| The Five Intangibles for a Great Action Movie |
| Bill Frat | |
| Thursday, 11 June 2009 | |
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All action movies can be split into three categories; the bad ones, the good ones, and the great ones. The specifics - what goes where – isn’t nearly as important as the qualities and characteristics that separate one category from another. Whether a certain movie meets these qualifications is, and should always be, left up to the individual viewer. And though what divides the awful from the average is sometimes simply a matter of preference, what keeps an action flick from ascending to the top bin typically comes down to one fact. Did it have the ‘intangibles.’ A straight up, by the books action movie – see the most recent Terminator or every Jason Statham picture – can, at the most, only be ‘good.’ To be great, it needs to have more. The movie needs to marry genres, surprise you, spook you, thrill you - anything extra that makes the action not only more real and credible, but in the end, more enjoyable. These are the intangibles. And though there are hundreds of these, five main ones emerge.  This last Indy picture was funny...for all of the wrong reasons Believable Love Interest – I’ve long come to grips with the fact that big budget movies, in the studios eyes, require some sort of ‘significant other.’ Ok. But I still don’t understand why this character needs to constantly be a detriment to the picture as a whole. And, keep in mind, this is rarely the actresses fault. Many of these young women are set up to fail with their roles. Meryl Streep isn’t making Hancock work. However, and not to ruin my argument by referencing Top Gun, but a credible love angle adds seriousness to silly moments. Goose’s death matters in Top Gun way more than it should because of his few scenes with Meg Ryan. That worked. See Val Kilmer and Ashley Judd in Heat for another example. I think viewers would be surprised with how much more they enjoy an action movie if the screenwriter spent more than five minutes and a pencil etching of a mini skirt with the female lead.  Rickman has played the villian as four separate characters. Name them in the comments below The ‘Didn’t See it Coming’ Moment – This could also be known as ‘the traitor’ intangible. A dull action movie can be flipped on its head if it surprises you. Nothing earns your attention more than the unexpected. Unfortunately, most people either see this intangible coming a mile away – Howie Long in Broken Arrow – or it doesn’t make any sense – Downey Jr. in U.S. Marshalls. Nothing pisses me off more than when a supporting character is revealed to be a bad guy and his motives or intentions aren’t teased AT ALL. ‘Hey guess what everyone…he’s bad. Fooled you.’ No, that’s no surprising. It’s infuriating. See Vantage Point for one of the worst executions of this intangible in recent history. Again, though, when done properly, this intangible, like the others, can make a movie. Does The Departed win an Oscar if the elevator scene doesn’t surprise everyone that’s ever seen it? But there was nothing cheap about it. The perfect ‘didn’t see that coming’ moment. The Polarizing Special Effect – I’m Ok with sacrificing story for spectacle, but if you’re going to do it, than you better make damn sure that the spectacle is going to kick ass. Wolverine didn’t suck because it was an incoherent series of action sequences. It sucked because the action sequences sucked. You had seen everything in that movie – action-wise – done before. Then you have The Matrix. Without the slow-mo bullet dodging and never-seen-before karate, the movie isn’t nearly as successful / good. It killed the spectacle. In fact, it triggered a number of shitty action movies that failed this intangible because they basically duplicated what they had just seen in The Matrix. There are hundreds of other intangibles – the backstory, the legitimately spooky moment, the loveable veteran that dies in the middle, etc., etc. What’s surprising about all of this is that great action movies don’t necessarily need to get a lot of these right do be classics. In fact, sometimes hitting one intangible out of the park is enough. So why does Hollywood choose to ignore and half ass these. I can’t think of a reason. But I bet you the makers of Fast and Furious could give me 170 million reasons why they’re not important. Hits: 1641 Comments
(6)
spdygnlz , August 09, 2009 Korinthian , August 10, 2009
Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg.
Because Gary Oldman is up there with Alan Rickman. Nyx , August 10, 2009
Scar in Lion King was Jeremy Irons, also a fabulous actor, but it was not Alan Rickman.
Wolf , August 10, 2009
Though Jeremy Irons did play the brother to Alan Rickman's Han's Gruber in Die Hard with a Vengeance. So it all comes around full circle again....
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Judge Turpin (Sweeney Todd)
Sheriff of Nottingham (Robin Hood)
Elliott Marston (Quigley Down Under)
Hans Gruber (Die Hard)
and
Severus Snape (Harry Potter movies) (I know it's debatable whether or not he's an actual villain here, but knowing how everything ends, I still think he's a good villain. )
A brilliant actor, by the way.