaggerated sound effects in portraying the fight scenes), as well as developing much of the required technology (techniques for underwater and aerial photography), and probing the limits to the intensification or scaling up of the pattern. In pace and spectacle You Only Live Twice represented a maximum that later Bond films only occasionally and marginally exceeded for decades afterward, while only once was a Bond film to cost more to make before the 1990s.
Still, it must be admitted that Hollywood was slow to replicate their success. It certainly cashed in on the Bond films' success with a rush of spy-themed movies, but generally went the cheaper, easier route of parody, while showing little alertness to what might be called the "poetics of the action movie"—saving its resources for splashy musicals, while the younger, fresher talents capable of walking a new path generally seem to have been more interested in the edgier material. For all that Hollywood did produce contemporary-set films with action in them, but a good look at the crime films and disaster films of the '60s and '70s shows that they were just regular crime dramas that might have a big car chase in the middle (Bullitt, The French Connection, Dirty Harry), or variations on Grand Hotel in which things periodically blew up or crashed or burned down (Airport, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno).
As the years progressed Hollywood continued its movement in this direction (Magnum Force and still more The Enforcer are rather more action-packed than the original Dirty Harry), but American filmmaking only really assimilated the pattern, let alone added anything to it, with Star Wars (1977). George Lucas' blend of action movie mechanics with space operatic imagery and revolutionary special effects (principally, the use of a computer-controlled camera that permitted a greater precision and replicability in effects shots, making the process cheaper, and allowing the production of more complex, denser, more elaborate shots of the type) was, where this kind of filmmaking was concerned, a revolution for Hollywood, and the world.
Once again Hollywood was not particularly quick to learn the lesson. Just as in the heyday of the Bond films Hollywood imitated the spy theme rather than the action movie mechanics, it imitated the space theme of Star Wars rather than what the movie did with it—as a viewing of those first two great follow-ups to Star Wars' success, Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, makes clear. Still, more action movies did not follow, not least by way of Lucas, who scripted and produced the Steven Spielberg-helmed Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), initiating a wave of H. Rider Haggardesque action-adventure, while encouraging the trend toward faster pacing, more gunplay and the rest—the second big-screen Star Trek film reflecting the logic in opting for a battle between Kirk and his most storied enemy, Khan (1982).
The same summer also saw John Rambo make his way to the screen in a battle with the authorities that escalated into a one-man war on the National Guard, First Blood. The finale had him cutting loose on the town that mistreated him with a machine gun, but it was really James Cameron's mix of science fiction and paramilitary action, The Terminator (1984), that established the pattern for films where the central figures, rather than shooting down opponents with a sidearm, takes them out in greater numbers with a machine gun—prevailing in the subsequent '80s action classics Commando (1985); that same summer's Rambo: First Blood, Part II (1985); Cameron's sequel to what had previously been a haunted house horror movie in space, Alien, the ingeniously titled Aliens (1986); and Predator (1987), which actually begins with Arnold Schwarzenegger participating in a conventional enough commando raid in Latin America, such that one could easily mistake it for a sequel to Commando. Heavier firepower of the kind also became increasingly characteristic of the similarly prolific cop movies, like that same summer's Lethal Weapon (1987), Robocop (1987) and Beverly Hills Cop II (1987).
Of course, the tendency had already hit something of a natural limit, and even self-parody, in Commando, where at the climax the protagonist mows down line after line of oncoming attackers just by facing in their direction as the machine gun he has on his hip blazes away. So did it also go for the genre more generally, a fact harder to ignore as the decade continued.* Over-the-top as the second Rambo film, the gargantuan Rambo III (1988), at the time the most expensive production in movie history, tried to top that, and simply looked foolish, while the finale of Stallone's next action film, 1989's gadget, assault vehicle and explosion-filled Tango & Cash, reinforced the impression. It was the case, too, that the angst to which the paramilitary action genre spoke increasingly felt like yesterday's issue. (Rambo was a spectacle of post-Vietnam anguish—fifteen years after the troops came home.) The box office grosses made this harder to ignore as the genre's two most iconic paramilitary franchises each flopped, the fifth Dirty Harry film, The Dead Pool, virtually ignored by moviegoers, while Rambo III made a mere third of what the second Rambo movie had in North America.
