Stop Pretending You're Average.

Why action movie stars don’t get action movies.

 There are two types of film in the “action” genre, broadly speaking.
 In one of them, an average (or seemingly average) man is pitted against insurmountable odds and has to overcome them through determination and brains. This is a genre that Bruce Willis flat-out owned ever since it’s greatest example, “Die Hard.” Other examples are Indiana Jones, the Bourne franchise and “Con Air.”
 Then there’s the other kind of action movie. The kind where ludicrously pumped supermen machine-gunned foreigners to pieces with their shirts off. (There’s also Steven Segal, but he’s shit.)
 The reason the genre divides so neatly is this: If you look like you could break the average human in half with a shrug of your shoulders, you’re on one side of the fence. Don’t use those same shoulders to shrug and pretend you’re “just a regular guy.”
 A friend of mine is a 6’ 3” bodybuilder. I once took him to a house party and, having rung the bell, he looked at me and said “Do you think they’ll be frightened?!”
 I would, personally, be startled at the very least to find a giant on my doorstep. I might do a double take, or raise my eyebrows, or even recoil slightly. It’s only natural.
 Case in point, when my friend arrived, there was a moment of shock; after that, nobody gave a shit. At the same time, nobody pretended he wasn’t physically imposing.
 Which brings us to the current problem: Ignoring the recent glut of superhero movies, steroidal supermen have been largely confined to history.
 We buy Chris Hemsworth as Thor, because he worked hard (chemically assisted or not, I couldn’t say, although I suspect not) and grew enormous. More important than that, he’s playing a Norse god who we, as an audience, expect to be huge.
 There is no expectation anymore for action heroes to be that massive. Indeed, Matt Damon finally killed the idea permanently in the Bourne films, by looking like a normal, fit man who could decimate an entire platoon through sheer skill.
 It was the final nail in the coffin for a genre that, ironically, given it’s pedigree, hadn’t fought back in years.
 I said it at the start, but I’ll say it again: “Die Hard” changed everything. It made people feel like an average guy could be an action hero.
 Never mind that Bruce Willis was a well-built, tough looking guy in that movie; he wasn’t a giant with 5% body fat like Arnold and Sly, and that was all it took for the public to be enthralled with a new, believable brand of ass kicker.
 Where Arnold, Sly and all their cohorts went wrong was that, uncharacteristically, they surrendered immediately instead of going on the offensive.
 Following “Die Hard”, which Stallone and Schwarzenegger both turned down*, the action movie genre shifted. This is how we ended up with “Cliffhanger”, which is basically just “Die Hard” on a mountain, and “Total Recall”, in which Arnold was supposedly just an average construction worker. (Walk past a building site sometime and see if you notice anyone built like that…) Attempts at realism were starting to make these guys look silly.
 It only got worse. As heroes became more believable, Stallone - who, let’s not forget, made his name by writing a heartfelt drama about a slow-witted, down on his luck boxer - tried to cope with the sea change by appearing in bleaker and bleaker roles, from his burned-out veteran in “Assassins” to his baffling “Get Carter” re-tread, at no point capturing his former box office glory.
 Schwarzenegger meanwhile tried to play himself down in the mediocre “Eraser” and attempted high camp - disastrously - in “Batman and Robin.”
 By the early 2000’s, it seemed like the era of the superhuman action star was over. Stallone was a joke, Schwarzenegger had moved into politics, and Van Damme - always the "other guy" - was now going straight to DVD. And to rehab just afterwards.
 We wanted our fictional special forces soldiers and assassins to look realistic; most special forces guys are small, lean, flinty men who can run marathons without breaking a sweat. They’re trained to be durable and tenacious, not to be able to bench press fire engines.
 Then it happened.
 Stallone lurched worryingly out of obscurity and convinced some idiot, somewhere, to fund another “Rocky” movie.
 Fans were aghast. What the fuck was Sylvester Stallone - at this point a has-been in his late fifties - thinking?! Who would ever spend money seeing that movie?!
 Then, Stallone went and did something doubly insane, and made a decent, engaging, worthwhile film.
 Cynics were stunned.
 In an eerie moment of deja vu, Sly then parlayed his warm, human, well-received movie into a career of blowing shit up for entertainment.
 He started with another "Rambo" film, in which his monosyllabic vet shot, gutted, and throat-crushed more people than in any other movie in history.
 Next he set his sights on“The Expendables”, which, although never troubling the intellectual critics, did at least give us a shitload of action stars, an ending in which literally everything blew up, and a sequel that promises even more of the same brand of lunacy.
 So why am I worried?
 Because Arnold and Sly, the two biggest proponents of the “hugely muscled superman” brand of action film, have never really learned.
 Arnie’s next solo effort sees him play a small town desert sheriff who is reluctantly involved in the apprehension of a drug cartel leader.
 From what we know of Arnold, does he have the acting chops to pull of an emotion as subtle as “reluctant” ?!
 Shit no.
 Arnold can barely pull off the difference between “Keira Knightley offered me a blow job” and “just stepped in a bear trap.”
 Also, nobody will be able to satisfactorily explain why the town of Buttfuck, Nevada elected a giant Austrian sex pest as sheriff. (The script gets a pass on this, as nobody ever explained why the people of California elected him governor, either.)
 After that, Arnold and Sly are teaming up again in “The Tomb,” in which Stallone is a  security expert who is framed and jailed next to Arnold’s veteran convict.
 There’s a reason why, years ago, we bought Stallone as a kind-but-slow-witted pugilist.
 It’s the exact same reason we won’t buy him as a high-tech security expert.
 Arnold, meanwhile, could only pull off that role if the veteran con in question was, in fact, a slightly wooden Austrian man.
 The problem with the two-tier nature of action films is this: We don’t WANT our steroidal giants trying to play the everyman roles, anymore than we want Matt Damon twin-wielding Uzis on top of an exploding bus.
 And sadly, as nobody seems to appreciate the dumb, cartoony appeal of old school action movies, and given the state of modern actors, we might just have to abandon the concept of invincible bodybuilders hacking miscast ethnic minorities to death next to artificial palm trees altogether.
 Otherwise, things might end up getting silly.


*So did Richard Gere, but hey, all for the best. None of those actors would have been right.