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Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

GoodyTwoShoes posted:

You are wrong; Skin Trade is an awesome movie. Dolph Lundgren has almost learned to act! Starring He-Man, Robocop, Spawn, Hellboy, and . . .Tony.


Content: The Dead Lands (2014) is pretty cool. Does it belong here or the martial arts thread? Here's the trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKy7Q50tJ84

The Dead Lands was very cool. It's rare to see something that feels so much like it's own thing in a new style.

Megaman's Jockstrap posted:

Martial Arts wise, yes. I think Expendables probably had "bigger" names if you're an 80s guy, but they were largely wasted.

A reminder that Undisputed 4 is coming to Blu-Ray on August 1st. If you haven't seen the Undisputed movies they are the kings of the DTV fight movies and incredibly good. Watch Undisputed 2 and 3!

Seconding this. Undisputed 4 is pretty bonkers even by the standards of the series. Scott Adkins has been reliably knocking out good ('good') action movies for a few years now. Ninja 2 is probably the stand out here.

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Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010
Fatal Contact and Legendary Assassin confirm this assessment.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

X-Ray Pecs posted:

I saw this on the big screen last month and I was grinning the whole time, it's so high-energy and fun. The Raven/Cody fight is awesome.

Another good Walter Hill joint is Trespass, a movie where Bill Paxton and William Sadler go to an abandoned East St Louis warehouse to find hidden treasure, and end up witnessing a murder by Ice Cube, Ice T, and Argyle from Die Hard, it's awesome as hell and makes great use of the setting.


Might I recommend Act of Valor, the film that literally started as a recruitment video for the SEALs? It stars active-duty SEALs in a ridiculously video gamey version of Islamophobic conflict, including dozens of headshots and even a dude basically doing the Call of Duty Last Stand perk. It's absolutely mind-melting how openly racist and supportive of US military intervention it is, but it's very well-filmed and exciting.

The irony of Act of Valor is that the gunfights, despite being done by actual gunfighters, are poo poo.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

mobby_6kl posted:

Whoa, I had no idea. Red Cliff did nothing for me unfortunately, but I still trust that The Master can deliver something kickass in the correct crime action genre. Pretty pumped now!

There's a difficult balance to strike in a movie battle scene between stylisation (showing manuvers and giving a sense of tactics) and brutality, and Red Cliff, like the Battle of the Bastards, is on the wrong side of it. With the exception of the first fight, it all feels like a kid playing with toy soldiers.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Wandle Cax posted:

My guess is that they would use it

I think they tend not to. That is, apparently, why Michael Bay reused footage from The Island in Transformers 3, because someone died in that stunt.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Neo Rasa posted:

If anything they didn't go far enough. Like it needed the part where anybody who's anybody realizes that Guan Yu's beard is way too beautiful so they force him to wear a custom made beard veil when he goes to the Emperor's court otherwise the Emperor would be shamed for life and worthless and the kingdoms would be thrown into anarchy upon realizing how not even the Emperor could have as good a beard as Guan Yu.

I suspect we won't see eye to eye on the battle scenes, but we can forge a lifelong friendship based on how hard we agree that that scene should have been there.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Basebf555 posted:

The Raid's non-stop action trumps Dredd imo, but you're right that Dredd is more interesting visually.

That's why I love the John Wick movies so much, I get to have my cake and eat it too with those. Taking a look at Stahelski's wiki page I'm kinda worried that he's become too popular to do another John Wick sequel. He apparently signed to do a whole trilogy of rebooted Highlander films. Maybe his partner(David Leitch ) will come back to do Chapter 3.

I always thought that if you combined the Raid and Dredd into one film, you'd have as close to the perfect action movie as you could get.

But Dredd is a really good looking movie, as is John Wick. There's not a dull shot in either. John Wick 2 takes it even further. It's like Argento's lighting sensibility applied to an action movie. The Raid is a little dull to look at. The sequel makes up for it. My god that is a pretty movie.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Lobok posted:

I think it really helps if you know what kind of movie it is before you go in. Someone who only half-remembers Hard Boiled and Face/Off might be expecting a totally sincere hardcore gunfight movie. And this is not that. This is all of the same over-the-top Woo action but the tone of it is much funnier and self-aware.

