Action Movies Essay Research Paper Simply by

Action Movies Essay, Research Paper

Merely by its name, the action movie genre would look to be the easiest of all genres to depict. In fact, unlike a genre such as the Western, whose generic markers are mostly distinct ( comeuppances, cowpunchers, Equus caballuss, shoot-outs on Main Street, the frontier ) , the action movie can be defined so loosely that it becomes a term of about no usage at all. Technically, as marked by the call of “ action ” by the manager at the beginning of all scenes, every movie is an action movie, and all movies have action in them. But the classification of any movie in the action genre has come to intend that it has two indispensable things: force and decease. Additionally, there is about ever an overtly masculine ethos.The history of action movies is about every bit old as film, evidenced, for case, in the conflict sequences of D.W. Griffith ‘s Birth of a Nation ( 1915 ) , or ( subsequently ) in the climactic shoot-out and race against the Apache to do it to the town of Tonto in John Ford ‘s Stagecoach ( 1939 ) , or ( much subsequently ) in the dizzying chases that unfastened and close Alfred Hitchcock ‘s Vertigo ( 1958 ) . But action movies as we regard them today are about entirely both a post-Classical Hollywood Studio and a post-Vietnam War phenomenon ; this is for two major reasons.First, the dislocation of the studio system ( which was initiated by the Paramount Decrees in 1949 ) and the crisis in which mainstream American film found itself in the face of telecasting forced Hollywood to separate itself from the little screen and to offer experiences to audiences which Television could non present. One of import manner movie did this was to stress widescreen ( including Vistavision and Cinescope ) , new colour procedures ( from Technicolor to Tru-color ) , and particular effects ( 3-D being the most black, though it seems to hold found a suited bequest in IMAX movies ) . This development of the large screen paved the manner for the pyrotechnics, high velocity auto pursuits, atomic detonations ( True Lies, 1994 ) , planes crash-landing on the Las Vegas Strip ( Con Air, 1997 ) , and even foreigners blowing up the White House ( Independence Day, 1997 ) , the ideal & # 8212 ; so far & # 8212 ; of the action movie ‘s appetency for devastation ) . All of these are par for the class in the genre today, so much so that in the action movie ‘s latest embodiments, there is frequently a sense of self-reflexive sarcasm to the proceedings, as when Nicolas Cage comments to his spouse Sean Connery in The Rock ( 1996 ) that he senses merely a small excessively much male stripling, testosterone-based anxiousness in the motives of their antagonist ( Ed Harris ) . This is exactly what & # 8212 ; sociologically talking & # 8212 ; seems to be at the root of the action movie ‘s raison vitamin D ‘ ? tre in the first place.Second, it is platitude that the Vietnam War brought an unprecedented, immediate, and existent force into America ‘s life suites. This, combined with the apparently eternal twine of blackwashs in the ’60s ( get downing with President John F. Kennedy and traveling through Robert F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the pupils at Kent State, and likely stoping merely with the failed blackwash effort on the life of Ronald Reagan ) , incited a demand to work through these injuries through cathartically violent narrations ( e.g Sam Peckinpah ‘s The Wild Bunch ( 1969 ) , a Western good on its manner to being an action movie ) . But it besides had the consequence, slightly ironically, of approving the increased representation of force in film merely for its ain interest. Surely, in the aftermath of the blackwashs, the war in Southeast Asia, the protests and public violences in urban centres in the United States ( Chicago 1968, Newark, Watts ) , force as represented in the “ world ” of telecasting, found its overdone opposite number in film, and largely in the action film.There are no action movies without force, and in which no 1 dies, and this distinguishes action movies from extremely physical comedies and “ caper ” movies & # 8212 ; besides works with plentifulness of action in them & # 8212 ; from the soundless period of Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd to more recent daredevil narratives such as A Fish Called Wanda ( 1988 ) or the movies of Jim Carrey ( The Mask, 1994 ; Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, 1994 ) . Action movies are besides distinguishable from other movies with an accent on decease and force, including catastrophe movies ( Airport, 1970 ; Looming Inferno, 1974 ; Earthquake, 1974 ; and The Poseidon Adventure, 1972 ) , in which the narration is driven by nature or the elements run amok. The action movie is besides distinguishable from escapade movies in the swashbuckling tradition of Errol Flynn ( Captain Blood, 1935 ; The Adventures of Robin Hood, 1938 ) , in which the accent on swordplay over gunfight alterations the bets and the manner of the force and invests in a more formal version of