actionmovies - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

The Grisly, Goofy <i>Starship Troopers </i>Played Dumb To Make Hollywood Look Even DumberThe moment when you discover what Starship Troopers is really about is one of the great eureka moments in the life of any young movie dork. I’ve got vivid memories of staggering out of a suburban multiplex in 1997 and sputtering, “What the fuck was that?” To my teenage self, it was basically Saved b...

<i>No Tears For The Dead </i>Mixes Badass Fights With Heavy ConsequencesIn the opening scene of the 2014 South Korean thriller No Tears for the Dead, we see a dark, brooding figure, tattoos peaking out of the sleeves of his suit, folding together an origami crane in a nightclub. After spending a few seconds charming a little girl a few tables over, he gets the text he’s...

<i>The Bank Job</i> Is A Great Jason Statham Flick, Even Though He Hardly Kicks AnybodyThe Bank Job is a movie that stars Jason Statham, but it’s not a Jason Statham movie. The chief attributes of his persona, as established in a long line of mostly-pretty-great action B-movies (like, say, this one or this one), are just not there. We don’t get the cold-eyed and square-jawed stare, or...

<i>Kickboxer </i>Is Even Sillier Than You Remember, And Even Better, Too

I’m pretty sure the first animated gif I ever saw was Jean-Claude Van Damme dancing in a Thai bar in Kickboxer. The image is the sort of thing that sticks with you: his khakis hiked up to a near-Urkel level, his spaghetti-strap tank top just barely managing to exist, his face contorted into what I g...

<i>Fallen Angels </i>Has The Prettiest, Artiest, Most Nonsensical Gunfights Ever Filmed

When I was in high school, Hong Kong art-film superstar Wong Kar-Wai’s 1994 classic Chunking Express was one of those weird movies that became a cornerstone of my whole idea that I was a Smart Person Who Appreciated Smart Things. I watched it over and over and over, and started telling people it was...

The First <i>Mission: Impossible </i>Movie Is Very '90s And Very Necessary

There has never been a bad Mission: Impossible movie. They’ve all been ridiculous. They’ve all strained credulity. They’ve all had dense, convoluted plots that don’t really stand up to any scrutiny. They’ve all functionally served as Tom Cruise stunt reels, the plots reduced to incoherent connective...

<i>Road House </i>Is Patrick Swayze's Finest Hour, And Also America's

Here’s something fun: Imagine the conversations that Terry Funk, the eternally grizzled pro wrestler, and John Doe, the co-leader of the great art-punk band X, had on the set of Road House. By 1989, the year that this beautifully ridiculous action flick hit theaters, those two were legends in their ...

All White Everything: The Glorious Badness Of <i>Enter The Ninja </i>

Ninjas tend to wear all black because they want to move around in the dark without being seen, right? Like, that’s the whole point of being a ninja? I’m asking this because the hero of 1981’s Enter the Ninja is a white ninja, in both senses of the word: He’s a Caucasian man who’s become a ninja, and...