Even by Hard Boiled, Woo had acquired a lot of self awareness, which he then threw out for his Hollywood run.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Wandle Cax posted:

If you think a film in which Jean Claude Van Damme punches out a snake is not self-aware i'd love to hear your definition of the term

Okay, fair point.

I also forgot about the bit where he shoots someone twenty times, karate kicks them, then shoots them twenty more times.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010
gently caress, y'all are right. Mea Culpa. Like you say, the goofy elements are played so straight that they barely register, they're just part of the extremely melodramatic landscape. A Better Tomorrow 2 also features a man turning into a crazy invalid out of grief, only to remember mid-gunfight. It's spectacularly dumb.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Al Cu Ad Solte posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxM6vsMNwXs

New trailer for Re:Born. The pen + empty pistol magazine throat shot kill... :vince:

gently caress yes. Death Trance was fantastic.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

X-Ray Pecs posted:

Dredd is probably my favorite movie of the past 5 years, it’s violent, slick, brutal, and a hell of a lot of fun. The cast is awesome, and Urban is the best possible Judge Dredd.

I've said for a while that if you combined The Raid's action and style with Dredd's everything else, you'd have the perfect action movie.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

X-Ray Pecs posted:

Tintin has a scene that’s basically the truck hijacking from Raiders as one long take, Spielberg took Zemeckis’ motion capture CGI and thoroughly embarrassed him with how much you can do with it.

There is a shitload of genuinely astounding detail in pretty much every shot of that Tintin movie. It's full of Jackie Chan style flair, but you don't need to endanger an insane stunt team to pull it off.

X-Ray Pecs posted:

He’s presented as the good dad of Dennis and Dee in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

That is weird and horrifyingly appropriate for Always Sunny's one nice character to turn out to be played by a pedophile.

Wheat Loaf posted:

Best Mel Gibson acting movie since 2000 was Chicken Run. :v:

He had some really effective moments in 'We Were Soldiers' but there's a thick streak of insane jingoism in that movie that undermines a lot of what it was working hard to say.

Payndz posted:

Christ, didn't anyone tell the director "The Matrix was three years ago, man! Move on!"

That's why I remembered it as being boring - there's so much slo-mo that the scene moves like treacle.

The overuse of slo-mo is a hallowed tradition. I swear ninety percent of 'A Better Tomorrow 3" is in slo-mo

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Fart City posted:

Yeah, it totally commits to the gonzo universe it's set in. So like, you can have Rutger Hauer monologue about his dreams of owning a lawnmower in one scene, and jump to a ghost bus full of dead kids, or The Plague wrecking a hospital, and none of it really clashes. It's earnest towards the world it's set in and doesn't ever take an outsider's stance.

There's no winking in Hobo, whereas Rodriguez always has to remind you that he's above the film, that he's smart enough to get it, and as a result the films (especially Machete Kills) really smack of insincerity and insecurity. It's amazing that even more than 20 years into Tarantino's career, so few of his imitators get why he works. He makes earnest films about pulp movie characters. They're either small scale stories of when things go wrong (like the Marvin story) or true, fundamental identity crises (like Jules in Pulp Fiction or the Bride in Kill Bill)

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Wheat Loaf posted:

I don't know how much of a problem that is in Rodriguez's movies in general; of those I've seen, it's only really been a problem with Machete Kills. I didn't think there was too much winking in, say, Desperado or Rodriguez's half of From Dusk Til Dawn.

He was a lot younger back then.

X-Ray Pecs posted:

Oh god the king of overused awful slow-mo is The Boondock Saints. Every action scene is the exact same and it get extremely tedious towards the end, to the point where I cheered when they just shot a guy regularly. God what an awful movie.
Boondock saints plays out like a parodical sketch about 90s action films. It's a pity it's so poo poo, because the two leads have good chemistry and deserve a better film. I mean, Defoe is great, but he's fuckin' Defoe, he's always great.

quote:

Streets of Fire, if you’re good with a lighter-toned movie about rock music. Great Willem Dafoe performance, and Rick Moranis, Diane Lane, and Lee Ving are fun.

Get the gently caress in. Streets of Fire is loving great.

X-Ray Pecs posted:

The Boondock Saints is a matryoshka doll of “the real lovely part”s, it’s easily in the top 5 worst movies I’ve ever seen. The only good things about it were a paycheck for Willem Dafoe, and Overnight, the documentary about making it (although I have no idea how it’s aged with what we know about Harvey Weinstein).

