10 Action Movies That Looked Awesome But Sucked
Don't judge a movie by its poster.
Action cinema went horribly wrong when the genre’s biggest stars, who’d become famous by appearing in glorified exploitation movies, began muscling their way onto Hollywood’s A-list. As their films became bigger, plots got smaller and expectations had to be reduced in order sit through them.
Last Action Hero, hyped by Arnold Schwarzenegger as “big, gigantic, monstrous”, was basically a bad joke made at the expense of the films that had made him a star. Steven Seagal’s On Deadly Ground might’ve been big, but it certainly wasn’t clever and didn’t offer much in the way of entertainment. Then there’s Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Sudden Death, whose title described its fate at the box office.
Whereas most 1980s actioners were low budget, ran for 90 minutes and had a B-movie feel, this new breed of action movie cost $100 million to produce, was intended to start a franchise and utilized enough digital effects to make the car chases look cartoonish. They partnered with soft drinks companies and fast food restaurants, whose products were shown throughout the movie, and had tie-in soundtrack albums and video games.
The pulse to make them was always financial, never creative, and the movies suffered as a result. Directors from the world of advertising were drafted in, delivering slick, soulless, visually indecipherable pictures to hit-hungry studios. They were less about satisfying an audience than promoting a corporation’s products.
None of the following are good movies, but the the tie-ins were awesome.
10. The Punisher
Jonathan Hensleigh wrote Die Hard With A Vengeance so he seemed a good choice to write and direct a movie based on the Marvel Comics character. Unfortunately, his directorial debut only serves to remind us that he also wrote The Saint, Armageddon and Next.
No movie with Thomas Jane in the lead, John Travolta as the villain and Will Patton as his henchman should be this bland, but Hensleigh takes two hours to tell an origin story so banal it could’ve been addressed in a line of dialogue. At 140 minutes, the “alternate version” runs longer than 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Even for a comic book movie, though, it’s pretty lunkheaded. Jane moves into an apartment complex where everybody knows who he is, yet Travolta still has trouble finding him so instead he hires The Russian, a 7 foot tall muscleman presumably on loan from a local circus. Though he’s capable of tearing a toilet out of the wall and using it to beat his opponent, he’s surprisingly easy to defeat – his skin is so sensitive that throwing boiling water in his face is enough to transform him into Freddy Krueger.