aggression. The Three Musketeers, ( 1993 ) is a adolescent movie disguised as a costume play. The Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle The Man in the Iron Mask ( 1998 ) , and the The Mask of Zorro ( 1997 ) , starring Anthony Hopkins and Antonio Banderas, are all invested in this earlier paradigm, though each shows the influence of the action movie. See this manner, the Steven Spielberg/Harrison Ford Indiana Jones ( Raiders of the Lost Ark ( 1981 ) , Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ( 1984 ) , Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ( 1989 ) ) series is every bit much escapade movie as it is action.The action movie is besides distinguishable from the war and combat genres, since the force that erupts tends to happen in apparently safe topographic points, such as the place, or public domains of civilization ( the theater ) , ingestion ( the section shop or promenade ) , and travel ( planes, trains, autos, and coachs ) . Finally, a wide definition of the action movie might include movies such as Jurassic Park ( 1993 ) and its subsequence Jurassic Park: The Lost World ( 1997 ) , or Star Wars ( 1977 ) and its subsequences ( The Empire Strikes Back, 1980, and Return of the Jedi, 1982 ) and prequel ( The Phantom Menace 1999 ) . But at least two factors rule it out in a narrower consideration: the fantasy elements of both utmost yesteryear or hereafter override the action, and none of these movies is driven by a strong male star presence.The action movie is besides eminently intercrossed, and progressively so under postmodern conditions where hybridity is a traveling rate of exchange. See the strong presence of the Western genre in Die Hard ( 1988 ) , the action movie that made Bruce Willis an international star. The bull Dirty Harry Callahan ( Dirty Harry, 1971 ) overlapped with other Clint Eastwood figures of the Western supporter, showing generic distinction but incarnating a really similar paradigm of maleness. Both the Western hero and Dirty Harry ( a paradigmatically 1970s action figure ) normally wind up at the terminal of the movie every bit lone as they started, isolated from the really society whose demands they serve and protect and diffident whether or non they ‘d truly prefer things to hold worked out any otherwise. In any instance, no 1 doubts their ability to acquire the occupation done. One is merely left wondering, at the terminal, whether, in the Vietnam and Watergate Era, there is now anything at all left for them to make. The dominance of Ronald Reagan changed that, and divine developments in the action hero and the action film.Bruce Willis in Die Hard represents a full displacement, a move ( as did Sylvester Stallone ‘s John Rambo before him in First Blood ( 1982 ) , Rambo: First Blood Part 2 ( 1985 ) , and Rambo III ( 1988 ) ( a blatantly Reaganite movie “ Dedicated to the Brave People of Afghanistan ” ) , into a whole new substitution of the action genre, which displaces the Western ‘s battle for control of the frontier into the context of both the present tense and an urban environment, two things anathema to the Western. Besides, unlike either most Westerns or ’70s action movies, the hero ends the movie integrated into, instead than divide from, the community he has merely saved. As author Susan Jeffords has described, heroes such as Willis are the hardbodies of the Reagan Era. At the first degree of reference, Die Hard articulates a elated re-engagement with the ability to make that which Reagan seemed to enable, and given the explicitly consecutive nature of so many of these movies ( as opposed to Dirty Harry ‘s movies which ne’er had consecutive numbered rubrics ) , it was implied that the Hard Body hero could make it infinitely. Hewing ( more symptomatically than actively ) to a Reaganite fond regard to the political orientation of Manifest Destiny, Die Hard is dependent on a Western-derived apprehension that the frontier is a infinite of contention, both physical and ideological, and that the declaration of this contention in favour of the hero will besides ensue in the ability to name that infinite “ place. ” The movie redefines the tensenesss of the frontier as 1 ) between corporations and the political orientations that serve them, and 2 ) between the person and the corporation, instead than the community. The frontier does non be as a horizontal geographic infinite but has been metaphorized in the corporate office edifice. John McTiernan, a manager who specializes in confined infinites ( e.g. The Hunt for Red October ( 1990 ) , which takes topographic point in a pigboat ) , has a bent for utilizing ideological battle to open them up. The infinites seem larger because they articulate something so immense, and the frontiers they represent are no less tied to American individuality in the twentieth century than Westerns had antecedently been.Die Hard is, as critic William J. Palmer observes, one of the many “ Terrorist Plot ” movies of the ’80s, and one he reads as wiser than most, since its gets the gag of its ain genre, laughs, and still plays along. “ Ironically, Die Hard