He already did with Equilibrium, which is just as “cool” and just as stupid. while actually having some style to its action scenes and being massively entertaining. I loving love Equilibrium.

We already knew that Weinstein was a loving crazy person, absolutely willing to strong arm people to get ahead in the business (if you've ever been told about how historically innaccurate Saving Private Ryan is, that's a Weinstein started story)

Equilibrium is fantastic. It's the sketches of a kid bored in English class while studying 'Faranheit 451' turned into a movie.

Also, whoever here recommended the Villainess, I'm not sure how I feel about the movie. It's technically extremely ambitious, but it's not got quite enough money and/or talent to pull off its ideas, so even in the opening tracking shot, henchmen in the background just sort of disappear, and the gunshots always feel slightly out of sync with the reaction.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Big Bad Voodoo Lou posted:

I love Streets of Fire too, between batshit Willem Dafoe, sidekick Rick Moranis, gorgeous Diane Lane, the sledgehammer fight, the doo-wop group led by Ellstin Limehouse, the weird '50s-by-way-of-the-'80s aesthetic, and especially those two incredible, epic Jim Steinman songs bookending the movie. The hero reminds me of Captain Mal from Firefly, but just in how he looks -- not charming or roguish at all.

That and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension might be my two favorite movies that not enough people have seen.

They're both movies that, in other universes/timelines, were massive hits and started trends. As it is, nothing really imitated them so they just stand as these odd, unique films that have bits and pieces of other stuff, but largely defy categorisation.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Big Bad Voodoo Lou posted:

Another fun, quirky, weird action movie that falls into the post-apocalyptic genre discussed earlier is Six String Samurai, which came out in the late '90s. Nobody ever talks about it or makes references to it, but I swear it's real. I used to even own a tie-in comic book with cover art by the infamous Rob Liefeld.

If you haven't seen it, it's about a bespectacled, taciturn nomad named Buddy (meant to be Buddy Holly) who is traveling through the desert wastelands to the kingdom "Lost Vegas," where the King recently died. He runs afoul of all kinds of creeps and weirdos including a family of cannibals and a Soviet surf-rock band (the Red Elvises, who did the soundtrack and are an amazing live band I've seen twice), and eventually has to face off in a guitar duel against Death himself (who looks an awful lot like Slash).

Unfortunately, the movie has the most annoying kid actor ever, who mostly just shrieks and screams. I think the kid brings the whole movie down, and it might have a better reputation as a cult film if not for him.

Holy poo poo, I was looking for the trailer, but it looks like the whole movie is on Youtube!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaPP00uNkNI

It doesn't really have an ending, which is probably why it has acquired an even smaller cult audience than the others mentioned. It was supposed to be a trilogy, but it leaves us with an incomplete film.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Gatts posted:

It is pretty fantastic but I've always wondered what deep passion Mel has for vivid violence. I don't mind it to a degree because it doesn't sanitize things and its very visceral but it seems almost obsessive the way it's always prevalent in his movies.

He's catholic. Every saint, along with the son of god, is depicted more often in their death than anything else. And remember that the majority of those deaths are super loving gory.

Echoing that Hacksaw Ridges battle scenes were weird in an interesting way, making no attempt at historical or tactical realism, and instead being an impressionistic mixture of images. It sort of works. Pity about the rest of the movie.

Snowman_McK fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Jan 4, 2018

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010
gently caress, the end of the Villainess is super disappointing, like literally all their good ideas got used in the first half, and the second half is unambitious action scenes with a spastic camera.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Basebf555 posted:

It's definitely up there, no doubt about it.

Kurosawa is often credited with innovating the way action scenes are shot, and Spielberg and George Lucas were known to be two of his most devoted followers. Spielberg once called Kurosawa the Shakespeare of our time. So the scene in Raiders definitely has lots of Kurosawa DNA in it.

He had a very artistic stagey style of direction, but his action scenes felt really...brawly and organic. I love the way people slip over all the time in Seven Samurai, and swing while off balance. I mean, he also did the slick choregraphy in Yojimbo and Sanjuro. Was he the one who crystalised that?

