10 Rules For Surviving Action Movies

The entire history of the action genre is built on cliches, perhaps more so than any other in the business, so much so that it has become increasingly rare to find a movie that doesn't stick closely to at least one of the established archetypes, with most relying on a handful of standard elements as minimum requirements.

Plenty of filmmakers have managed to put fresh spins on familiar tropes to give them a new lease of life without actually doing anything to drastically reinvent the wheel, while the countless annual bargain bin entries that swarm the home video market seem content to copy and paste the same basic revenge plots over and over again and hope that nobody notices.

Chances are, if you've seen one action movie cliche then you've seen them all, and if any self-appointed fan of the genre found themselves caught up in one of the many familiar scenarios, then they'd no doubt feel pretty well-equipped to survive having seen these very circumstances unfold hundreds of times before.

Deadpool's opening credits skewered one of action cinema's favorite cliches by simply listing Ed Skrein's Ajax as 'A British Villain', and if there's one thing Hollywood loves more than having someone from the United Kingdom play the bad guy, it's casting them as someone from elsewhere in mainland Europe.

If you're a British actor putting on an accent in an action movie, then the chances of you getting out of it alive are microscopic at best. Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber set the tone for the sharp-suited and intellectual archetype, which we've seen replicated on innumerable occasions, and they always end up meeting the same fate.

British actors playing villains from their own nation have enough of a hard time surviving action movies as it is, but adopting an accent is always a guaranteed death-knell from the second they open their mouths and begin over-pronouncing their vowels and hard R's.