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<i>Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry </i>Is Acidic B-Movie Nihilism Done Right
The car-chase movies of the '70s really only had one plot: Someone drives a muscle car really fast, hoping to avoid police cars, some of which end up driving into streams or ponds. But each movie found a vastly different way to tell that one story. Vanishing Point, the genre's real masterpiece, to...
<i>Iron Monkey </i>Is An Underrated Goof From Hong Kong's '90s Golden Era
Somehow, in the early '90s, the Hong Kong film industry just had the action movie figured out. You'll see something like this every once in a while: A particular locale just going ham on some particular art form. It's like New York rap in the mid-'90s: All these classics coming out at a dizzying s...
Vin Diesel's Gloriously Absurd <i>XXX </i>Is Mountain Dew For The Soul
XXX, the fantastically stupid Vin Diesel vehicle from 2002, starts with a shaky premise: James Bond is done. The world has changed, and he can't survive. You can understand how someone might've arrived at that conclusion. The Pierce Brosnan era was nearing its bloated end, and Die Another Day, with ...
<i>Headhunters </i>Proves That Norway Is Secretly A Super-Messed-Up Place
For a non-fan, the whole idea of the Nordic noir phenomenon can feel a bit strange: An entire genre of mass-market paperback thrillers dedicated to the idea that people in some of the world's cleanest, brightest, richest, most polite countries are really doing unspeakable things to each other behi...
<i>The Running Man</i>'s Goofy, Violent Dystopia Hasn't Arrived Yet, Alas
Right around New Year's Day, I saw a bit of online chatter pointing out that we were entering the year depicted in Back to the Future II, and that to our great disappointment, we still don't have hoverboards or '80s-themed diners. Tragic as that may be, I'm more concerned that we're now only two yea...
The Loopy <i>Project A</i> Is Jackie Chan At His Most Violently Ridiculous
There's a moment in the 1983 Jackie Chan movie Project A where he's dangling from a clock tower's minute hand, clinging for dear life as people watch him from stories below. Chan has always been a big silent-comedy head, and the scene was directly inspired by a famous stunt that Harold Lloyd pulle...
Jason Statham Will Hopefully Never Stop Making Movies Like <i>Homefront</i>
There are things you expect to see in a Jason Statham movie, and 2012's Homefront has those things: kicks, headbutts, armbars, heads smashed through car windows, weary neck-stretches, imperiled little kids, muttered warnings not to fuck with Jason Statham. It also has James Franco banging Winona Ryd...
The Terse, Explosive <i>Drug War </i>Is Nearly As Hard As <i>Hard Boiled </i>Itself
The Hong Kong shoot-'em-up is a venerated cinematic genre, one that blew a whole lot of minds and changed the way all movies look, but it really had a pretty short shelf life. The halcyon era really only lasted about seven years: From 1986, when John Woo made the groundbreaking gangster flick A Bett...
<i>RoboCop </i>Is The Best Movie Ever Made
In fourth grade, I went to school every day with a RoboCop lunchbox. In retrospect, this seems insane. RoboCop is arguably the bleakest, most violent, most nihilistic movie ever made by an American studio. Every scene seems to drip with malice even when nothing especially dramatic is happening. It's...
Pretty Hurts: Why The Steely <i>Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon </i>Holds Up
There is a lot of fighting in 2000's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but almost none of the blows look like they hurt. The one really painful attack here—the one where you sort of recoil from the screen—is when one woman tells another woman that they're not friends anymore, that they could never b...
<i>Peaky Blinders </i>Is The Brutal British Gangster Saga For You
Right now, my wife is making it through both seasons of Peaky Blinders, the British TV show about warring 1920s gangs, for the second time. The big difference: This time, she's watching it with the subtitles on. She swears she'd missed entire plot threads the first time just through the sheer, dis...
<i>Blood and Bone </i>Treats Michael Jai White Like The Badass Miracle He Is
America has failed as a society in many ways, and one of them is this: Michael Jai White is not a titanic movie star. There is no reason why Michael Jai White is not a titanic movie star. He can act. He has a calm, still, intimidating presence. He's handsome enough to play the love interest in a...
Keanu Reeves, B-Movie Auteur: The Badass Excellence Of <i>Man Of Tai Chi </i>
Neo is more interesting than you realized. Last year, Keanu Reeves, once one of the world's biggest movie stars, released Man of Tai Chi, his directorial debut. It's a hard, unpretentious, generally frill-free martial-arts movie about an underground fighting ring, and it was released direct-to-VOD i...
<em>Battle Royale</em>'s Wincing Nastiness Can Never Be Duplicated
Once upon a time, seeking out a way to see Battle Royale, the 2000 Japanese movie about little kids killing each other on an island, felt like finding a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook or something. This movie was never banned in the U.S. the way it was (and still is) in Germany. But even though it q...
<em>Total Recall</em> Was Fucking Awesome
During the first scene of the original 1990 Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger's head explodes. It's just a dream sequence, and the camera cuts away before his face actually pops open. But the fact remains: One of the biggest summer blockbusters of its era opens by forcing you to contemplate the mo...
<em>Django Unchained</em> Gave Us The Quentin Tarantino Gunfight Of Our Dreams
Quentin Tarantino loves action movies in all their forms: ritualistic Hong Kong martial-arts epics, '70s car-chase odysseys, terse and meditative Japanese gangster flicks. He hires the stars of those old movies, and he peppers his own films with references in just about every way he can manage. But ...
<em>El Mariachi</em> Is A Feast Of Bloody Micro-Budget Silliness
There's a moment early in El Mariachi, the micro-budget 1992 movie that introduced Robert Rodriguez to the world, where our hero, an unnamed wandering musician, asks a bartender if he can work there, singing for tips. The asshole bartender laughs in his face and says that he'd never pay one guy ...
The Rad '90s Western <em>Tombstone</em> Is Val Kilmer's Finest Hour
Since I started writing this column, I've been wondering what to do with westerns. They aren't quite action movies, but they're action-adjacent. It feels a bit ridiculous to discuss Once Upon a Time in the West in the same space I'm using for stuff like Dredd and Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning....
Jet Li, Ass-Kicking Jerk: The Amazing Absurdity Of <em>Fearless</em>
There are early scenes in the 2006 martial-arts epic Fearless that require Jet Li to play an asshole. These are some pretty funny scenes. Assholism isn't, generally speaking, his thing—pained nobility is his thing. He is a legitimately world-renown ass-kicker, of course: Before he made a single mo...
<em>Red Dawn</em> Is Delusional Right-Wing Porn In The Best Possible Way
The best scenes in the original 1978 Dawn of the Dead aren't the early bursts of urban confusion or the biker-zombie rumbles. They're the scenes where the four isolated survivors giddily run through an abandoned shopping mall, balling out with the artifacts of a just-dead culture. They use mannequ...