Jose Oquendo posted:

Yeah it's not bad at all. It does a pretty decent job of genuinely trying to recapture the feel of the buddy cop movies of the era.

Strike Back already did this. And it had tits.

Snowman_McK fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Jan 9, 2018

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Neo Rasa posted:

Absolutely yeah, there are some earlier cases but in general most of the stereotypical samurai action kill "stuff" comes from Yojimbo, Sanjuro and Seven Samurai.

You all probably know, but I love that the iconic someone gets slashed and they freeze and then blood sprays out of them and they fall over slowly was a mistake! At the end of Sanjuro when they filmed that take the mechanism to make the blood spurt out a little bit seemed to malfunction to the person operating it so they kept activating it over and over again causing the massive spray of blood. And I don't know if they realized how imitated and ubiquitous that would become but they knew that it was perfect.

I did a quick bit of googling and it would seem that it kicked off around the early 60s. You've also got the fantastic 'Hara-Kiri' at the same time and 'Sword of Doom' a few years later.

Sword of Doom is especially cool because it was supposed to be the first of a series, but the project fell through. And so the open-ended ending, without a sequel, takes on a new significance and it works perfectly. Like the unanticipated blood spray, it works for reasons the artists may not have intended.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Nroo posted:

To be fair, the serialized novel Sword of Doom was adapted from was also never finished. It also had earlier adaptations with the separate trilogies Souls in the Moonlight and Satan's Sword in the '50s and '60s respectively, which don't seem to be currently available.

Oh, it wasn't a mark against the film. It's a great ending, speaking to the character's refusal to change and his inevitable self destruction. It's just funny that it was conceived partially as a sequel hook.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

brocked posted:

Oh, we're talking samurai flicks now? Let me throw Hanzo the Razor out there- 3 movies with lots of violence, booby traps, fuzz tone guitar, some goofy dreamlike cinematography, and disturbing interrogation techniques.

Isn't that the one about the guy who makes women orgasm so hard it acts as torture?

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Neo Rasa posted:

Correct and personally I'm not crazy about them but I would say the first one is worth checking out depending on what you're looking for. Like brocked says if you want what's basically the feudal Japan equivalent of a 70s grindhouse exploitation crime flick they are the final word.

Woah. More so than Lone Wolf and Cub? Because the's pretty high in the pantheon of 'action hero played by schlubby looking guy'

If anyone hasn't read the comics the lone wolf and cub movies are based on, they're really good and better than the films, largely by dint of not having the action lead played by an awkward looking guy with a double chin.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Basebf555 posted:

I figured that guy never had time to take any other roles, it seems like he had a Zatoichi movie to film like every single year for 20 years or something. He has to have the record for playing the same character in the highest number of films.

Nah, that's the guy who played Wong Fei Hung in like 100 movies.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Wheat Loaf posted:

I know one of the expectations about contemporary action movies is that the lead will get into really good shape for it to the point of physically transforming themselves (Exhibit A: Chris Pratt in Guardians of the Galaxy) but are there any examples of action leads who either wouldn't or couldn't get into shape?

I imagine Seagal is one who might be mention, but I recently watched Under Siege and I think he tended to rely on his martial arts rather than getting really jacked like Arnold or Stallone.

I remember something about Benicio Del Toro being really difficult about training for the movie 'The Hunted'

Halloween Jack posted:

I don't know what movies or serious movies were the ones that changed the game, but it's only recently that guys like Arnold, Stallone, and JCVD aren't exceptions anymore. Bruce Willis and Nicholas Cage are some others who rarely or never got really jacked up for their roles. I don't remember Matt Damon being in ridiculous shape to do the first Bourne movie, but then of course he was jacked up by the last one. (Granted, even in that, it's not like he went all the way to a bodybuilder physique.)
Matt Damon has been in freakishly good shape for all those movies, it's just that the movie didn't show it off. He was loving huge for Elysium as well. I read an interview about the difficulty of training him, because he had three action movies to do in a row, and couldn't afford to ever be injured. They used one of those mountain climbing machines a lot.

quote:

When it comes to martial artists, Jackie Chan was extremely cut when he was young, following Bruce Lee, but size wasn't a big deal. Now he has no need to put his body through that. Donnie Yen didn't bulk up until he did a movie with Vin Diesel. Chuck Norris was always in shape, but he looked like a normal human being.
Chan is an outlier, because, while he is an absurd super-athlete (even now) he didn't play super athletes, he played determined guys with a bit of luck. And so he wears loose fitting clothing, de-emphasising his physicality. His body posture has a similar effect.

sean10mm posted:

I think you see the transition to making normal actors get jacked for action roles in the early 2000s, give or take. Like Hugh Jackman in X-Men was just a ordinary looking fit dude, but by X2 in 2003 he's huge.

