Top 4 reasons Action Movies are overdone

After reading about the umpteenth super hero movie... I thought I'd write this blog rant about the state of action movies.

I grew up in the 1980s heyday of action movies - with the big triumvirate, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Bruce Willis in their Terminator, Rambo, Rocky, Die Hard primes.  Those were action movies, and some hold up incredibly well if you watch them today.  I watched every one of their movies, sometimes multiple times.  Commando anybody?  I even liked seeing the occasional Steven Seagal or Jean Claude Van Damme flick, but those were second tier movies like Above the Law or Bloodsport (which by the way is the best kickboxing movie you'll ever see - RIVETING).

Die Hard became the movie that all action movies were defined by.  Die Hard on a bus (Speed)  Die hard on a airplane (Passenger 57) and so on.

1. Too noisy. Now we've got Transformers. I saw them in the theater and I still don't know what its about. I loved the cartoon as a kid, but now... They just seem like an excuse to blow things up and see how loud they can get in the movie theaters.  I'm deaf, so I have the luxury of turning off my hearing aids.  I find that if I don't, then my battery will die before the end of the movie and it can give me a headache listening to all that noise. I think Michael Bay must be going deaf, cuz each movie he makes is louder than the one before.

2. Too many Superhero movies - Whats with all the superhero movies nowadays?  Thor, Ironman, The Avengers (which wasn't bad).  I saw Ironman 2 and it was so-so. I'm getting tired of Robert Downey Jr's "I'm richer and smarter than everybody and I'll tell everybody that until they vomit" schtick.  And why did they reboot Spider-man like 5 years after the previous trilogy??? A reboot usually happens like a decade or more after if they even do that. Five years was ridiculous.

I've got superhero fatigue nowadays.  And Marvel is going to be ramping up their film-making with Ironman 4 and Thor 10 and Avengers 14 and all that. Ugh... You just know Avengers 14 is just going to really suck.

3.  Movies are too long.  The BEST action movie I've seen in the past decade... Taken.  It was a surprise hit, but it was riveting from start to finish.  Running time: 91 minutes. This was the rare movie that I watched a 2nd time immediately after the 1st, because it was that good.  I even made jokes on twitter about it, like "I'd be comfortable putting Liam Neeson down as an emergency contact" or things like that. It was taught, didn't rely on too many special effects (you can never tell these days) and it was well written and immensely quotable.  "I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you're looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that will be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you."  By far the most hair-raising line you'll hear in recent movies.  You just know he'll find him, and he tore apart Paris to do exactly that. It's only 91 minutes long, and I find the shorter movies are, the better they are because it forces the filmmaker to really pack the action.  Men in Black is 89 minutes, and you don't feel like you're missing anything.

If they stretch to 2 hours or more, then it can drag in parts.  Anybody seen Lord of the Rings, Return of the King?  You could cut an hour out of that, and it'd still feel long.  I made the mistake of getting a coke in the beginning of the movie.  By the way, if anybody wants to know when the best time to go and pee during a movie in the theater, here's a great app for that.

4.   Too many special effects.  I think there's something to be said about doing your own stunts. Sometimes the special effects, if you do them too much, make the movie feel too... unbelievable.  A great movie franchise today, The Fast and the Furious, they're well known for not doing effects at all. Its a guilty pleasure, fast cars and fast women and lots of pretty people.  And they've got the token Black, Asian, and Hispanic cast members so they hit all the demographics. Now look at Transformers... Need I say more?