presents a scenario in which the ’80s scoundrel, the terrorist, attacks the ’70s scoundrel, the corporation, in this instance a Nipponese corporation runing in America. ” In a reading that distinguishes between neoconservative and New Right political relations, Jeffords notes the movie ‘s typically hypocritical Reaganesque ill will toward Large Government and its intervention in the economic system, while still take a firm standing on authorities ‘s right to command the person ‘s organic structure and private domain. But, generically, Die Hard is besides significantly more, as so many action movies of the ’80s and ’90s are, and to some extent, it stakes its claims to action on the political necessities derived from the Western. Early on, John McClane adopts the anonym Roy Rogers, the name by which about everyone in the movie but his married woman knows and refers to him, and invariably refers to himself: a cowpuncher siting to the rescue.Die Hard has two major ideological undertakings, one foreign, one domestic. It is of import that the movie takes topographic point in California, because it means that the intruders are conflicting on American dirt, and this outer border of American dirt is a critical facet of the definition of the frontier. ( Ten old ages subsequently, Independence Day will take this even further, detonating America ‘s frontier bounds as a Clintonesque American president ( Bill Pullman ) will beat up his military personnels by declaring that July 4th used to be America ‘s Independence Day, but now it is Independence Day for the whole universe. ) By proclaiming early on an affinity for the Western through the supporter ‘s self-re-naming, the infinite that John McClane/ ” Roy Rogers ” moves through becomes reconfigured as correspondent to the Western frontier, and what transpires on that 40-story, perpendicular frontier becomes correspondent to Western narrations as well.Die Hard ‘s historical manoeuvres are those of a marked desirous believing about the yesteryear every bit good as an anxiousness about the present. The scoundrels are two-pronged. The obvious 1 is the multi-cultural set of terrorists, whose ringleaders are German ( though they are played by Alan Rickman, a British national, and Alexander Gudonov, a Russian ) . The less apparent one is the Nipponese Nakatomi Corporation, led by a unthreatening but ( in a crisis state of affairs ) ineffective Nipponese foreman ( James Shigeta ) . The offense of the Nakatomi corporation is that it has taken Holly McClane ( Bonnie Bedelia ) , now “ masquerading ” under her inaugural name Holly Generro ( denominating her for the audience as the generic married woman, female parent, and career adult female ) , off from her household. More loosely though, the Nakatomi ‘s presence represents frequently-voiced anxiousnesss about Japan ‘s economic high quality and fight in universe markets. Die Hard combined this with the presence of every bit capitalist-minded German terrorists, who add abuse to injury by merely feigning to be ideologically motivated when all they truly want is money. After naming a figure of fanciful extremist political organisations whose insurrectionists he wants released from the universe ‘s prisons in exchange for the sureties he now holds, Hans Gruber ( Rickman ) says in a politically camp aside, “ I read about them in Time magazine. ” What this peculiar constellation of nationalities allows for is a restaging by the movie of World War II, which re-enforces the inevitableness of a McClane triumph within the narrative, and a planetary economic triumph outside of it.Die Hard is a transitional action movie. Like the action heroes of the ’70s, McClane works entirely, without a company, without a battalion, and this lone heroic model is besides implicative of the Western, particularly when combined with the acknowledgment of McClane as a cowpuncher by about everyone in the movie. This brings to the bow another inclination of action movies: to break high spot ( and fetishize ) maleness, action movies about ever have solo heroes, but rarely more than a partnership of two. If a 3rd male is present, he ‘s normally there for amusing alleviation, as is Joe Pesci in the 2nd through 4th Lethal Weapon movies. Willis as McClane adopts the character of a cowpuncher non merely because he wants to, but because he already knows that this is how Gruber will see him as he moves alone through the edifice, traveling from floor to floor as a gunfighter in a Western moves from Main Street edifice to Main Street edifice, or from protective stone to protective stone. But his is a really Reaganite version of the Western. Gruber inquiries the enigma adult male who threatens to destroy his programs: Gruber: Who are you? Merely another American who saw excessively many films as a kid? Another orphan of a belly-up civilization who thinks he ‘s John Wayne, Rambo, and Marshall Dillon? McClane: I was ever sort of partial to Roy Rogers, really. I truly liked those beady shirts.Gruber: Do you truly think you have a opportunity against us, Mr. Cowboy? McClane: Yippee-ki-yay, motherf**ker.Two things