It was more that he'd never really worked out hard before, and he was cast late in the process for the first X-Men (poor Dougray Scott) so he got huge through the course of the movie, so much so that the cage fighting scene and the scene after he wakes up at the X-mansion, which were shot at very different times in production, border on being a continuity error.

Meanwhile, for X2, he had three years to get in shape.

Neo Rasa posted:

Uh, Arnold?

I'd throw in Stallone as well. He started out in pretty good shape, but looked like an action figure by Rambo 3.


X-Ray Pecs posted:

Wasn’t De Niro putting on 50 pounds for the end of Raging Bull a big deal? And also didn’t Rock Hudson beef up after it came out that he was gay?

de Niro also had a couple of actual boxing matches. I'm not sure if they were pro or amateur. Daniel Day Lewis went on to do that as well.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Lobok posted:

Maybe not super athlete but usually some flimsy reason as to why he might have some physical prowess. And there was often at least one point in a movie where you'd see how in shape he was. The guy was topless in scenes even as late as the Shanghai Knights movies.

True, but there's a gap between that and, for instance, the constant focus on Bruce Lee's physicality. He was more inclined to fight in a tracksuit than a tank top.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

The thing I remember about seeing DM2 in the theater is that people could tell it was an older film, like obviously from the early 90s, yet no one cared because the action was light years ahead of anything going on in American action films at the time. One of the only action films I'd seen at that point where people just stayed through the credits.

It still is light years ahead. I mean, everyone's imitating the Raid, now, but no matter how much money they throw at Whichever Chris/Hemsworth is there, they're a long way behind a bunch of mad Indonesians, and even further behind Chan.

Lobok posted:

And back then seeing a Jackie Chan film, or probably any martial arts film, was like going to a midnight screening: the people in the theatre were there because they were fans.

I saw Raid 2 the Streets on opening night, and it was me, my girlfriend, a couple of morbidly obese white guys and a gaggle of drunk Indonesians. Turns out that's who goes to see martial arts movies on opening night.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

YOLOsubmarine posted:

Project A has an homage to Keaton (or perhaps Harold Lloyd) hanging from the clock tower, except on Project A Chan actually falls 60 feet through several awnings before landing in his head.

It’s completely insane.

I’d be hard pressed to pick my favorite Chan movie, but any of them with the Biao and Hung are really high up there. Dragons Forever might be it.

The original Drunken Master is really good too if you don’t mind be more deliberate old style kung fu movie choreography. Chan had a knack for picking the best dudes as villains and then didn’t mind letting them cut loose and overshadow him.

Chan says that clock tower stunt was one of the two that came closest to killing him. He cracked his skull. Then cracked it again in jumping to a tree in Armour of God.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

Is that the one where Hitler shows up at the end in a wheelchair?


The fight on/under the train against the loving DIRECTOR, Lau Kar-Leung, is like the 4th best action sequence in the film and to this day blows away practically any fight scene in any American action film.

Condor was apparently the Apocalypse Now of kung fu movies. It had a really long, strained production that ran massively over-budget while shooting on location, and Chan had a bunch of affairs, including with his co-star.

And yeah, Drunken Master 2 has at least three scenes that would be the absolute pinnacle of literally anyone else's career (the axe gang fight, the drunken street fight and the finale), and I'm not even sure you can definitively say that they're the best of Chan's career. poo poo, the smaller fights he has as a warm up for the finale would be genre topping if the rest of Chan's filmography didn't exist.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Fart City posted:

The same thing happened in Salvation, where it was this huge reveal when the T-800 comes out at the end... and then it's immediately immolated because every second you got a computer animated Arnold on screen you're burning through money.

