It’s little accident that, in the wake of the film’s success, clones sprouted up like toadstools almost overnight, from Die Hard on a boat ( Under Siege) to Die Hard on a bus ( Speed) and this year’s Die Hard on a musical instrument ( Grand Piano). Admittedly, there are precedents- Assault on Precinct 13 must have been an on-set favorite-but no one had told this tale with such streamlined precision before. Their only hope is a man locked in with them, yet free to roam, a lone hero who must pick off the bad guys one by one, arcade-game–style, until he reaches the Big Boss. The story is so ingenious, it’s incredible no one had thought of it before: A group of terrorists invades a state-of-the-art skyscraper and takes the inhabitants hostage. We want speed and intensity, wit and wisecracks, cartoon violence and things going boom. We don’t want to see ourselves reflected, we don’t want understanding or honesty or intellectual insight. If cinema is the perfect escapist medium-and until someone invents a virtual-reality device that works, it will be-then action movies are its purest expression, the best way we know of for humanity to shake itself loose from the trappings of humdrum reality and take to the ether. It isn’t exactly what pseuds would call High Art.Īll of which is precisely the point. It doesn’t offer much insight into the human condition (though the image of Bruce Willis walking on broken glass could be taken as a poignant metaphor for life’s little brutalities). But does Die Hard really fit the bill? It doesn’t have anything to say about the state of the world. The killer scene: Alan Rickman’s final tumble: iconic, nostalgic, slightly-shoddy-effects–based glory. □ The 25 best martial arts movies of all-timeĬast: Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Bonnie Bedeliaīest quote: “Now I have a machine gun. □ The 18 greatest stunts in cinema (as picked by the greatest stunt people) □ 33 great disaster movies that’ll have you running for cover Written by Eddy Frankel, Eddy Frankel, Joshua Rothkopf, Trevor Johnston, Ashley Clark, Grady Hendrix, Tom Huddleston, Keith Uhlich, Dave Calhoun, Phil de Semlyen, Dave Calhoun & Matthew Singer To put together this list of the best action movies ever made, we polled over 50 experts in the field, from Die Hard director John McTiernan to Machete himself, Danny Trejo, along with our Time Out writers, and the results show a genre as versatile as any other – and in many cases, way more fun. And even those that aim for nothing more than visceral thrills can stick with you in a way more subdued and subtle films cannot. Some can karate chop you right in the heart. Many are beautiful and almost operatic in their orchestration of violence. But the truth is that action needn’t be dumb to succeed. In many ways, action flicks are cinema’s pressure relief valve, the thing you throw on to relieve your mind of the stresses of the modern world and massage that part of your brain that just wants to see some stuff get blowed up real good. Sometimes, all audiences want is to sit down in a theatre with a high-tech sound system and get their senses blown to bits by loud explosions, pulse-pounding car chases and well-detonated one liners – and in those instances, only an action movie will do. Snobby cineastes may insist otherwise, but the movies cannot survive on mannered costume dramas and four-hour experimental art films alone.
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