are noteworthy in this exchange. First of wholly, as Gruber accurately states, Rambo has already become comfortably lodged in the canon of ass-kickers between John Wayne ( a existent individual ) and Marshal Dillon ( another fictional character ) , both Western icons, one from movie, one from telecasting. In this, the terrorist besides puts his finger on Reagan ‘s ain troubles spoting the difference between representation and fact, filmic re-enactment and history, jobs which seemed besides later to consequence the state. The Wayne/Rambo/Dillon flight is seen as an uniform continuum, and this brings us back to the manner in which action movies exist as a infinite of hyper-fantasy in which anxiousnesss about maleness, and its loss of power and bureau, are expressed and resolved partially through this conflation of fiction and world. Second, McClane rejects the butch theoretical accounts Gruber offers him in favour of a Western figure whose primary intent, like Reagan ‘s before he was president, was to entertain. The disingenuousness of the response is besides clear. Nevertheless, McClane will go on to masquerade as the dry incarnation of the “ King of the Cowboys ” for the remainder of the movie. What will be in maintaining with the appropriation of the Roy Rogers character is the manner that through the class of the movie, McClane, like Rogers over his calling, will go progressively violent in order to convey the narrative to a successful near. Ultimately, the frontier of the high-rise Nakatomi Corporation is re-Americanized, saved from foreign intruders, and made safe for American civilization.In the movie ‘s 2nd ideological docket, a domestic one, McClane engages in community saving. In the political logic of both Reagan and Die Hard, this undertaking is double. First, it means salvaging his married woman from her feminist propensities, which finally displays itself in McClane ‘s salvaging her from the German terrorist and her Nipponese transnational corporation. This makes Die Hard a authoritative imprisonment narration, in which the white adult female needs to be saved from the progresss of cultural Others who are depicted as barbarian. His married woman is, of class, sword lily to be rescued. At the terminal of the movie she re-adopts her married name, proudly and girlishly proclaiming herself non Holly Generro but, as she corrects her hubby, “ McClane. Holly McClane. “ Die Hard ‘s other domestic job ( one that Lethal Weapon besides attempts ) is the Restoration of a peculiarly white maleness, and this, excessively, is typical of action movies of the 1980s, though with the rise of African American male stars like Wesley Snipes ( Passenger 57 ( 1992 ) , Blade ( 1998 ) ) and particularly Will Smith ( Bad Boys ( 1995 ) , Men in Black ( 1997 ) , Independence Day ( 1997 ) , Enemy of the State ( 1998 ) , and Wild, Wild, West ( 1999 ) ) , the generic definition of maleness is no longer so purely

race-based. But in Die Hard, Sergeant Al Powell (Reginald Veljohnson), a black L.A. police officer who is initially the only one who believes that McClane is not a crackpot, and stands loyally by this man he has never met, is the first to recognize the heroic implications of McClane’s cowboy pseudonym, and it is through this recognition that the pair form their bond. As the plot thickens, we also learn that Powell has accidently shot and killed a child and is therefore no longer capable of drawing his weapon. Emasculated, he is further desexualized by being relentlessly drawn as a family man (as is Danny Glover’s Sergeant Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon), whose sex drive has been safely reigned in for pro-creative purposes (his wife is expecting their first child). This remains true until the very end of the film, when one of the terrorists, seemingly returning from the dead, comes back to wreak revenge on McClane, coming at him from behind to shoot him in the back. Only then, when the life of the Great White Hero is in danger and the cowboy himself is unaware, can the black man, now properly inspired, draw his weapon and save McClane. Black male violence and the sexuality the film equates it with is acceptable only if executed by an officer of the law in the service of saving a white subject.Even as it expresses anxiety about its loss, the action film is deeply invested in maintaining patriarchal power, and this explains why most action heroes are either cops, soldiers, or government agents of some sort. The archetypal action heroes of the ’70s, Charles Bronson (Death Wish, 1974) and Clint Eastwood (Magnum Force, 1973), set a precedent for these figures of patriarchal authority. They themselves having problems following orders, and, as with so many of the classical Western heroes, seem uncomfortable in the societies and institutions they themselves help protect. Dirty Harry (1971) famously ends with Eastwood’s Harry Callahan tossing away his police badge in disgust. But in the ’80s, as action films became increasingly symptomatic of the Reagan Administration’s ideology and values, action heros began to change not only in physical