Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Action and Adventure Films
and highly profitable Hollywood films and franchises.
Thus, while action and adventure forms took on challenging
material (in terms of both censorship and mainstream
taste) in the 1970s, the decade also saw the
reinvention of a family adventure tradition that has
continued to fare well commercially, if not critically.
The release of George Lucas’s enormously successful
fantasy adventure, Star Wars, underlined the commercial
potential of ‘‘safe’’ adventure scenarios. Lucas and his
contemporary Steven Spielberg, director of adventure hits
such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jurassic Park (1993),
have come to represent a commercially lucrative yet
culturally conservative vision of the action-adventure film,
one which remains enormously influential.
Action, as distinct from adventure, was significantly
redefined once more in the American cinema of the
1980s: ‘‘action’’ became a widely used term to promote
films as generic, rather than for describing one element of
a film’s repertoire of pleasures or a type of sequence.
Through its association with the blockbuster, action
and adventure cinema is increasingly typified by pleasures
of spectacle and excess, a showcase for innovations in
special effects, including three-dimensional computerized
imagery. Action and comedy also became an increasingly
common pairing, as the earnest action narratives of the
1980s gave way to more or less explicit action-comedy
and tongue-in-cheek enactments of the genre’s conventions
and character types, as seen in such films as Con Air
(1997) and Charlie’s Angels (2000). Such films ask, even
require, that audiences not take them too seriously; it
is as if filmmakers, aware of action cinema’s reputation
for ideological simplicity and spectacular violence, seek to
acknowledge and to revel in the genre’s fantastical
premises.
Two male stars are particularly associated with the
genre’s prominence during the 1980s: Sylvester Stallone
(b. 1946), star of the highly successful and culturally
controversial Rambo series (1982, 1985, 1988), about a
vengeful Vietnam veteran’s quest for redemption; and the
former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger (b. 1947),
whose film career proved to have far greater longevity
than Stallone’s, arguably due to his greater talent for
comedy. These stars’ muscular bodies have stood in for
the general excess with which 1980s action is associated.
Shifting this emphasis onto bodily display, a new group
of male action stars came to prominence during the
1980s and 1990s, among them such A-list stars as Tom
Cruise, Mel Gibson, and Will Smith. In reflecting on the
male stars associated with action and adventure in this
period, it is notable that these genres have been somewhat
more open to black, Asian, and Latino performers
than some other Hollywood genres. Yet this diversity in
casting is by no means in conflict with the cultural
conservatism associated with action and adventure. Just
as 1970s blaxploitation deploys uncomfortable racial and
sexual stereotypes, the 1980s variant of biracial buddy
movies, such as 48 Hours (1982), the Lethal Weapon
series (1987, 1989, 1992, 1998), and the Die Hard series
(1988, 1990, 1995), has been read as a strategy to exploit
and contain black male stars, such as Eddie Murphy.
These films pair black and white stars in order to appeal
to the widest audience demographic, and in the process
black characters are typically portrayed within primarily
(or entirely) white institutional contexts. More recently,
Mary Beltrán considered Hollywood’s deployment of biracial
and multi-ethnic stars such as Vin Diesel and
Keanu Reeves in terms of economic and cultural expediency
(p. 54).
INTERNATIONAL ACTION
European cinemas boast strong national action traditions.
These range from Italian westerns and peplum,
defined by Richard Dyer as ‘‘a cycle of adventure films
centered on heroes drawn from classical antiquity played
by American bodybuilders’’ (p. 286), to the British gangster
film, such as Brighton Rock (1947) and The Long
Good Friday (1980). Frequently European action films
are successful primarily within local markets, although
there are also notable international successes, such as
Nikita (Luc Besson, 1990) and Lola rennt (Run, Lola
Run, Tom Twyker, 1998). That both of these titles
focus on female protagonists is not insignificant, since
the marketing of a certain image of female action became
increasingly central to the genre through the course of
the 1990s. Hong Kong action cinema has also accorded
female fighters a more central position than has
Hollywood cinema. With the success of Hong Kong
action cinema in the United States, a series of awkward
attempts to incorporate Hong Kong stars within
American filmmaking practices occurred, many featuring
Jackie Chan (b. 1954) or Jet Li (b. 1963) (the latter
moving from villain to hero in his American films). A
huge star in Asian markets, Chan finally achieved a
measure of consistent commercial success in the United
States through variants of the bi-racial buddy formula,
for instance, in Rush Hour (1998).
With the migration of many Hong Kong filmmaking
personnel at the end of the 1990s, different patterns
of influence and exchange become notable. The critical
and commercial interest in the Hong Kong director John
Woo (b. 1946), who has had some success in Hollywood
with such films as Face/Off (1997) and Windtalkers (2002),
is one manifestation. Perhaps more indicative is the use of
Hong Kong fight choreography, though less often with
Asian performers, in Hollywood films such as The Matrix
series and Charlie’s Angels. Quentin Tarantino’s decision
to film sections of his hit martial arts pastiche Kill Bill,
32 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM