Action Stars

Watching a lot of the big summer action movie previews really got me thinking about the fact we have no true action stars today. In fact, studios seem do desperate to get a new one that they started promoting a lot of their action vehicles with that claim. Remember the original "XXX" campaign boasting Vin Diesel as the next Schwarzenegger. Then he doesn't even do the sequel, and his last movie was "The Pacifier" where I guess he was trying to stretch like Schwarzenegger did with "Kindergarten Cop" back in the eighties, or maybe that was 1990, but you know what I mean.

In the eighties we had Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Bruce Willis. These guys were making big action film after big action film. And not all of them were good by any means, but they stuck to the formula and produced a lot of big hits. Before that, I guess you could say Burt Reynolds was the big action star with movies like "Smokey and the Bandit" and the sequels along with "Sharky's Machine," "Gator," "City Heat," and so on. Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, and John Wayne had their heydays in the sixties and seventies. But the late nineties and early 21st century has just produced a bunch of test subjects that haven't amounted to anything.

Look at Schwarzenegger's reign throuhgout the eighties and into the early nineties. "Terminator 1 & 2," "Predator," "The Running Man," "Red Heat," "True Lies," the "Conan" movies, and "Total Recall." Not one actor since then that has been touted as the next action star has managed to come even close to that kind of resume. Even when Schwarzenegger came back two years ago in "T3: Rise of the Machines," it was obvious that no one could match his prowess on screen; he might not be the best actor out there, but it's arguable there has been no one to match that kind of prescence on the big screen.

If this was the eighties, Bruce Willis would be tackling the aliens in "War of the Worlds," Schwarzenegger would be the Thing in "The Fantastic Four," and Sylvester Stallone would be wooing Michelle Pfeiffer in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." Instead we have the so called sensitive action sensibilites of Tom Cruise (W of the W) and Brad Pitt (Mr. and Mrs. Smith), and Michael (The Shield) Chilkis taking on the Thing (Fantastic Four). And that's not necessarilly bad, but I kind of miss having that one big ridiculously bulked he-man taking out aliens, terrorists, and whatever else causes problems to all of us puny Americans at least a couple times a year.

And maybe people don't want those ridiculous testosterone induced mega budget films anymore. But if we did, who the hell would take over in them anyways? Vin Diesel? Hugh Jackman? Clive Owen? Sure as hell won't be Nicholas Cage I hope. It seems like today's big budget action pictures, ala "Sahara," while not bad, are trying too hard to add a lot of points and meanings to these over the top shenanigans. Most of the time, this is by throwing in our PC minded "Save the Environment" jargon. I kind of miss my action pictures being about nothing more than kicking ass and taking names, and maybe throw in a few cool one-liners. Maybe I've lost my mind, but it's nice to have a popcorn movie every once in a while; do we really need an environmental issue brought up in the middle of it? John Rambo would have taken that tree humping hippie out of the equation just so he could get on to killing the bad guys, and in movies there should be nothing wrong with that either.