The Forgotten Action Movie Speed KILLED
Why Blown Away Goes Harder In 2026 Than It Ever Did In 1994
With all that said, the failure of Blown Away and its general inability to assert itself within the canon of nineties action greats does feel somewhat unfair. It isn't just that it succumbed to Speed-mania, or that there's the perception of Speed being so good that Hopkins' film seems somewhat irrelevant. It's the fact that "mediocre" in 1994 feels like gold dust in 2026.
Now, obviously, this isn't to mistake critical consensus as a barometer for objective quality - one man's Yuletide dud in 1946 is a Wonderful Christmas masterpiece years later - and reappraisal is an ever-present in the movie-discourse-sphere. It's rather that it feels as if the technical foundations of filmmaking 30 years ago were taken for granted, that every dismissible action movie would have a depth of sincerity about them, practical set-pieces, and the tangibility of actual location work. These elements all feature in our current cinematic landscape, but for the mid-budget action movie specifically, it can sometimes feel like the exception and not the rule.
Watching Blown Away, I couldn't help but be struck by what a frenetic orchestration it was, bursting at the seams with suspenseful direction, creative blocking, and gnarly visual effects. Ebert was right when he called it preposterous, but it is at least believably preposterous, populated by talented players like Bridges, Jones, and Whitaker, each of whom commits to the conceit without reservation.
If the action is the juice, then compared to Blown Away, a lot of movies today feel somewhat juiceless. Maybe it's the switch to digital photography, the widespread use of technologies like green screen and The Volume, or the over-reliance on over-stretched CGI production houses to achieve ambitious set-pieces, but a lot of Hollywood action films today - many of which head straight to streaming - just do not hit like they used to. There's an air of artifice about them, exacerbated by recycled, globe-trotting premises and irreverent dialogue, and they usually star The Rock and/or Ryan Reynolds, as Patrick H. Willems brilliantly examined in a video essay earlier this year.
Again, this is not to dismiss the oodles of great action cinema there is today. Chad Stahelski set the world alight with John Wick, Michael Bay took drone cinematography to ludicrous heights with the criminally overlooked Ambulance, and Donnie Yen regularly rips and tears across Hong Kong and Hollywood in flicks like Raging Fire and John Wick: Chapter 4. Even so, Tinsel Town seems to have lost some of its Dad Movie sparkle over the last 10 years, which is probably why it's easier to appreciate Blown Away's gifts today than it was in 1994, even beyond the external pressures of the nostalgia pendulum, or the general compulsion a lot of us have to reclaim cinema we felt wasn't given a fair shake in its day.
Revisiting a film can feel like reliving a moment, a memory, but the same is also true of discovery. Watching a movie like Blown Away takes me back to a filmmaking era I didn't live through, but am intimately familiar with - squibs, explosions, and one-liners aplenty. It's my happy place, but Hopkins' film also invokes a jarring kind of nostalgia, because it is flawed, it isn't as good as Speed, and most of you reading this could probably go about the rest of your lives not watching it and you wouldn't be missing anything even remotely essential.
What it did do, though, was provide a reminder of the lack that pervades a lot of modern cinema - the technical hijinks and skill that were part and parcel of many productions but which are today fleeting in that mid-budget genre space. All of this might seem tediously nostalgic and curmudgeonly - and also possibly unfair to Blown Away, which I do think is a good film on its own merits and simply suffered the misfortune of death via Twin Film - but it does feel like an indictment of the genre landscape that what passed for bad or "mid" in 1994 feels so invigorating here and now.
Granted, it does feel a bit silly to make that point specifically in 2026, a year which has given us a practical effects showcase like no other with Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey and also a future action movie all-timer in Kenji Tanigaki's The Furious, but for all the wins we've gotten this year, the well-made, mid-budget Hollywood action movie feels increasingly like a dying breed.
10 years ago, Shane Black got a star-studded, buddy-cop movie to the big screen with The Nice Guys. Less than a decade later, he musters Play Dirty, a straight-to-streaming riff on the hardboiled works of Donald Westlake with digital photography so clean it could easily be mistaken for a car advert. Blown Away smokes it and then some, and there's something distinctly not great about that, regardless of whether the blame lies with declining budgets, digital photography, or just general streamer apathy.
There are a few holdouts out there, such as Antoine Fuqua's Denzel Washington-starring Equalizer series, and there are also times where it feels like Jason Statham is a movie industry unto himself, but I don't know. It's very "old man yells at cloud" to say that Hollywood action ain't what it used to be - times change, trends come and go - but if I'm watching something new, there's a good chance I'm going to be thinking, "man, this won't ever go as hard as Blown Away."