What exactly is an action movie?
What exactly is an action movie?
This seems like a good point to address the question: What exactly is an action movie? The answer seems kind of obvious. It’s a movie with action in it. Except that’s every movie, except maybe Andy Warhol’s “Sleep.” So how about this: It’s a movie with guns in it. And killing. And carnage. That’s closer. But not quite specific enough.
If you Google a list of “best action films” you’ll get a hodgepodge of genres, including buddy-cop movies (“Lethal Weapon”), dystopian sci-fi (“The Matrix”), martial-arts flicks (“Enter the Dragon”), matinee thrillers (“Raiders of the Lost Ark”) and movies like “The Bourne Identity,” which belong to a subgenre I like to call American Tourist Anxiety. (In these movies, a confused American runs around the great cities of Europe yelling at befuddled foreigners to tell him who he is, where he can find his loved ones and just what the hell is going on. See also: Liam Neeson in both “Taken” and “Unknown.”)
To my eye, the purebred American action film can be identified by three elements:
1. A loner hero who excels at combat — this is not the provenance of miscast heroes or industrious everymen. (John McClane in “Die Hard” is the arguable exception, though as a workaday cop, he proves to have a disbelief-suspending amount of lethal expertise.)
2. A perverse fetishization of firearms. No dainty Walther-concealing James Bond here. The M60 machine gun was a popular sidearm, and that’s a weapon you would typically see mounted on a helicopter.
3. Explosions. Big, blossoming, ecstatic, pointless explosions. This is what separates action films from, say, “Dirty Harry.” These cathartic money shots serve no purpose plotwise, which is precisely what marks them as the philosophical earmark of the action movie. It’s a genre dedicated unreservedly to carnage as a source of aesthetic delight.