The Action Movie is Dead. Long Live the Action Movie!
One flop, or two, has never been enough to make Hollywood shift gears all by itself, the more so as at any given moment the movies to hit theaters two years on have probably already been greenlit—and while entertainment journalists, displaying their usual lack of historical memory for the business they write about and their tendency to read in any little up or down an epoch-defining trend, made noises about the end of the action film soon enough, this was not to be so. Indeed, Hollywood continued to make '80s-style Stallone and Schwarzenegger films, and Schwarzenegger in particular scoring a number of successes (Total Recall, Terminator 2, Cliffhanger, True Lies, Eraser); while milking those franchises that still seemed viable—and relatively successful with Die Hard (which was reasonably successful during that same summer in which Rambo III flopped), and Lethal Weapon (Lethal Weapon 2 having done very well in 1989, and leading to two more successful sequels in 1992 and 1998).
However, the fact that the action movie actually became more rather than less prominent at the box office during the 1990s was due to Hollywood's willingness to try other ideas. Not by any means did they all pan out. The decade saw quite a few video game-based action films, for example, like Super Mario Bros. (1993), Double Dragon (1994) and Street Fighter: The Movie (1994). (In these years only the relatively low-budget, August dump month release Mortal Kombat (1995) was a big enough hit to warrant a sequel, and only one (1997).) There was, too, quite an effort to produce female-centered action films, with an American remake of Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita, Point of No Return (1992); and Geena Davis' Cutthroat Island (1995) and The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996). Things turned up a bit for both endeavors with Charlie's Angels (2000) and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), but only to a slight degree. Instead the real successes derived from other approaches.
Reuse the Die Hard Formula . . . Endlessly
In the course of squeezing those extant franchises, there was the repetition of their ideas. After the second Die Hard film the actual Die Hard franchise generally moved away from the pattern of the original—a situation in which "terrorists" or somesuch seize a building or other structure and take everyone in it hostage for the sake of executing some film; miss an individual who remains loose and, despite their isolation, perhaps because they have loved ones at stake, undertakes a one-man guerrilla war against the bad guys with the clock ticking, the authorities outside trying to help and often making a botch of it, and likely some final twist awaiting us which will show the villains' plan was not quite what we thought it was at the beginning. However, no one else did, the imitators numerous and often shameless, as the innumerable lists of them on the web show.
Steven Seagal's career high film, Under Siege (1992), was "Die Hard on a battleship." Speed (1994) was "Die Hard on a bus." The Rock (1996) was "Die Hard on Alacatraz." Air Force One was . . . "Die Hard on Air Force One," the same summer that The Rock star Nicholas Cage wound up in a similar situation on a plane full of convicts, Con Air (1997). We even got Die Hard out on the "final frontier" in the eighth Star Trek film, Star Trek: First Contact (1996), where the Borg took over the Enterprise, and Jean-Luc Picard, initially single-handed, had to recover the ship and save the day and the universe from their control.
And of course, alongside these big-budgeted hits there were a good many less celebrated efforts, like those other "Die Hard on a plane" films, Passenger 57 (1992) and Executive Decision (1996); the "Die Hard in a school" movies Toy Soldiers (1991) and Masterminds (1997) (where Patrick Stewart was the villain rather than the day-saving hero this time); "Die Hard in a stadium," Sudden Death (1995); the less successful sequels to Under Siege and Speed, Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995) (train), and Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997); and an abundance of straight-to-video stuff, like the Anna Nicole Smith vehicle Skyscraper (1996), which stuck with the skyscraper idea of the original because, why not, and anyway, no one was really watching that for the plot, were they? Meanwhile, one can see more modest influences of the '88 classic in more mobile action films like Cliffhanger (1993) and Broken Arrow (1996), or even the family comedy Home Alone (1990).
When American Movies Aren't Enough, Look Abroad
Besides imitating Die Hard, there was a measure of borrowing from abroad, some more successful than others, with France an obvious case. Hollywood's remake of Besson's Nikita was a critical and commercial disappointment, and the reception to Besson's own English-language film The Professional (1994) was cold, but the biggest action hit of 1994, True Lies, was a remake of Claude Zidi's La Totale! (1991).
