IdleRich
IdleRich
This truly is an action film post; it could go in the Butler thread or the Stath one but really it's more general - I don't think we have such a thread but... now we do.
Anyway, this isn't really a coherent point or anything, it's just a load of stuff I thought about yesterday after my unplanned immersion in this stuff.
To be honest, here I'm talking about the fighting types of action film. I suppose the genre as a whole is often considered to have begun with The 39 Steps which is the first famous film (there may have earlier ones that are similar but I can't think of them and they are less renowned so it seems as good a start as anywhere) where they pretty much did away with plot, or at least relegated it to a few minor scenes which tied together the action spectaculars - needless to say, compared to Hardcore Henry or Crank it looks like Checkov as the inevitable demand for bigger, better, harder, faster and more kicked in and ramped up and up and up.
Yesterday I was kinda under the weather, plus it was pouring down all day, and I sat and watched film after film on telly. It was really an action bonanza with a Stath one in there, the Butler one Gamer, Godzilla (couldn't make it to the end - which is something of a shame cos it wisely started off with a long, slow and atmospheric build up before finally showing the monsters and quickly becoming very boring), Alita Battle Angel(!), The Hunter's Prayer and maybe another too... and I also watched two episodes of Will Kent which is a fairly violent detective show which on this occasion involved quite a lot of fighting.
By the end of the day, whenever I closed my eyes I saw flying fists - from the vaguely plausible Hunter's Prayer in which one man single-handedly takes down a crime empire but really only tends to fight two or three at the same time while moving at an almost believable speed and sustaining actual injuries; to the totally bananas Statham vehicle Safe in which a homeless tramp suddenly remembers that he is an elite undercover assassin and goes on an extraordinary spree of violence in which he destroys the Russian mob, the Chinese mob and NY's corrupt police force, regularly blasting his way through ten or twenty at a time with sickeningly hard punches, horrendous twisting arm-breaks and heads being smashed into walls and car doors left right and centre (the trailer for The Beekeeper looked almost exactly the same); the quite literal computer game violence of Gamer; and then the kids' film Alita in which a young girl in the body of an invincible space cyborg battled her way numberless other slightly more vincible cyborgs.
And I began to wonder if maybe people who complain about violence in films have a point. I started to feel down about the sheer number of evil people betraying civilians and their mates at an alarming rate. Even though the characters were for the most part paper thin, the sheer negativity of almost every single one of them began to weigh on me.
One necessary component of these films is a terrible and ruthless baddie so each film has to show this by having a scene in which they kill an innocent victim. I remember as a child watching The Spy Who Loved Me and I realised that the bad guy was ruthless cos he dropped a failing subordinate into a shark pool - but that doesn't cut it now, the villain has to torture a whole family or set fire to a load of school children so we cheer when he's finally dispatched.
One recurring theme yesterday was redemption for the hero by saving a young girl - in the Hunter's Prayer the main guy is an assassin sent to kill a child but has a crisis of conscience and saves her instead, putting him up against the posh crime lord; in Safe the Stath is happy to be a human punching bag given up on life until he sees the Russkis who murdered his family trying to kill a young Chinese girl whom he saves and tows around with him while massacring countless hapless henchman - same as in HP in fact; in Alita, although she becomes the hero she is first saved and taken under the wing of a cyborg doctor and secret hunter killer played by Christopher Waltz; no actual girl on screen but Butler's character does it all for his wife and after-thought of a daughter it occasionally remembers to mention.
I dunno how common this trope is, but it occurred to some extent in all of yesterday's films.
Anyway, this isn't really a coherent point or anything, it's just a load of stuff I thought about yesterday after my unplanned immersion in this stuff.
To be honest, here I'm talking about the fighting types of action film. I suppose the genre as a whole is often considered to have begun with The 39 Steps which is the first famous film (there may have earlier ones that are similar but I can't think of them and they are less renowned so it seems as good a start as anywhere) where they pretty much did away with plot, or at least relegated it to a few minor scenes which tied together the action spectaculars - needless to say, compared to Hardcore Henry or Crank it looks like Checkov as the inevitable demand for bigger, better, harder, faster and more kicked in and ramped up and up and up.
Yesterday I was kinda under the weather, plus it was pouring down all day, and I sat and watched film after film on telly. It was really an action bonanza with a Stath one in there, the Butler one Gamer, Godzilla (couldn't make it to the end - which is something of a shame cos it wisely started off with a long, slow and atmospheric build up before finally showing the monsters and quickly becoming very boring), Alita Battle Angel(!), The Hunter's Prayer and maybe another too... and I also watched two episodes of Will Kent which is a fairly violent detective show which on this occasion involved quite a lot of fighting.
By the end of the day, whenever I closed my eyes I saw flying fists - from the vaguely plausible Hunter's Prayer in which one man single-handedly takes down a crime empire but really only tends to fight two or three at the same time while moving at an almost believable speed and sustaining actual injuries; to the totally bananas Statham vehicle Safe in which a homeless tramp suddenly remembers that he is an elite undercover assassin and goes on an extraordinary spree of violence in which he destroys the Russian mob, the Chinese mob and NY's corrupt police force, regularly blasting his way through ten or twenty at a time with sickeningly hard punches, horrendous twisting arm-breaks and heads being smashed into walls and car doors left right and centre (the trailer for The Beekeeper looked almost exactly the same); the quite literal computer game violence of Gamer; and then the kids' film Alita in which a young girl in the body of an invincible space cyborg battled her way numberless other slightly more vincible cyborgs.
And I began to wonder if maybe people who complain about violence in films have a point. I started to feel down about the sheer number of evil people betraying civilians and their mates at an alarming rate. Even though the characters were for the most part paper thin, the sheer negativity of almost every single one of them began to weigh on me.
One necessary component of these films is a terrible and ruthless baddie so each film has to show this by having a scene in which they kill an innocent victim. I remember as a child watching The Spy Who Loved Me and I realised that the bad guy was ruthless cos he dropped a failing subordinate into a shark pool - but that doesn't cut it now, the villain has to torture a whole family or set fire to a load of school children so we cheer when he's finally dispatched.
One recurring theme yesterday was redemption for the hero by saving a young girl - in the Hunter's Prayer the main guy is an assassin sent to kill a child but has a crisis of conscience and saves her instead, putting him up against the posh crime lord; in Safe the Stath is happy to be a human punching bag given up on life until he sees the Russkis who murdered his family trying to kill a young Chinese girl whom he saves and tows around with him while massacring countless hapless henchman - same as in HP in fact; in Alita, although she becomes the hero she is first saved and taken under the wing of a cyborg doctor and secret hunter killer played by Christopher Waltz; no actual girl on screen but Butler's character does it all for his wife and after-thought of a daughter it occasionally remembers to mention.
I dunno how common this trope is, but it occurred to some extent in all of yesterday's films.
