Three Action Movies

In this blog I am going to write about three ground breaking action movies, and their impact on the genre. So without further a-do:

First Blood (1982)
Unfortunately like Rocky, First Blood has had it's reputation spoiled by the sequels that followed. The original Rambo film is a dark and gritty psychological thriller, and Stallone's performance is believable and excellent. The film is based upon a book of the same title by David Morrell, it follows the plot of the book all the way though except the book ends with Rambo being killed by Troutman. I'm sure you all know the plot of First Blood, John Rambo is an ex-Green Beret (US Special Forces) and Medal of Honor recipient who has come home from the war in Vietnam after being in a P.O.W. camp, to find that his best friend has died of cancer, probably from Agent Orange poisoning. He is arrested for vagrancy by a local sheriff played by Brian Dennehy which sparks off some P.O.W. camp flash backs, and busts of of the small town jail and is chased into the hills where he embarks on a personal war against anyone that comes in after him. Firstly the local police force and eventually the National Guard.

So why is this film so groundbreaking? Well firstly because of it's length. First Blood is only 97 minutes long, this is now the standard length for action movies, but before First Blood it was common for action movies like The Godfather, The Deer Hunter etc to be between 2 and 3 hours long. First Blood was originally longer, but in the editing room it was cut down to a shorter length, which resulted in 90 minutes of straight action. The film is barely 15 minutes in when Rambo makes a thrilling police station escape and then is chased into the woods on a motorbike, after this the action doesn't really stop until the end of the film.

The character of Rambo is also a first for the action genre. Before First Blood the actors that played action movie characters were pretty normal looking physically. Excluding Bruce Lee, most actors in action films looked pretty puny. Stallone in First Blood looks just as mean and muscle bound as the character of John Rambo should look. He was one of the first of the 80's pumped up action stars, that included Arni, Dolph Lundgren, Carl Weathers etc. First Blood spawned a whole decade of parodies, where over muscled guys sort out their personal problems with brute force and ultra violence. Things soon went too far, with films like Commando, and well....nearly everything that Stallone and Schwarzenegger made for the next 15 years! First Blood may have spawned these movies, but it is not one of them. There was a reason for John Rambo's muscles, and fighting ability - he was a soldier, and compared to Schwarzenegger, Stallone doesn't really look that over muscled, not like in the second and third Rambo films where he looks like a condom stuffed with walnuts!

So that's First Blood, a fast paced action movie with amazing stunts, a muscle bound anti-hero who became a movie icon, and spawned a generation of musclebound Hollywood action heroes. Next up:

Die Hard (1988)
In First Blood, the setting is a quiet town where nothing really happens, until John Rambo appears all hell breaks out. John Rambo is a character not necessary looking for trouble, but who trouble will inevitably find. John McClane is the opposite, he is an Everyman character who finds himself in an extraordinary situation. Just as the small American town was peaceful before John Rambo turned up, John McClane was doing fine until the Nakatomi building was taken over by terrorists on Christmas Eve. This being pre 9/11 the terrorists are German.

McClane isn't just an ordinary guy though, he's a cop. Compared to being an elite soldier or secret agent though, a policeman is a pretty average profession. This makes the action scenes particularly exciting, McClane is always overmatched when he comes up against the terrorists, either in number, strength or firepower, unlike Rambo who easily dispenses of the under skilled police who have chased him into the mountains. Like another of Stallone's characters Rocky, Bruce Willis' character survives on sheer determination and providence.

Unlike many action films in which the main character survives unscathed, the character of John McClane spends most of the film battered and bleeding. His bare feet are cut to shreds by broken glass, and he is beaten and bashed around so much that he spends most of the second part of the film covered in blood. Rambo in contrast seems indestructible, sewing his arm up with a needle and thread from his knife after jumping 50 feet from a cliff into the branches of tree. And how many times before Daniel Craig have you seen James Bond with anything worse than a torn shirt?

Die Hard spawned many similar films, like Speed, The Rock, Under Siege etc, where a group of innocent people are held captive and a single man with the odds stacked against him becomes the only one who can save them.

Now the last film on the list:

The Bourne Identity (2002)

After films like The Matrix, and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, films that contained martial arts started to get a bit unbelievable. People flew around suspended on wires and performed leaps and flying moves like they were in NBA Jam. James Bond films had started to feel this way too, the last of the Pierce Brosnan Bond films had an invisible car; nuff said.

The Bourne Identity was a clear change from the wire-fu/ hi-tech action movies that had started to dominate the action genre, and along with films like Ong-Bak, it set a new standard for action films, where the punches are real and the hero has to rely upon his own talent and whatever happens to be in the room at the time, to fight with, rather than fancy gadgets and huge weapons.

Jason Bourne is a new breed of action hero, he is extremely intelligent (unlike John McClane or Rambo) he has little or no resources at his disposal unlike James Bond, and is therefore more believable even when he takes down four highly trained men in less than three seconds! Although The Bourne Identity follows a familiar pattern in the action genre, it is basically a classic cat and mouse chase, it does this with originality. The first action scene is a foot chase through the US embassy, that ends up with Bourne scaling down the building. Before the Bourne films you didn't get many foot chases in films, apart from police chasing criminals, but since Bourne nearly every action movie has a free running style chase, most prominently Casino Royale, a film which wouldn't really exist without Bourne.

In the first fight scene, in Bourne's apartment in Paris, Bourne beats the assassin off not with a 6 inch knife or Uzi 9mm, but a Biro! In the car chase through the streets of Paris, Bourne is not in a BMW or Aston Martin but a beat up old Mini; somehow this makes the chase more intense and exciting. The Bourne Identity mixes the gritty realism of 70's action movies like Bullet and The French Connection, with the post 9/11 world of surveillance and counter-terrorism. The Bourne movies are now the benchmark for the recent action flicks. The Daniel Craig Bond films owe everything to Bourne, as do films like Body of Lies, The International, Taken...... There is a scene from the car chase sequence where the camera is facing the driver (Jason) from the side so we are looking out of his door window, and we see a car come straight towards the camera, and smash into the side of Jason's car, (an often copied scene) and you feel as if you actually in the car with them. In fact throughout most of The Bourne Identity, and more so in the sequels, the camera puts you close to the action, that you find yourself ducking in your seat. Best of all unlike the other two films I have discussed above, The Bourne Identity's sequels were amazing!