Action Countdown Bonus: Most Underseen Action Movie
This summer, MovieJawn is counting down our 25 favorite action movies of all time! We will be posting a new entry each day! See the whole list so far here.
Today we are taking a break from our countdown before the top 5 in order to share some of our favorite action movies that we think more people need to check out!
As much as Bong Joon Ho has become a household name since Parasite took the movie world by storm in 2019, he still feels like an underdog. That'll happen when the movies you make are so deeply weird and strange that any modicum of mainstream success feels like an aberration. Bong deserves all the praise in the world--he's one of our greatest living filmmakers after all--but his winning the Oscar for Parasite still feels like a fever dream. A wild fantasy that only supports the theory that we are living in a simulation.
Snowpiercer is one of the best science fiction movies of our generation, and I don't think people realize that. It's as odd as you'd expect for a Bong movie, and while you'd think a non-English speaker's English-language debut might find some of the director's trademarks getting lost in translation, it's a Bong movie through and through. It's thematically rich (in this case its climate change and class war), full of insane set-pieces, and features non-sequiturs that are so out there and bizarre that they go past weirdness for the sake of weirdness and instead contribute to the surreal patchwork that makes this film so special.
It bombed at the box office. What should have been Bong's stateside breakout was relegated to an afterthought despite featuring an Avenger (Chris Evans) in the leading role. Not even a 95% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes could get people to the theaters for a movie that begs to be seen on the biggest screen possible. A movie where certain sequences--like Alison Pill's fresh-faced schoolmarm whipping out an Uzi or when the head of a masked mob bleeds out a huge fish in front of our protagonist--will be crystal clear in my mind's eye until my dying days somehow couldn't connect. It did find its audience when it finally came out on DVD (that's where I found it, I’m part of the problem), and you would probably call it a cult classic in hindsight, but rewatching it this past weekend my main takeaway was: Why can't all blockbuster action movies be like this?
I have professed my love for the dumb action movie many times this past month, but Snowpiercer is the unicorn smart action movie. It does the dumb action movie thing by detaching the plot from reality, in this case setting the story in a future where the last remnants of humanity circle the globe on the titular train in a world terraformed into an icy hellscape but employs satire in a way that feels fresh and original. It’s the most ass-kicking work of an auteur ever committed to celluloid and needs as many eyes on it as humanly possible.
I first learned about Tank Girl from a friend I accompanied to a cult film convention. I had the gall to question why she was so seriously considering purchasing a ratty white tank top with a bullseye on it. Shocked that I’d never heard of Lori Petty or her iconic role as a chaotic, post-apocalyptic anti-heroine driving around the Australian desert in an army tank, she put a few back issues of the source material in my hands and sent me on my way.
I righted the wrong a few years later with a boy I met with a TG tattoo. He’d never seen the movie somehow (perhaps a red flag considering that he had the comic book character forever etched onto his skin). Anyway, the movie went off and we had one of those moments where we turned toward each other expecting vastly different reactions. The scowl on his face said that the last 104 minutes had just sullied the names of cartoonists Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett. Meanwhile I had a shit-eating grin plastered on that said everything I just witnessed rocked from start to finish. I’m not sure he ever trusted my taste level again, which was perfectly fine with me.
Ever since, I’ve used Tank Girl as a litmus test for the company I keep. I’ve put all my nearest and dearest through its unwieldy shenanigans: bazooka bras, mutant kangaroos, and Malcolm McDowell’s digital pirate hook/hand. It’s an action movie like none other, and if you want to be in my good graces (or are just looking for a good time) I’d highly recommend giving it a watch. Still not convinced? Go catch my article in MovieJawn’s future-themed back issue!
One of my English professors in college introduced me to Takashi Miike. Back in the mail-order Netflix days, I was able to request a copy of Full Metal Yakuza and I haven’t been the same since. Ever since, I did my best to keep up with Miike’s career and with a feature filmography that boasts over seventy titles (not including direct-to-video and television titles), that has not been easy. But one I managed to see at Liberty Hall in Lawrence, Kansas when it was actually released was Sukyaki Western Django. As a staunch fan of spaghetti westerns and their original Japanese counterparts (e.g. A Fistful of Dollars/Yojimbo), I couldn’t wait to see Miike’s take on the story. Miike said, you know what, while we’re having the conversation, I’ll take it all the way back to Shakespeare and Henry V. Miike has the kind of cinematic violence I can pick out of a lineup. Quentin Tarantino even plays a small part in this one and you can see a lot of inspiration for what he would make later, Django Unchained. I never want to miss an opportunity to introduce Miike to other film-lovers. Additional recommendations include 13 Assassins and Blade of the Immortal.