appearance, but also in character. Rather than being the outsiders and vigilante loners of the ’70s, they tended to be part of society. John McClane is a family man who begins Die Hard estranged from his wife and children and ends up reunited and reconciled. In the Lethal Weapon series, Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs starts out as an anti-social broken-hearted widower/Vietnam War vet, and ends up, by the fourth installment, married to a pregnant Rene Russo. In Con Air, Nicolas Cage’s wrongly accused Green Beret inmate can kick recidivist ass while still protecting a stuffed bunny rabbit he is obsessed with bringing home to his daughter. In John Woo’s Face/Off (1997), John Travolta’s FBI agent Sean Archer is brought into conflict with Nicolas Cage’s Castor Troy when Troy shoots Archer’s son. Even single men in action films often find love among the bullets. Broken Arrow’s good guy, Christian Slater ends up with park ranger and accidental partner Suzi Amis, and, in a film that was aggressively marketed as “Die Hard on a bus,” Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock spend enough time confined together in the tight space of a bus in Speed (1994) to get to know each other rather well. In yet another role as the sassy action hero’s love interest, Bullock’s nostalgia-obsessed police officer of the future becomes the object of choice for the recently unfrozen Sylvester Stallone in Demolition Man (1993).Given their masculinist bent, it is not surprising that, despite this relentless coupling, action films are also the site of an extraordinary amount of homosociality, the liminally erotic, but decidedly non-(overtly)-sexual congregation and social formation of men. In yet another generic hybrid, the fighter pilot film combines the action film and the space film and provides the rigorously masculine environment of the armed forces to present its homosociality. If The Right Stuff (1984) is infused with the real history of the development of the space program to the point where its identity as a fighter pilot film is submerged (far more so than Tom Wolfe’s book on which it is based), then Top Gun (1986), existing outside of any real historical claims, announces itself loud and clear. Like Die Hard, Top Gun is emblematic of both the hard body and the Reagan Era neokitsch aesthetic. As a typical Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer production, it comes with all the requisite testosterone a fighter pilot film needs. The star pilot (Tom Cruise) is named Maverick, making explicit the link between gunfighters and fighter pilots, F-15s and horses. In another tip to the Western, Cruise is depicted as a gunfighter initiate with a serious Oedipal complex about his father, (cf. Shane and Red River), who, also a fighter pilot, was downed under mysterious circumstances in Vietnam (again, as with Gibson’s Sergeant Riggs in the Lethal Weapon series, echoing the crucible of violence in which action films are formed). It would be inaccurate to consider it a Combat film, not least because the only actual fighting that takes place happens at the end, and is covert; officially, it never happened. Rather, Maverick and the other cowboys literally ride the range in their F-15s; all they do is train high above the Mojave desert, but not so high that the landscape over which they fly isn’t essential to how the space they traverse is articulated.This is a space-oriented action film in which the anxiety about being a man and living up to the Reagan image of masculinity is a narrative obsession. The homoeroticism that is often barely submerged in traditional Westerns, combat films, and other masculinist genres prior to 1980 comes utterly to the surface in Top Gun. Early in the film, Cruise, in an effort to win over Kelly McGillis, follows her into the ladies room. On the one hand, this is the kind of heteropredatory behavior sanctioned by Reagan-era masculine paradigms. Cruise, the film suggests, is so manly that he can go into a ladies room without being mistaken for a gay man. But the looks he gets from the women in the rest room, and the men as he enters and exits, suggest otherwise.The film continues to vacillate between a comfort in its homosociality (whose very purpose is to exclude the homosexual) and a deep homophobia which, apropos to a return of the repressed, is expressed in a homoerotic discourse of which the film is only partially aware. As his flight partner Goose (Anthony Edwards) watches Maverick preparing for a date with McGillis, he says, “Honey, you look great.” The film finds this funny; fighter pilot teams are as intimate as married couples, and for the safety of the nation they have to be. But when comedy turns to tragedy, the social turns erotic. Says Maverick in a tone something more than grief-stricken as he mourns Goose’s death, “God, I want him back.”As action films nearly always do, Top Gun revels in the magnificence of the male body as it shows the pilots cavorting during a game of beach volleyball. To acknowledge the body-eroticism of Cruise, Val Kilmer, and the other young male stars, there