But to your first point, a lot of director's don't seem to realize that weight is a huge factor in making CGI characters feel "present" in the scene. Neil Blomkamp and Guillermo del Toro seem to be pretty okay with it (in regards to District 9 and Pacific Rim, specifically), but almost everyone else seems to equate slow = to weighty, as opposed to actually making the characters appear weighty through how they actual move.

Same when Dracula turns into a huge monster in Blade trinity, you know they're not going bother choreographing a proper fight with their elaborate and difficult to fix prosthetic. I mean, that was a dreadful movie, but that was one of its many flaws.

YOLOsubmarine posted:

Yea, the Operation Condor one apparently caused blood to shoot out of his ears and left him with a hole in his skull.

For whatever personal flaws he has you can’t fault the man for his dedication to getting things just right.

Chan is a lunatic perfectionist. There's a stunt in 'The Young Master' where he spins a fan through the air, then catches it. He says it was the hardest thing he's done. 140 takes.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

YOLOsubmarine posted:

He apparently has mild ocd, which is not at all surprising.

The surprising part is the word 'mild'

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

LesterGroans posted:

Yeah, it's actually a cool series in the sense that the first 3 or 4 movies are very stylistically different from each other. It makes sense that it's Tom Cruise's pet franchise, because until recently he seemed to be all about working with a wide range of filmmakers and rarely repeating.

But to your question, it's a series worth watching. The weakest one is probably the most recent entry, Rogue Nation, and even it has some standout action set pieces. I used to be pretty down on M:I 2, but I liked it a lot more when I recently rewatched it.

The biggest selling points of the series are Tom Cruise giving it his all and an impressive supporting cast.

Even the latest one is different from those that came before it. I feel like there was a bet between some people to see whether you could do a Mission Impossible movie where Ethan barely uses a gun. I think the finale is the only real shootout in the whole thing, the rest of it is chase scenes and that really elaborate opera sequence.

Hoffman was a shockingly good anything. The dude was loving amazing and he was a real loss.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010
That very long shot of Cruise running down a street in China in III had me convinced for some reason that CGI or special effects were somehow involved. Nope. Pure Cruise. It was the first time I appreciated how loving much that guy loves running.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Wandle Cax posted:

I also find it particularly impressive how he held his breath for real for 6 minutes for the underwater scene in Rogue nation. The man is dedicated to getting the shot

Wait, for real? That's amazing.

You could throw his Japanese martial arts and firearms training on that list as well.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Fart City posted:

Mission Impossible: 2 would be a lot easier to watch if it was like, twenty minutes shorter. It’s really bloated and has some serious pacing issues. And it doesn’t really go full Woo until the very end when there is a motorcycle fight scene.

I’ll always have a soft spot for Face/Off, but Hard Target is my favorite American Woo joint. Van Damme in his spin-kickiest prime, Lance Henrikson playing to the rafters, Wilfred Brimley doing a Cajun accent, snake punching. What’s not to love?

Hard Target also contains a short sequence that is just perfect. Van Damme shoots a guy a lot, spin kicks him, then shoots another guy, spin kicks him, then the first guy gets back up and gets shot some more. It's amazing

Wandle Cax posted:

While we're at it LIVE.DIE.REPEAT: Edge of Tomorrow is perhaps the ultimate cruise action film. He makes fun of himself by being a loser at the beginning but still gets to be the action hero by the end. There is big sci fi action but still lots of practical stunts he did. The plot revolves around a world ending threat but still revolves around one man saving it, with a sci-fi twist.

If Edge of Tomorrow had had a slightly better ending and aliens that leant themselves more to action choreography, it would have been perfect. It is pretty drat good.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Wheat Loaf posted:

I'm not sure what my favourite Die Hard rip-off is. Probably a toss-up between Cliffhanger and Air Force One.

The Rock.
Come on guys.

Big Bad Voodoo Lou posted:

Everyone hates Ayer now, probably due to Suicide Squad (which I hated too, mostly as a fan of the original comics) and Bright. But he has written and/or directed some good movies too. I personally love Street Kings, which is more "crime" than "action," but a lot of people slept on it when it came out. It is written by James freakin' Ellroy, maybe the best living crime/mystery novelist, and it has a stacked cast: Keanu Reeves, Hugh Laurie, Forest Whitaker, Chris Evans, Terry Crews.

Also Fury. Fury is dope. It's three quarters serious, grim war film, and then in the last act it turns into John Woo's Windtalkers with nazis and a better DP.