Swashbucklers have fallen out of fashion since the mid-twentieth century, but it is difficult to overestimate their influence on modern action films. No one wears the hat of swashbuckler (sometimes it has feathers!) than Errol Flynn. Flynn and Michael Curtiz–who you may know for such iconic works as Casablanca (1943) and White Christmas (1954)–made 12 films together, many of which are considered classic works of the swashbuckling genre. Although the technicolored The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) remains their most famous achievement together, I picked a childhood favorite of mine, The Sea Hawk, as their most underrated collaboration.
The film follows the adventures of English privateer Geofrey Thorpe (Flynn, doing his best Sir Francis Drake impression) as he tries to convince Queen Elizabeth I (a delightful character performance by Flora Robson) to build an armada to combat the growing influence of the sinister King Philip of Spain. Except the film isn’t actually about that: it’s about inspiring American audiences to rally around Britain as she faced invasion from Nazi Germany in 1940. As a child, I didn’t know the historical context: I just loved watching Flynn and the supporting cast swing from one sailing ship to another using grappling hooks and ropes and fighting their way through the rigging. I loved watching Flynn fence with Spanish captains and English appeasers. I loved watching him flash that charming smile at Doña Maria (Brenda Marshall) and Queen Elizabeth, who clearly has a soft spot for rascals.
As an adult film critic, I am fascinated by the audacity of the production–these were full sized ships sailing in a specially made set filled with water in the Warner Bros. lot, an incredible feat of set design. I love the shots of Thorpe and his men cutting their way through the Panama jungle after a failed mission, only to find their comrades killed by Spanish saboteurs, and the shots of him fencing with the treacherous Wolfingham, the camera panning up to show the duel as candle-lit shadows on the wall. There is real tension, heart, and blood in this film, a sincerity that shines through the flamboyant bravado of the dialogue and action. In Thorpe, we can see the forerunner of the modern action hero and modern action tropes.
I don’t fault you if you’ve never seen Bon Cop, Bad Cop, since while it’s one of the highest-grossing Canadian films, it has only screened at a few festivals outside the country. But it’s worth tracking down for an evening’s diversion.
The film plays on the tensions between largely French-speaking Quebec and English-speaking Canada, as well as the more general odd-couple pairing of by-the-book anglo cop Martin Ward (Colm Feore) and rule-bender francophone cop David Bouchard (Patrick Huard). The two are forced to work together when a body is found draped over a sign marking the border between Ontario and Quebec and they're unable to agree under which provincial police force’s jurisdiction the case therefore falls. What follows includes the race to solve a string of murders in the hockey world, lessons in Quebecois swear words (and how to use them in a variety of sentences), sometimes-darkly-comedic mishaps, and an appearance by TV icon Rick Mercer. It may not have as many hey-look-it’s-him moments as the more recent Canadian hit BlackBerry, many of which would probably go over the heads of foreign viewers, but I digress. As someone who went to French immersion schools, the fully bilingual dialogue, and the resulting jokes, is fun. And any opportunity to watch national treasure of Canadian theatre, Colm Feore (familiar to some as Reginald Hargreeves on Umbrella Academy), is not to be passed up.
I don’t know how the references in the script play to a foreign viewer, but the pairing of opposites is a universal experience no matter the context. It may not be a grand masterpiece, and certain scenes might not have aged well given the increased scrutiny of police conduct in recent years, but it’s still silly fun, which in many ways is the best kind of action movie as far as I’m concerned. If you ever find yourself on a road trip between Ontario and Quebec, check your surroundings carefully as you cross the border.
A lot of people live under the impression that John Carpenter fell off in the 90’s, but this is simply not the case. I really did go into this thinking that it was some sort of joke. Now, as you can see, I’ve seen the light. It’s not just that it’s a snubbed end to a great director’s career. Some pictures depict action while others embody action in their progression and there’s a grinding, interminable velocity to this that’s hard to get out of your head. To pull a comparison form Carpenter’s idol Howard Hawks, what His Girl Friday and Scarface lack as a shared subject they have as a shared energy. Chaos increases; and in this sense a shotgun blast is no different from a verbal barb, both of which harmonize with the filmic splice. Hordes of possessed townspeople descend on our heroes, and below that is the apparatus moving, sputtering, moving, smog and red dust kicking about.