Moreover, the borrowing from France was minor next to that from Hong Kong. Hardly a new idea for action filmmakers (Tango & Cash "borrowed" its opening from Jackie Chan's Police Story), this intensified drastically, with recent Hong Kong hits getting the kind of highly publicized wide releases virtually unheard of for foreign productions, starting with the Jackie Chan vehicle Rumble in the Bronx in early 1996. More significantly, Hollywood also copied the fight choreography of the films, particularly the tight, choppy martial arts style made famous by Jackie Chan, the "heroic violence" of director John Woo's films, and the "wire fu" of directors like Yuen Woo-ping, to such a degree that they would soon become standard. Hollywood also brought many of the figures themselves into its own movies, with Woo making American films like Hard Target (1992), Broken Arrow and Face/Off (1997), and Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh and Tsui Hark not long in following them. (Sammo Hung even got a prime time Big Three network show for two seasons, Martial Law (1998-2000) on CBS.)
Often the tropes, and the figures, were used to inject new life into tiring or idea-starved franchises. The Bond series, serving up yet another, and particularly nonsensical, do-over of The Spy Who Loved Me (itself a do-over of You Only Live Twice) in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), sought a measure of novelty in having Bond work with a Chinese agent this time, in an adventure set in Vietnam, with Hong Kong star Yeoh cast as said agent and getting a martial arts sequence in which to do her thing. The next year the fourth installment of the Lethal Weapon series (1998) featured Jet Li in a supporting role that was hyped far out of proportion to his actual screen time, while the sequel to the 1996 film adaptation of the old Mission: Impossible TV series (2000) had director John Woo bringing his trademark "heroic violence" into the franchise, epitomized by the climactic fight scene in which protagonist Ethan Hunt and his current adversary raced at each other on their motorcycles, then leaped off them to fight in mid-air.
More subtly, the pairing of Jackie Chan with Chris Tucker permitted Hollywood a significant success with the long-flagging buddy-cop action-comedy genre, Rush Hour (1998), and a more minor one with the even less vibrant Western, Shanghai Noon (2000). More significant as a pop cultural moment than any one of these films, however, a more than usually entertaining use of what Hong Kong martial arts films had to offer was part of the package that made the original The Matrix (1999) one of the decade's biggest pop cultural phenomena.
When You Run Out of Movies to Copy, Turn to TV
The 1990s, in general, was a decade of nostalgia for earlier periods, with Hollywood in particular seizing on a good many old TV shows as inspiration for big screen films—like The Addams Family, The Flintstones and The Brady Bunch, each of which was followed up by a sequel. Where the action genre was concerned the possibilities were more limited than with comedy because of the limitations of that medium in this genre, especially in its earlier days. Still, there were some efforts, the two great successes among which were, of course, The Fugitive (1993) and Mission: Impossible (1996). Notable, too, were the space opera Lost in Space (1998), and the James Bond-meets-Western series, Wild Wild West (1999).
By and large the "adaptations" were superficial, relying more on nostalgic evocation of brand names than anything else where the source material was concerned, and deriving much of their interest from elsewhere, even when they were being thoroughly derivative. Mission: Impossible director Brian De Palma, whose previous transformation of an old TV show into a feature film had borrowed its most famous scene from a classic film (The Untouchables, which worked in the baby carriage rolling down the steps from Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin), likewise turned to another classic movie for MI's most memorable sequence, the hanging-by-a-rope break-in scene from Topkapi (1964). (Much imitated since, everyone seems to think Mission: Impossible was the first to do it, testifying to the brevity of most cinemagoers' memories.)
Unsurprisingly, there was not much of a basis for a major franchise in these. The Fugitive, whose plot about the innocent Dr. Richard Kimble's attempt to survive and clear his name was scarcely repeatable, was nonetheless a big enough hit that the producers endeavored to do so on the basis of Tommy Lee Jones' well-received turn as Sam Gerard, U.S. Marshals (1998), and did not succeed, the series ending there, while there was insufficient enthusiasm to attempt even that with Lost in Space or Wild Wild West. However, the Mission: Impossible series has, with the aid of new borrowings, soldiered on into the present (numbers seven and eight being shot back-to-back at last report).