Also, he gets a legitimately really good performance out Shaya Aboof.

Suicide Squad was weird, and apparently editorially gutted at the last minute.

Wheat Loaf posted:

The best example I can think of is the Albert Pyun movie Cyborg having been, at various points in its development, a sequel to Masers of the Universe and Cannon's ill-fated attempt to make a Spider-Man movie.

Albert Pyun's filmography is amazing. Nemesis, (which is a pretty good cyberpunk movie) has a sequel that crams about four movies worth of material into the opening narration. The further sequels just turned into soft porn with a lady bodybuilder.


Wheat Loaf posted:

What's Reeves's background in martial arts? I know he studied Brazilian jiujitsu for John Wick but what was he on in Matrix?

He apparently has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and followed up with a lot of training with Yuen Woo Ping's team.

Basebf555 posted:

24 Hours To Live was a pretty solid popcorn action flick but more in spite of Ethan Hawke than because of him. One of the smarter decisions they made was to give like half of the John Wick style action stuff to an unknown Asian actress that was way better at it than Hawke is. Picture a scene from John Wick, so every shot is a headshot and guys are dropping left and right, except instead of the uber confident and streamlined movements of Reeves, it's a guy who's never done this before bumbling around waving the gun haphazardly with almost no technique to it.

To be fair, there's a reason for that kinda built into the story but it didn't make up for the fact that the action just wasn't nearly as "believable"(as weird as it might be to use that word in relation to John Wick) as Wick's.

There's a dreadful Brazilian film on Australian Netflix called 'Special Operations' (I'm not going to butcher the Portugese spelling) about a young woman who joins the civil police and shoots a lot of drug dealers. It's basically a lovely recruiting movie, in the vein of 'Acts of Valor' and you can see that everyone did a bit of weapons training, but it's still filmed so very badly (seriously, on a fundamental, it's one of the worst shot movies I've ever seen) that everyone looks like poo poo. Reeves gets a lot of credit for his work on Wick, but it's also that he's shot in such a way that makes you realise just how impressive it is.


muscles like this! posted:

Something I found weird about White House Down is the scene near the beginning where Channing Tatum is pretending to be cowering in fear on the bathroom floor and uses this opportunity to shoot a bad guy. It came across as really odd and a bad look for the character.

Reactions like this are really funny and remind me how strict the unspoken rules of the action movie are.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Wheat Loaf posted:

At the very least, probably the best movie in Sean Connery's late career revival as a leading man (toss-up between that and Hunt for Red October).

Does The Rock have the most sympathetic (for the most part) action movie villain? It's got to be up there.

Somebody on here described it as a movie about war criminals trying to stop another war criminal from committing war crimes by committing more war crimes with an illegally detained political prisoner. It's a pretty accurate summary.

I liked it. The Rock rules (tm)

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Basebf555 posted:

It was a bit of both, she was really hot at the time but people were definitely excited to see Lara Croft in a big budget movie. Maybe they'd have been less excited if Jolie didn't seem like such a perfect casting though, so it's hard to separate the two.

Video Game movies were a big deal, because back then you were turning some colored blobs into an actual person. It was a huge deal to see sub-zero move in more than two dimensions.

That's just faded, since games are now capable of looking loving amazing. I mean, playing out a battle in the Total War games doesn't look that much worse than watching a big budget battle scene in a movie. Shogun 2, for instance, looks absolutely spectacular, even in close up.

Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

Neo Rasa posted:

Everyone in this thread should watch Doomsday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJMjiCxHLdg

Second.

You get about 4 movies for the price of one. You get a zombie movie, a cop movie, a rampaging hordes vs. cop movie, a little bit of excalibur, and then it finishes with a Mad Max impression.

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Snowman_McK
Jan 31, 2010

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

To this day I wonder if Rhona Mitra is bitter about Kate Beckinsale.

the fact that they both exist and look almost identical?


Yaws posted:

The Way of the Gun is fairly forgettable movie overall but the gunfight at the end is hands down the best I've ever seen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20oEmQZrqyI

I love the way they do brass checks and reload their pistols. A minor thing but something a lot of movies ignore.

lol at Way of the Gun being forgettable. It opens with Sarah Silverman getting punched in the face.

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