the-netflix-action-movie-canon - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

<i>Red Cliff </i>Is The Crazed War Epic John Woo Was Reborn To MakeIt’s probably fair to say that John Woo went limping back to Hong Kong. In the ’80s and early ’90s, Woo changed the Hong Kong film industry by making some of the best action movies of all time: Hard Boiled, The Killer, A Better Tomorrow, Bullet in the Head. He then spent a decade in Hollywood, where...

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>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>Infernal Affairs </i>Can't Escape <i>The Departed</i>'s Shadow, But Watch It Anyway

Hong Kong action-movie directors have picked up a lot from Martin Scorsese. Think of John Woo in particular: the brotherly criminal-underworld bonding in A Better Tomorrow, the gliding camera moves of The Killer, that endless and amazing tracking shot in Hard Boiled. When you consider that Woo basic...

<i>The Wild Bunch </i>Is Still Nasty, Unrelenting, And Pretty Goddamn Great 

Imagine being alive in 1969 and going to see The Wild Bunch when it was new. It was released in an era when American movies were changing, and when audiences were getting more and more used to seeing gruesome violence onscreen, like in Bonnie & Clyde. Granted, it was still a time when movies would t...

<i>The Avenging Eagle </i>Is A Great Shaw Brothers Flick For Kung Fu Novices And Experts Alike

Sometime 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 Deserved

I 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>The Bank Job</i> Is A Great Jason Statham Flick, Even Though He Hardly Kicks Anybody

The 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...