More Military Hardware
As the cop-and-commando films of the '80s showed, there was a tendency to incorporate more military hardware into the adventure to up the level of action, while this heyday of the military techno-thriller saw a still broader fascination with high-tech weaponry. Where bildungsroman had been a reliable basis for box office success with films like Private Benjamin (1980), Stripes (1981), and An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), mixing into such a story F-14 Tomcats in aerial showdowns with foreign enemies made Top Gun the biggest hit of the year in 1986, while that same year's Iron Eagle (where Louis Gossett Jr. again played the mentor) enjoyed a more modest success.
This did not immediately lead to a slew of military-themed action movies. However, the successful adaptation of Tom Clancy's submarine thriller The Hunt for Red October (1990) for the big screen changed that, not only making a multi-movie franchise out of the adventures of its protagonist Jack Ryan (followed up in 1992 with Patriot Games and 1994 with Clear and Present Danger), but also leading to such hits as Under Siege, Crimson Tide, Broken Arrow, Executive Orders and Air Force One. (As noted earlier, many of them were variants on the Die Hard formula, and it does seem worth noting that the confined spaces and destructive potential of warships and military aircraft made convenient settings for such plots, while the fact that such scenarios were smaller in scale may have made them more approachable for audiences.) At the same time there was more hardware on display in movies not built around this theme, with True Lies, the biggest action hit of its year, incorporating a Harrier jet fighter into the climax, while it seems worth noting that the Bond films of the period, particularly Goldeneye (1995) and Tomorrow Never Dies, made especially lavish use of combat aircraft, warships and the like in their action scenes.
Intensified Editing
Besides recycling classic movie stunts so old that to many they seemed new, adding in Hong Kong-style martial arts and gunplay, and continuing to up the military-grade firepower, Hollywood action films worked to squeeze more effect out of such spectacle as they served up, not least through a more intensive use of editing. That approach, of course, was not wholly without precedent, in cases precedent going far back into film history. Montage pioneer Sergei Eisenstein's penchant for short shot lengths is strikingly contemporary, while it is worth noting that more action-oriented film has always tended to be more tightly edited than other kinds (John Ford or Howard Hawks, for instance, tending to shorter takes than Billy Wilder). Later the advent of television and the television commercial provided an arena for ultra-tight editing, facilitated by the shortness of the product, which in the 1960s became a major influence on cinema, by way of those formative James Bond films (so much so that they may be said to have helped create the action movie), and more widely evident in moviemaking as the work of Richard Lester on films like A Hard Day's Night (1964). In the 1970s Don Simpson's famous and infamous promotion of "high concept"-style filmmaking, which turned a movie into a two hour commercial, or music video (an approach encouraged by his enlistment of makers of commercials and music videos as feature film directors, like Ridley and Tony Scott, and Adrian Lyne), which became routine across the industry, intensified this yet again.
Still, technological change made this easier and more commonplace, notably the commercial availability of digital editing technology from 1989 on, which contributed to a sharp drop in Average Shot Length. Indeed, where feature film was concerned the possibilities were rather rapidly exploited, most notoriously by Michael Bay, yet another director of commercials and music videos who made a major splash in feature film with Bad Boys (1995), The Rock (1996) and Armageddon, though others were more aggressive still, not least Paul W.S. Anderson. It was the latter who, in short order, took the trend to what appears a natural limit in Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse (2004) (with an ALS of a mere 1.7 seconds), virtually no movie pushing the envelope further in the fifteen years since.
More Science Fiction. Much, Much More Science Fiction—and Much, Much Less of Some Other Things . . .
As the late '80s already demonstrated, the desire of filmmakers and audiences alike for bigger and better action movie spectacle was exceeding the limits of the frameworks provided by the old cop-and-commando stories, even with the additions discussed above. And so there was a turn to the fantastic—to displays of more than superhuman ability and outright superheroics (Batman), to exotic creatures (Jurassic Park), to the depiction of disaster (Twister), the cast-of-thousands epic (Braveheart), and the space opera that brought all these together (Independence Day, and above all Star Wars: Episode I—the Phantom Menace).