needs to be this spectacle, this equivalent of a musical number to arrest the narrative. Fighter pilots don’t fly naked, after all. But perhaps the most delicious moment of both pan-sexual body delectation and homoerotic splendor is when Cruise, leaning over the locker room sink in his tighty-whities, is himself cruised by the father-figure of his Commanding Officer (Tom Skerrit). After telling Maverick that he has to get on with life after Goose’s death, he leaves the locker room. His parting gesture is not the expected manly pat on the back, or even a slightly more intimate hug. Rather, it is the languorous gesture of running his fingers slowly across Cruise’s back. One wonders why Maverick continues to have Oedipal anxieties after that, for it is clear that the father does indeed love his son.As with Die Hard, there is a crisis of masculinity (though here with the central figure of Cruise) which manifests itself in the loss of the ability to draw and fire. As in the Western and combat films, this ability is regained by the external threat; in Top Gun, the Communist threat is generic, untied to any particular nation. At best, the construction of this Cold War enemy is something between an Arab abstraction and a Soviet. This parallels the generic threat of Indians in Westerns, which, even when identified by tribe, were seldom ever depicted with any real cultural specificity. Again, though this is obviously more readily connected to the War film, the fact is that Top Gun takes place largely in domestic space, which to say American space, and takes place there in a certain way. So it is just as intimately linked with the frontier as it is with borders of conflict abroad, though certainly not more so.The film’s only partially spoken historical referents are easier to locate. Like the Rambo series and Westerns of the ’70s, the specter of Vietnam haunts the film, from the details of Maverick’s father’s disappearance right down to the film’s desire to return to the Manichean ethics of WWII, a desire Reagan made altogether possible to articulate, and even, far too often, to achieve. Early in the film, McGillis’ civilian flight instructor is seen entering the fighter pilot class she teaches only from the back and only with a view of her legs, which are covered in retro-1940s seamed stockings. But unlike the earnest counter-Westerns of the ’70s, the Vietnam in Top Gun was as much a theme park as a historical referent. In his discussion of the re-historicization and re-narrativization of Vietnam, Jim Hoberman mentions that Top Gun producer “Don Simpson actually bragged to one interviewer that he wrecked his motorcycle to beat the draft.”The more recent paradigms of action film masculinity are as symptomatic of the Clinton years as the Hard Bodies were of the Reagan Era, as heralded by the evolution of the Terminator from one film to the next. In The Terminator (1984), Arnold Schwarzenegger plays what is literally a killing machine in a hybrid of biological and technological matter, unfeeling and unstoppable. In Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), the Terminator has become an agent of good, who, sent to save Sarah and John Connor (Linda Hamilton and Edward Furlong), eventually demonstrates even better mothering skills than Sarah does. Perhaps most symptomatic of the country’s anxieties about the President’s anti-war record (though Reagan never served in the Armed Forces either), there have been a number of action films in which the hero is the American President himself, Clintonesque in policy and warm, fuzzy accessibility, but revised in the imaginary world of the action film so as to be simultaneously capable of physical force, with the military record to prove it. Bill Pullman not only inspires his troops in Independence Day, he also hops into his jet fighter, as the film tells us he did in the Gulf War, and leads them into battle. In Air Force One (1997), U.S. president Harrison Ford protects his Hillary-esque wife and Chelsea-esque daughter from rogue terrorists (in American action films, an eminently reliable and repeatable adversary), reaching back to his experience in the field to become an indignant one-man army (“get off my plane,” he tells arch-villain Gary Oldman, as he tosses him whirling into the atmosphere).The ’90s have brought inevitable twists and tinkering to the action film genre. Certainly there have been forays into feminizing the genre, starting earlier with Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in Aliens (1986), who is far less contemplative than she is in the first film (Alien, 1979). Point of No Return (1993), starring Bridget Fonda, was based on the French film La Femme Nikita (1990), starring Anne Parillaud, and it has since become a successful syndicated television serial. Most cartoonishly, Pamela Anderson starred in the comic-based Barb Wire (1997).But if there is a new classicism to the genre, it is to be found in the work of John Woo. Largely as a result of the American “discovery” of the work of Woo and director/producer Tsui Hark, Hong Kong Action Cinema (itself profoundly influenced by