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<i>Skin Trade </i>Lets<i> </i>Dolph Lundgren Cook, And For A Dumb Action Flick, That's EnoughDolph Lundgren has had a couple of cups of coffee with the American pop-cultural psyche: haughtily sneering over Apollo Creed’s death in Rocky IV, wearing a necklace of severed ears in Universal Soldier, that sort of thing. But he never crossed over to the upper tier of action stars, and it’s hard t...

<i>The Avenging Eagle </i>Is A Great Shaw Brothers Flick For Kung Fu Novices And Experts AlikeSometime in the last month or two, a whole pile of Shaw Brothers kung fu movies suddenly appeared on Netflix. The Shaw Brothers studio started making movies in Hong Kong in the ’20s, but it’s most famous for the incredibly huge catalog it cranked out during the ’70s and early ’80s. At its peak, the ...

Jason Bourne Is The Paranoid-Assassin Hero America Needed, And DeservedI don’t know if I can call Matt Damon’s Bourne movies the best action franchise that’s come along thus far this century. After all, the original Fast and the Furious came out in 2001, a year before The Bourne Identity, and the idea of picking between Fast and Bourne is the kind of thing that makes m...

<i>Elite Squad: The Enemy Within</i> Is The Next Stop For <i>Narcos</i> Fiends

There’s a very good chance you’ve spent some time in the past few week binging on Narcos, the new Netflix show about the unlikely career of one Pablo Escobar. It’s a great show, one that goes as wide as possible in considering all the effects of the U.S.’s war on drugs and its appetite for them. May...

<i>First Blood </i>Is A Darker, Sadder, And Better Rambo Flick Than You Remember

The climax of 1982’s First Blood isn’t a gun battle or a knife fight. It’s Sylvester Stallone, as John Rambo, breaking down into big, blubbery tears, trying to make sense of the world around him. He’s learned that he’s the last surviving member of his elite fighting force, that America has no furthe...

<i>Shanghai Noon</i> Is The Goofy Kung-Fu Western You Didn't Know You Wanted

Rush Hour was a silly little action-comedy B-movie that blew the fuck up in 1998, and it was easy to get the sense, watching things play out, that Hollywood wasn’t quite sure how to deal with that level of unexpected success. The studios could make more Rush Hour movies, of course, which they absolu...

<i>Kung Fu Hustle </i>Is Goofy, Referential, And Totally Insane

The whole point of the Jim Carrey movie The Mask is the idea of using CGI to combine a pretty standard and amiable zero-to-hero comedy with the antic, absurdist slapstick of Bugs Bunny cartoons. Stephen Chow’s 2004 movie Kung Fu Hustle came a decade after The Mask and from a different side of the wo...

<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...