None of these ideas was new, of course. Indeed, there was a certain amount of nostalgia evident here as well, whether for old-fashioned superheroes, B-movie monsters, Irwin Allen disaster films, historical epics or Star Wars and its imitators. Nonetheless, new technology—above all, Computer Generated Imagery (CGI)—permitted such visions to be realized with a new ease, polish and flair. It was this that made the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park what they were, this that created those casts of thousands in a movie like Braveheart—while at the end of the decade, in The Phantom Menace, it permitted George Lucas to conjure all-CGI worlds, such as was hardly dreamed of back when he made the original Star Wars. Detractors of that film and the other prequels were harshly critical of the approach, but there is no denying that it was something new, that at least some found pleasure in the results, and that it did change the way movies were made.
Going along with the shift toward science fiction, and at that, science fiction films of these particular kinds, there were other, subtler shifts. One, reflecting the fact that science fiction's attraction was its affording room for bigger and more exotic action, was that rise in movie budgets. As late as the mid-1980s a summer blockbuster could be made for between $10 and $20 million, as was the case with Commando, or the science fiction-tinged-but-still-thoroughly-paramilitary Aliens and Robocop. By the late 1990s budgets on the order of $100 million (and often much more) were standard.
Another was the way the movies served up their thrills. Where paramilitary adventures emphasized bloody mayhem, these larger-budgeted, more briskly edited films were broadly staged effects extravaganzas, less apt to stress gore—or grit of any kind. Along with the generally declining tendency of popular film to "gratuitous" nudity (in contrast with the bits Commando or Die Hard served up), this meant less reason for an R rating, which in any case became a riskier bet when such large budgets were at stake. The result was that where any list of '80s action movies mostly consisted of movies advertised with the caution that "People under 17 years may only be admitted if accompanied by a parent or guardian," the R-rated action movies generally slipped from their genre's top ranks.
To be sure, there was still a very great deal of the '80s action film in those machine gun-packing Die Hard retreads and last Schwarzenegger films and the rest. Yet, it seems worth noting that the science fiction films outperformed them with increasing consistency and by widening margins, even without a Lucas or a Spielberg at the helm. In 1992 Batman Returns was the highest-grossing film of the year, in 1993 Jurassic Park, in 1995 the next Batman sequel, Batman Forever the biggest action success. The trend became still more pronounced in 1996 with The Rock and Eraser doing well, but nowhere near so well as Twister and Independence Day. The following year Air Force One was a hit, but well behind Men in Black and the Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World. In 1998 Lethal Weapon 4 was a moneymaker, but one well short of Godzilla, Deep Impact and Armageddon, while in 1999 The Phantom Menace, The Matrix and The Mummy were the year's action hits, all safely placing among the top ten earners of the year. By contrast, the highest-ranked, non-science fiction action film of the year was the latest entry in the perennial Bond series at #13, while Mel Gibson's Payback was down in the #26 position, and Schwarzenegger's End of Days (in spite of its supernatural and end-of-the-millennium theme) was all the way down at #33.
Unsurprisingly, the Die Hard retreads puttered to a halt sometime around 1997, and so did the techno-military action (Air Force One appears a last hurrah for both those genres as summer box office staples), while Stallone and then Schwarzenegger became steadily more marginal performers—all of this coming to look like rather B-movie stuff. Hong Kong flavoring remained very much part of any old-fashioned hand-to-hand combat that still took place, but was an element in the mix rather than the star of the show.
Meanwhile the colossally-budgeted newer-style science fiction epics were the titans fighting for the box office's commanding heights. In all that, The Matrix and its sequels seem to merit special attention. An R-rated, bullet-riddled mix of sci-fi and machine gun-packing paramilitary action that starts off in--where else?--L.A., it looked backward in that respect, while in its accent on superpowers it looked forward, and in being so Janus-faced, appears to have been very much of its moment.
* The parody of this kind of action film in Jim Abrahams' Hot Shots! Part Deux did not really have to do much more than imitate what Commando already did.
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