American action films, Westerns, and even melodrama, as well as Cantonese theatre and martial arts films) has made its mark on some of the most successful recent action films. John Woo’s first American feature, the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Hard Target (1993) was not particularly successful, but an increasing familiarity with Hong Kong Action films, as well as the popularity of some of its stars (Jackie Chan and Jet Li, as well as Michelle Yeoh) has led to an increasing intermixing of the two cinemas. Jackie Chan’s features have been dubbed into English, and also made here (Rumble in the Bronx, Supercop, Who Am I?). Rush Hour, in which he co-starred with Chris Tucker, was one of the most successful films of 1998. Michelle Yeoh was an unusually independent and self-sufficient Bond Girl, playing opposite Pierce Brosnan in Tomorrow Never Dies (1998). After his success playing a villain in Lethal Weapon 4, Jet Li’s first feature with United States first-run distribution, The Black Mask was released in the summer of 1999.Woo’s second U.S. feature, over which he retained considerably more creative control than Hard Target, was Broken Arrow (1996), with John Travolta in his first explicitly villainous role. This was followed by Face/Off (1997), in which the starring role is split by Travolta and Nicolas Cage. That Travolta is the good guy and Cage is the baddie is complicated by the fact that they assume each other identities, and in this they are typical Woo protagonists: one cop, one gangster, both stretching the limits of their professions, both, by the end, indistinguishable from one another, and often as close as brothers. In many ways, Face/Off is in fact a re-treatment of an earlier film Woo made in Hong Kong, the Chow Yun-Fat vehicle The Killer (1989). Woo’s internalization of a variety of American film genres also makes visible the ways in which action films have, at least in formal terms, replaced the one genre that seems to have almost no place in American film today: the classical song and dance musical. The action sequences, so carefully and often balletically choreographed, take the place of musical numbers, and the climactic action scene which audiences have come to expect as the grand finale (which could be no more emphatically or offensively punctuated than the reunion kiss between Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis in front of a nuclear mushroom cloud in True Lies, is not unlike the closing number of a musical, in which no punch is pulled, all the dancers are on the stage, and all instruments are blaring.The action film is not only predicated almost exclusively on a masculine subjectivity (and an appeal to a masculine spectator), but is also dependent on a body of male stars who replicate their action roles as reliably as John Wayne inhabited the Western, or Katharine Hepburn significantly defined the urbane romantic comedy. If the action films of the ’70s belonged primarily to male stars like Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson (and, primarily through the James Bond series, Sean Connery and Roger Moore), the ’80s belonged to Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mel Gibson. Though they all continue to make action films with varying degrees of success, the fact that action films require a significant physical ability on the part of any star inevitably means that aging stars are simply less convincing and sometimes simply unable to continue to perform in this genre. When they do, their roles often shift explicitly to that of a patriarch or eminence grise (e.g. Sean Connery as Harrison Ford’s father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, or Bruce Willis as Liv Tyler’s father in Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998). The ’90s have seen a slightly more diverse group of performers, including former Independent film star Nicolas Cage, Jackie Chan, Will Smith, and with far less consistency, Keanu Reeves (The Matrix, 1999), take up the mantle from the previous generation. In an unusual exception (and in some ways this is typical of his career), John Travolta was never an action star until his post-Pulp Fiction (1994) renaissance, and his image in any action film he undertakes is frequently in relation to his markedly unfit physique.However, what is true as often as not is that it doesn’t take a big star to make a successful action film (Independence Day, Godzilla, Starship Troopers) as long as there are exceptional special effects, though these films often solidify the careers of their stars, as was the case with Will Smith and Independence Day, but which does not seem to have happened with the cast of Godzilla. The vast majority of the top grossing films of all time are action films, and some of the most successful series of sequel films have been action films, including the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon series. This speaks not only to a global desire to see special effects, gun battles and car chases, but also to an attraction to the odd portrait of money that these obviously expensive films paint.