11 Action Titles from the Last Century represents my contributions to A great action film for every year, 1924 to now, published by the BFI 30 Oct 2024
Includes capsules of: Harakiri, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Assault on Precinct 13, Shogun Assassin, Aliens, Hard Boiled, Shaolin Soccer, Who Killed Captain Alex?, The Raid, Mad Max Fury Road, Train to Busan
Harakiri (Seppuku, 1962)
“Oh no, not again,” says Saito Kageyu (Rentaro Mikuni) as ‘half-starved ronin’ Tsugumo Hanshiro (Tatsuya Nakadai) arrives seeking to commit ritual suicide in the Iyi clan’s courtyard. Saito tells Tsugumo the cautionary tale of another ronin (Akira Ishihama) who had come there earlier with similar intentions. Yet Tsugumo has his own tale to tell, and his own mixed motives – and so an exchange of stories will eventually lead to vengeful violence. In this sophisticated clash of words and swords, director Masaki Kobayashi’s postwar allegory cynically exposes and eviscerates Japan’s professed code of honour in both the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, 1966)
Oaters typically end in a duel, resolving polarised issues with a stylised confrontation. Yet despite its backdrop of that ultimate American duel the Civil War, Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western breaks down simplistic binary divisions not just with characters whose motives on all sides are chiefly low and venal, but also with a focus on triangular structures. You can see it in the tripartite title, in the three corresponding characters (who in fact share, to differing degrees, all three of the title’s qualities), in the film’s status as a loose trilogy closer – and especially in the climax, a spectacular three-way Mexican stand-off.
Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
John Carpenter could never get the budget together to make a western, so he compromised with this lean, mean $100,000 urban oater, loosely based on the plot of his idol Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959), and set in contemporary Los Angeles. As a decommissioned police station comes under vicious attack from street gangs, the skeleton crew inside must join forces with two death-row convicts if they are to see the night through. This tense siege drama shows old war drums still reverberating in America’s modern civilisation, and finds morality not in institutions, but in individuals doing what they have to do.
As if the manga-adapted six-feature Lone Wolf and Cub series was not hyperkinetic enough, Robert Houston inventively remixed and redubbed the first two, Kenji Misumi’s Sword Of Vengeance and Baby Cart at the River Styx (both 1972), into a flab-free cavalcade of massacres and maximalism for American viewers. As the Shogun’s outlawed executioner Ogami Itto (Tomasaburo Wakayama, extraordinarily intense) roams the land with his young son – and the film’s narrator – Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa), he hires out his swordsman’s skills while facing assassins from all sides. The results are a bloodbath of values pitched paradoxically between conservative nostalgia and countercultural rebellion.
Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) was an extremely effective merger of sci-fi and horror, relocating a slasher cum haunted house movie to outer space. The genius of James Cameron’s sequel was to take all the elements now familiar from the original, but to reconfigure them as action. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) agrees to join a search-and-destroy mission, this time surrounded not by unarmed workers but by macho, posturing Marines. Now taking out the aliens with a big gun and industrial mecha suit, she proves herself one tough mother, while facing off against another in the form of a giant, egg-laying xenomorph queen.
“Give the guy a gun and he’s Superman – give him two, and he’s God!”. These words summarise the signature aesthetic all at once of Hong Kong’s Heroic Bloodshed films, of the director John Woo, and of the actor Chow Yun-fat who had, since Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986), been the genre’s poster boy. Here, Chow’s Inspector ‘Tequila’ teams up with undercover cop Alan (Tony Leung) to bring down armies of gangsters, deploying the pistols in their hands in much the same stylised manner that heroes from earlier local films used swords. Later, surreally, Tequila will tote a baby alongside his shotgun.
What makes Stephen Chow’s madcap action comedy so funny is its application of martial arts to decidedly non-martial activities. No longer able to find any pupils for his skills, indigent Shaolin kung fu master Sing (Chow) forms a soccer team with his Shaolin brothers in the hope of popularising their discipline, even as Sing’s love interest Mui (Zhao Wei) uses her tai chi powers to make Chinese steamed buns, and eventually to be a goalie, and even a champion bowler. Using copious wire-fu and CGI to create gravity-defying effects, this has little interest in real-world physics or indeed the offside rule.
Who Killed Captain Alex? (2010)
The brainchild of one-time brickmaker Isaac Godfrey Geoffrey Nabwana (aka Nabwana I.G.G.), the film’s nano-budget is offset by maximalist ambitions, combining the sensibilities of Hong Kong kung fu (the hero is a Shaolin martial artist named Bruce) and American Eighties action flicks with home-made CGI, cheap props, explosively bloody squibs and hilarious live commentary. This – or more specifically its viral YouTube trailer – is what put on the international map Ramon Film Productions (‘Wakaliwood’), Uganda’s cottage action movie industry born from the capital Kampala’s slum suburb Wakali. The titular mystery may never be resolved, but the body count is very high in this military-vs-mafia massacre.
The Raid (2011)
Pitting cops against criminals in a locked-down 15-storey tenement, this Indonesian action movie (showcasing local martial art pencak silat) was improbably written and directed by Welsh filmmaker Gareth Evans, and is one of the very finest – and tautest – action films ever made. Perhaps it is the Aristotelian unity of time and place, perhaps it is the immense talents of actors/fight choreographers Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian, or perhaps it is the bone-snapping intensity of the action, but this ascends fast to a genre peak that only Pete Travis’ Dredd (2012), uncannily in production at the same time, also reaches.
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
George Miller’s belated addition to his Mad Max trilogy (1979, 1981, 1985) not only recasts Tom Hardy in Mel Gibson’s rôle, but slyly sidelines Max Rockatansky to passenger status, now a mere ally to new character, the one-armed Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who is very much in the driving seat for a future that might just bring an end to the prevailing patriarchy. Essentially one extended chase sequence, this is endless barrelling spectacle and zany visual invention – a mad, maximalist ride down the road and back again against impossible odds, with its strong feminist theme evolving naturally from the preceding films.
Train To Busan (2016)
Fast zombies had been done to death in the new millennium, but Yeon Sang-ho upped the ante by placing them aboard a runaway passenger train. This barrelling live-action companion piece to his animated apocalypse Seoul Station (2016) has workaholic fund manager Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) quickly resetting his priorities as he struggles to keep his estranged young daughter (Kim Su-an) safe. Meanwhile the beleaguered express locomotive becomes the vehicle for class allegory, as Korea’s entitled élites prove as dangerous as the infected undead to proletarian passengers. It barrels along at a furious pace, while finding unexpected pathos at its final destination.
Anton Bitel