Really, I have a lot of thoughts about this film as a five-way genre trainwreck, an apocalyptic western/sci-fi/horror/action film that has a lot to say about capitalism’s suicidal urge for more resource extraction, the way it lets you watch the contradiction reach its breaking point. There’s no one to sympathize with and the enemy is the land itself. Taking my thinking cap off for a minute, watching Ghosts of Mars fills me with feelings of tension and delight. Inserts of dripping meathooks and a dad rock score courtesy of a collaboration with Buckethead and an ensemble grab bag of “dirtbag” and “wooden” varieties—Oh my. Trying to pitch this succinctly got me thinking about that Alka Seltzer slogan, “try it, you’ll like it.” Ghosts of Mars is great and profound in the way that art can be for intentional and unintentional reasons, but before I started thinking about it I plain old liked it.
I don't mean this to be an exhaustive evolutionary chart, but Michael Meyers grabbed a butcher knife, so Jason grabbed a machete, so Freddy put together a glove with knife fingers. The biggest, longest-running slasher franchises kept popular interest by getting more complicated and elaborate. The most drawn-out Friday the 13th kill sees its villain smash a victim in a sleeping bag against a tree-- it got there after seven entries. A Nightmare on Elm Street's big bad transformed into an evil TV in entry three. These things accelerate and the arms race heats up until the slasher is fate/Death/God and the weapons are coincidence-powered Rube Goldberg machines that shoot logs through windshields.
And I like those movies, for the most part, but before the slasher genre could convolute itself into the Final Destination series in 2000, a stunt coordinator-turned-director named Tony Leung Siu-Hung combined horror aesthetics with martial arts and made a ridiculous film called Bloodmoon. He stripped away all that beautiful excess in favor of nature's machete: a guy who can kick really well.
A beautifully dumb (this is a complement) action/slasher, Bloodmoon follows an alpha male-type literally named Chad who bests and ultimately kills masters of different fighting disciplines every blood moon. He's pursued by a detective and a serial killer expert. The detective's only two traits-- that he makes bad jokes and performs magic tricks at wildly inappropriate times-- have you cheering on Chad. The serial killer expert is also a martial artist who, in the old standby action movie motivator, finds out Chad has killed his sensei.
When you watch a horror movie death scene or even binge them with a YouTube compilation, you're watching maybe thirty seconds of action. There are only so many ways for Leatherface to kill a person with a chainsaw or hammer, and horror fans are dedicated enough that if you repeat old crowd pleasing methods, people will notice and get bored. Bloodmoon circumvents the brevity and repetition by making its kills actual fights, and they range in style from boxing matches to sword duels but always focus on a couple people attacking each other with moves provided by a director who would go on to perform stunts in Ip Man movies and who already had action choreographer credits on over thirty films. The movie is goofy but, crucially, the fights stand tall next to any other martial arts film of the era.
That's one reason Bloodmoon is underrated: even if you somehow find the film, which is long forgotten and from a man who hasn't directed anything else since 1999, when he left America completely, the so-bad-it's-good laughs can obscure how good the fighting is. When my friend Josh screened Superfights, another movie from Siu-Hung's brief window as a director of American action films, at the essential Philadelphia Psychotronic Film Society, it brought the house down because it, like Bloodmoon, is incompetently written and acted, the sexuality is strange and forced and the low budget wasn't dealt with creatively as much as it was unintentionally addressed head-on. And when the fights, super and otherwise, break out, Siu-Hung knows how to make them work.
American martial arts movies were in a bad place in the late 90s. One year after Bloodmoon came out, Jackie Chan broke out here with Rush Hour, though he went on to complain that it was shot and edited so that you couldn't actually tell how talented the people doing those fights were. Bloodmoon is in its own universe, and if that keeps it from displaying any tonal coherence, it also shields it from a whole host of then-dominant trends. You couldn't put together another Bloodmoon because it barely feels like real human beings put it together in the first place.
Sherlock, Jr celebrated the 100th anniversary of its release back in April of this year. While it is loved and respected by cinephiles the world over, it is listed as only having 118K views on Letterboxd. Meanwhile, Deadpool & Wolverine boasts 437K views after its opening weekend. This is by no means a scientific poll, but I think it’s a good indicator that, for such a foundational film, it is wildly underseen by modern audiences.
