In movies like Shooter, Commando, and Cliffhanger, a reluctant hero gets the call. What matters is that you spring into action, typically after your peaceful cabin blows up or your daughter gets kidnapped. You're fired up! You're checking your ammo stash! You're handing out Predator-esque handshakes right and left! The call can come from a retired Army buddy, a forgotten childhood friend, a shadowy government employee, or even a member of your family - it doesn't matter. I love any scene where someone gets "the call." It's such a great cliché: one minute you're a strapping, grizzled retired cop/marine/mountain climber doing something very chill, like grieving your dead wife/partner or perhaps feeding a docile animal with you daughter, and the next minute you're "getting the call" from a high-ranking official and that gruff authority figure needs you to come back and help restore order to this fucked-up world. Or how about the shootout at the Guggenheim? I didn't think so. And these are just from Clive Owen movies! But even the straightforward clichés can work well when done right. To celebrate the endurance of our favorites, let's take a close look at a few classics and examine why they remain, like an army of liquid-metal Terminators, so unkillable. Like, we've all seen a shootout before, but have you seen the one where the hero dispatches baddies while having sex the whole time? Probably not. The best action movies find inventive ways to tweak, subvert, and playfully upend conventions. But when they rely too much on tried-and-true formulas, and the likes of Jason Statham, Channing Tatum, or Steven Seagal's sentient ponytail sleepwalk through emotional beats, set pieces, and groan-worthy exposition airlifted in from other blockbusters, action movies can disappoint.īut that doesn't mean that all clichés suck. As an action-movie fan, I go to the theater to be wowed by the new and the impossible, and to have my eyebrows singed off by increasingly elaborate explosions.
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