Movies That Were Probably Made By a Spasm of Six Year-Olds on Acid: The Top 75 Action Films Poll Results Thread

McTiernan = those 3 and Hunt for Red October (and Last Action Hero!).

Cameron = Aliens and Terminator/T2. Interested to see if Avatar / True Lies / Titanic / Abyss place - I wouldn't be surprised if any of them do or don't.

Actually iirc the rape in Showgirls is central to the resolution of the plot: Nomi refuses to go along with the club's plan to pay her friend to be quiet about it, kicks the rapist in the balls repeatedly, and leaves Las Vegas, end of movie. It's like the one thing in the entire movie that Nomi isn't cynical about.

remember when HK cinema started to be a thing in the US among film nerd circles, and that realization that there was a whole other universe of action movies out there that nobody you knew had seen?

that kind of revelation is the one thing i kinda miss about pre-internet culture

^^^yes definitely. hit me hard at the time.

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#43

THE FIFTH ELEMENT

Luc Besson
1997
United States/France
(265 points, 10 votes)

I think it's funny, colorful, visually interesting, full of fun cartoonish characters and details, good with its action bits ... I suppose the ending is a bit cornball, but I'd say all that's really missing is painting Bjork blue to play the diva. It kinda reminds me of those "You Are an Intergalactic Spy" puzzle books I was talking about on some other thread a while back.

Am I missing some narrative issues here, or are people projecting some strange expectations onto this? E.g., speculating that the humor may be "unintentional" seems really off -- this spends like half of its time being a comedy! I mean, the monks are practically Three-Stooging it throughout!

― nabisco

well nabisco a bunch of things I don't like about it have already been cited as other people's favorite so I dunno how productive its gonna be for me to say that I have never enjoyed Bruce Willis's smug-but-lovable-asshole routine in anything ever, or that I find Chris Tucker's emasculated-black-man-freak character just gross, or that the dialogue is all by and large totally laughable ("Me Leloo - supreme being!"), or that Gary Oldman as a sci-fi southern gentleman is unconvincing (what's the point of making him southern, again?), or that the plot's central theme of "love saving the universe" doesn't interest me in any way....

In a larger sense, maybe its that I like my sci-fi films to have some content that reflects on the present in some unusual or illuminating way. This one is just empty - a lot of eye candy and self-conscious dialogue about how ridiculous all the eye candy is and that's pretty much it.

― Shakey Mo Collier

Mull - tee - pass

― zaxxon25

hahaha omg I'd forgotten about the WAR montage. This movie fucking rules.

― Curt1s Stephens

The Fifth Element

mool tee pass

leeloo dallas, multipass! still smth we say quite often with my friends

i always liked how clearly the moebius designs came through in 5E.

I would like Besson to be the winning director tbh! C'mon there's this and Le Femme Nikita already and Taken, plus Transporter, B-13, Kiss of the Dragon could still come up....

(Full disclosure: I saw Wasabi with Jean Reno over Christmas break. It's...it was a worse action movie than I expected, but more loveable overall. And funny, occasionally very funny.)

forgot leon laurel. and taken, transporter, b13, kiss of the dragon are movies producd by his company, europacorop, not ones he directed. but yeah he's good with good ol' dumb action flicks

aw, too low

xpost And the Gaultier costumes.

gah the scene where she googles WAR

i always liked how clearly the moebius designs came through in 5E.

this is the best thing about it. otoh I can just read the Incal, rather than sit through all the other irritating elements packed into 5E.

xp

love the fifth element. i suppose i 'get' why people dislike it but it's so big-hearted in a way and weird and energetic and colorful and has some kind of bizarre singular originality in its huge number of homages.

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#42

SPEED

Jan de Bont
1994
United States
(269 points, 10 votes)

i once had a dirty dream about keanu after 'speed' came out, and it was pretty awesome, so i don't care about his pudding brain (which i disagree with, btw).

― Rubyredd

(I hate True Lies so much, by the way, it's like the racism of ToD+the horrible misogyny of, um, something horribly misogynist all mushed together into an OTT shit-bomb. The scene with Arnold forcing JLC to strip to prove a point is all time low).

I think Besson's credited with writing some of them, though this is probably "... his name on the cheque".

Maybe The Lady will win the 2022 version of this poll!

:D

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Omar you're going so fast!

the bus that couldn't slow down.

Want to say I saw speed the same day as the OJ car chase.

I have never seen Speed!

ha yes, gaultier. orange rubber suspenders, always a hot look.

true story, i'm not a comics fan in the slightest but i did buy the first incal collection at a used bookstore why because it look intersting. so years later 5E comes out, and i'm like... hmm these spaceships and cities and stuff look pretty familiar.

xps

Which actor will have the most films place? Bruce? Arnold? Arnold, right?

fr ted milkfloat > Speed

I liked Chris Tucker in 5E.

fuck i should have voted for speed

xxxp

Harrison Ford maybe. Indy+Bladerunner+Fugitive+Star Wars, maybe Air Force One or the Jack Ryan movies even.

feel like "is Chris Tucker's character in 5E" racist/homophobic could be it's whole own thread

I'm just going to pretend the speed votes were a practical joke or a conspiracy or the equivalent of a third party protest vote.

speed is a great action movie

way better than the fifth element (and now it's scientifically proven)

I'm reading your words, but I'm still pretending.

Yeah Speed is terrific, u mad

I wonder where They Live falls on the Tuomas action/scifi continuum

hmm these spaceships and cities and stuff look pretty familiar.

yeah there's things that are lifted straight off the page. Heavy Metal did that too, 5E probably more successful tho.

xp

Omar you're going so fast!

― wolf kabob (ENBB)

if i post a film every ten min or less i won't explode

Speed's great, Sandra Bullock doing Evil Knievel jumps in a bus while bug eyed Dennis Hopper does his creepy psycho schtick. What's not to like?

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#41

BULLITT

Peter Yates
1968
United States
(275 points, 9 votes)

bullitt owns and strangely enough i think it's elevated by the quieter scenes which are fairly basic and workmanlike (bullitt goes to the grocer's! bullitt looks through a suitcase! delgetti uses an archaic flip book to create composite sketch!)

― omar little

The hottest man in the world drinking a glass of milk.

― I have a paranoid daughter and a son who is addicted to internet (Laurel)

ok that's all for now! back later...

even i know that speed is great

for some reason i remember the 'date' scene in bullitt really well

Guess I should rewatch this. Car chase aside, which along with French Connection set the gold standard for car chases, I found it pretty boring. Though it's been a long time since I last saw it.

saw bullitt quite recently and was struck by how clueless the scenes of policework & basic law are. like sub-A-team. decades of law and order franchises have kind of drilled this into audiences maybe? you can't have a car chase ending in a death and then just... go home. idk maybe the 60s were a little more renegade-cop-friendly.

Yeah Ford for four (maybe 5 if The Last Crusade or more than one Star Wars rocks up), Ahnold has these two and Terminators and Predator and maybe... Conan?

Will Smith on 3? MIB, Bad Boys, Wild Wild West, Independance Day.

oh man Wild Wild West for #1

Bad Boys or BBII had better be on this list.

Hancock for #2

Bullitt was a pretty easy cut from my ballot. Aside from the car chase, it didn't seem very actiony. The airport foot chase at the end got downright boring after a while.

I remember Speed being pretty good (haven't seen it forever), but I don't really think you can call it an action movie because everyone is just sitting in a bus.

but the bus is SPEEDING