And thanks in part to digital trickery, it’s made to look like one continuous shot. I can’t possibly stress this enough: This is a combination motorcycle chase–sword fight. She drives into an abandoned tunnel, lit in sickly neon-green, and then proceeds to have a high-speed sword fight with her pursuers. A catsuited assassin is making her getaway on a motorcycle, and a crew of black-suited goons gives chase. This batshit South Korean murder party peaks early. Here, he brings a different kind of vulnerability. We’ve spent decades watching Chan injure himself in end-credits blooper reels. But as the grieving, vengeful father of a daughter killed in a London bombing, he also puts in a soulful and shattered performance. He slides down drainpipes, sets First Blood–style deep-woods booby traps, and fights a knife-wielding commando by putting two sticks up his sleeves. Chan, now 63, still gets to be an action hero. The result: a story about warring factions of radical Irish Catholic separatists that also has kung fu fights where guys jump around on wires. In The Foreigner, Campbell strips away the virtuosic slapstick that made Chan a screen icon, throwing him instead into the ash-gray skies and violent diplomatic betrayals of the Bourne and Taken movies. Now he’s done the same thing with a different cultural institution: the Jackie Chan movie. The Foreignerĭirector Martin Campbell has rebooted the James Bond franchise twice - with Pierce Brosnan in GoldenEye and with Daniel Craig in Casino Royale - and he’s made it meaner and grittier both times. Here’s our list of the best that 2017 had to offer. And more and more often, they’re coming from big Hollywood studios. These days, great action movies are coming from Asia, Europe, and the American straight-to-VOD circuit.
Fight scenes continue to get better and better, especially as the hectic, choppy editing that Hollywood loved in the last decade falls further and further out of favor. The long, unbroken tracking-shot fight scene - whether genuine or accomplished through digital illusion - has come into vogue in Asian cinema, while Hollywood movies are still drawing on the operatic gunfights that John Woo helped pioneer in Hong Kong. There have even been some pan-global collaborations, like the misbegotten Matt Damon vehicle The Great Wall. We’re more and more likely to see South Korean stars show up in American movies, or American actors fighting homegrown stars in Chinese movies.
And around the world, action filmmakers are pulling ideas and images and stars from one another. Globally, two of this year’s five highest-grossing movies - China’s Wolf Warrior II and our own The Fate of the Furious - come from the genre. But this is also a sneakily great time for another genre: old-school, grounded, punch-you-in-the-face action movies. We are neck-deep into the superhero-movie era, the time when films about men and women in capes, literal or metaphorical, are dominant at the box office.
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