How the American Action Movie Went Kablooey
How the American Action Movie Went Kablooey
The action film — like automobiles, televisions and team-oriented basketball — is an American invention that is now produced much better elsewhere in the world. The latest example of this (and there are many examples from points all over the globe) is “The Raid: Redemption,” a modest but irresistible action film from Indonesia that recently high-kicked (and punched and stomped and shot and throttled) its way into American theaters. The film has been rapturously celebrated; at last glance, its positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes hovered around 90 percent. In a rare dissenting opinion, Roger Ebert wrote: “This film is about violence. All violence. Wall-to-wall violence,” which is true but also a bit like complaining that a comedy is too full of jokes.
“The Raid: Redemption” also inadvertently serves as a reminder of just how bad American action movies have become. Which is a shame, because as they say in the world of business, we used to own this market. For roughly a decade, from the early ’80s to the early ’90s — marked by high-water films all weirdly clustered together, like “Commando” (1985), “Aliens” (1986), “RoboCop” (1987) and “Die Hard” (1988) — the great American action film was a robust genre, as complex and thematically rich and aesthetically unified as the musical or the western.
You may laugh — in fact, one sign of the genre’s decay is how completely it has devolved into a universal joke. (It’s now just as easy, and twice as pleasurable, to quote McBain from “The Simpsons” mocking Arnold Schwarzenegger as it is to quote Arnold Schwarzenegger.) But as a genre, the American action film featured hallmark stars (Schwarzenegger! Stallone! Willis!) and identifiable tropes (kill villain; make pun about method in which you killed villain), and it produced at least one bona fide masterpiece, “Die Hard.” (If you can’t get behind “Die Hard” as a great American movie, then I’d argue that you hate greatness, movies and America.) And the action movie carried, briefly, as all good genre movies do, the cultural weight of metaphorical significance. Action films meant something. As surely as the film noir communicated anxiety over postwar urban upheaval or as alien-invasion films helped us work out our cold-war agita, the action films of the golden age were a post-’70s, poststagflation collective national fantasy: one in which America was strong, independent, unstoppable and perpetually kicking much butt. Moreover, the best of these films (think “RoboCop”) managed the nifty artistic trick of both embodying and critiquing this quintessentially adolescent dream of dominance — providing us with fantasias of cartoon violence that also served as canny dissections of our lust for cartoon violence.