Sherlock, Jr. is the story of a projectionist schmuck that gets framed for a theft by a casanova that is trying to steal his girlfriend. The theater worker hopes to clear his name and keep his gal but, in truth, he’s kinda a dope. However, he imagines himself as a grand detective snooping out the clues to gain redemption.
This is where the action comes in. The projectionist dreams of crossing over into the film screen and having magnificent adventures of running along the top of a moving train, car chases, fist fights, and people falling off of motorcycles. But the stunts are just there for thrilling action. Most of them double as actual laugh-out-loud gags causing the audience to simultaneously gasp and laugh.
Admittedly, the love story with the girl is a little weak, but she’s to remind us, and the projectionist, what a dope he is. While he’s daydreaming, she’s managed to straighten the whole mess out, making for yet another chuckle.
Being only 45 minutes long, this should be an easy entry for anyone that doesn’t think they’d enjoy silent films. And for those of you that avoid them because of all the reading, don’t worry! Buster hated all the title cards too and preferred to tell his stories via the action. He even had a competition with Charlie Chaplin to see who could use the least. (Chaplin ended up winning that battle at 21 vs 23, but comparable films of that time used as many as 240.) So, go ahead and give this a shot! Or give it a rewatch if it’s been a while. It’s widely available for free out there in the world.
One of the most underrated and underseen action films is Wayne Kramer’s 2006 flick, Running Scared. This sleeper is a perversely giddy film, full of shocking violence, streamline profanities, and surprising luridness. Paul Walker stars as Joey, a mob flunkie asked to dispose of a gun that was used to kill a crooked cop. But Joey’s son’s best friend Oleg (Cameron Bright) steals the weapon and uses it to shoot his father, Anzor (Karel Roden), a Russian meth maker. When Oleg flees, Joey has to recover the kid and the gun before the cops and the mob find him. The convoluted plot takes some unexpected turns, and there are a few extraordinary twists, which only rachet up the tension. Walker acquits himself quite well to this role, even if it does require getting hockey pucks slapped into his pretty face. Running Scared also showcases a series of outstanding set pieces with one memorable sequence featuring Joey’s wife, Teresa (Vera Farmiga, exceptional in her pivotal role) having an unsettling encounter. Kramer’s film is not for the squeamish, but this riveting thriller is edge-of-your-seat stuff.
I will continue to bang the drum for The Last Dragon until I’m dead and buried. It’s one of the most across-the-board enjoyable films I’ve ever seen and has one of the best villains ever to appear on screen. Its action sequences have a ton of visual flair, a terrific cast, and it takes a break from the action to show most of the music video for DeBarge’s 1985 single “Rhythm Of The Night.” The fact that it isn’t a part of every conversation about ‘80s martial arts, action, or comedy cinema is a travesty.
Partly to blame was the introduction of the PG-13 rating, less than a year old when it was applied to The Last Dragon. Most big action movies of the early ‘80s, like Beverly Hills Cop, First Blood, and The Terminator, were rated R. Films more comparable to Dragon’s tone released less than a year earlier, like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or Romancing the Stone, both had been rated PG. And the most well-known martial arts film at that point being The Karate Kid certainly wouldn’t have helped audience expectations.
More importantly (and more obviously) is the lack of a once-in-a-generation talent like Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop or 48 Hrs. to bring white audiences out to a “black” film. No offense to Taimak, Vanity, or Julius Carry, who are all excellent, because this was essentially an impossible task in the mid-80s (and remains so today). Even Eddie wasn’t seen as a big enough draw on his own, and was surrounded by mostly white casts until The Golden Child in ‘86 and Coming to America in ‘88.
So The Last Dragon never got the chance it deserved when it was released, and the lack of any big-name stars means it’s continued to fly under the radar. But we can fix that! It’s on tubi right now, you can watch it for free! Help give this action gem the recognition it deserves.
Watching Hard Rain, you’d have thought director Mikael Salomon’s career would have more movies in it. Though he has a long career as a cinematographer and a TV director, Hard Rain is one of very few things he directed for the cinema. Starring Morgan Freeman, Christian Slater, Randy Quaid, Minnie Driver, and Ed Asner, the film takes the western trope of robbing a stagecoach and updates it to a more contemporary equivalent in an armored car robbery. Hard Rain also adds an element of weather and disaster movie in the flooded town where the robbery takes place. Plenty of plot twists and action that escalates as the waters rise makes this a fun watch, and although it was a major flop on its initial release, it is worth digging up today.