What happened to the ‘Golden Age’ of Action Hero Movies?… The 1980s and 1990s, was for movie fans, the best years of action on the screen!
Today, with such a huge leap in technology in CGI, methods of filming, camera technology and so on, has made a world where these movies could be even better than back in the 80s and 90s, but with all this technology, the action hero has been killed off!
Don’t get me wrong, there are some awesome movies regularly hitting the big screen and streaming services, but these are not from the action hero genre. A great example of a recent Action Hero Movie was Rebel Ridge, promoted as a modern day Rambo movie, a movie we need to see, but when it came out, it was a huge disappointment! The movie starring Aaron Pierre who plays the part of Terry Richmond, a former Marine who coms into a small town who quickly finds himself butting heads with the local law enforcement.
Every time Pierre’s character stood square to the local cops, the movie had the opportunity to be the next Rambo! So who wouldn’t be expecting lots of violence? But this ex-marine has had a dose of GenZ blood pumped into him that seems to have made him some kind of pacifist and reluctant vigilante.
At every scene where Marine Terry Richmond is confronted with the chance to go Rambo on the corrupt cops, he becomes Non-Lethal Weapon!
Today we just don’t have the likes of Sylvester Stallone’, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, Van Damme, Charles Bronson, Cynthia Rothrock, Jackie Chan, Kurt Russell, Seven Seagal, Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis to name just a few!
If we go back to the 80s, one of the biggest boosts that launched the Action Hero was the birth of VHS and the home video recorder. This launched the birth of many low budget studios such as Cannon that churned out low budget action movies such as American Ninja, Death Wish, Missing in Action, Robocop and Cobra. You would think with the arrival streaming services, especially Amazon Video, we would see a resurgence, but unfortunatly it was not to be.
There is hope… A few Last Action Heroes have slipped through into todays world of high budget movies through the medium of TV shows on streaming services such as the hugely popular Jack Reacher, starring Alan Ritchson on Amazon, Tulsa King on Paramount+, Longmire, Justified and Bosch.
As for the Big Screen, apart from Expendables franchise that has given us four great kickbacks to the iconic age of Action Heroes Movies, bringing back many of our old favourites such as Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, with of course Sly and Arnnie, surrounding themselves with the likes of more recent action heroes like Steve Austin, Liam Hemsworth and 50 Cent, action movies have just relied too much on high budget special effects such as Marvels Avengers and the Fast & Furious franchise.
We need to get back to story, drama, character, humour and physical action in todays action movies. The reason why the Action Movies of the 80s and 90s were so great was that they had all of this, even when through the 90s, the age of CGI was starting to come through into these movies such as Total Recall, Mission Impossible 1, T2 and even Rambo III which actually is a late 80s movie, they still had the core elements that made the Action Hero Movies of the 80s.
The Fast and Furious franchise is a great example of where action movies have departed from where they started. The first in this franchise, The Fast and the Furious (2001) was all about the characters, the story and of course the cars, as well as physical real stunts, fast forward to Fast 7 and it was how can we just top the first 6? CGI has already found its way into the franchise, but now its how big they can make the effects to wow audiences, theres a token gesture to the origins of this franchise where ‘Family’ is mentioned, but it just seems in passing, was it the tragic passing of Paul Walker? Was it just the way action movies going at the time? Fast, although a franchise I still love to watch, the movies have just got further and further away from the original 2001 movie, even making the cars as a backseat star and adding nuclear submarines, adding camp secret agent James Bond plots and launching the franchise into space! It’s time to bring the Last Action Hero back to the the golden age of the genre.
Bring back drama, physical action, humour, and bring back 35mm thinking in how a movie looks on the big screen.
We need another Steven Seagal, Van Damme, Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves, Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone!
The Rock needs to make an 18 rated action movie like Commando, how great that movie could be! Bring back the 18 Rated Action Movie with the real action scenes, the real fight scenes of Keanu Reeves and Tom Cruise!
Entertainment Swindon 
Leave a comment