The action hero is dead. Tom Cruise may strut his stuff across the globe in Knight and Day, but he is little more than an animated corpse, marking time until a retirement that is closer, and more comprehensive, than ever before. The failure of the Tomster’s most recent vehicle has been well covered by the trade press (see, for example, JoBlo), and it is tempting to see it manifesting the beginning of the end of the star system as we know it.
Tempting, but perhaps not entirely accurate. Certainly, along with Angelina Jolie’s Salt, Knight and Day feels like the last gasp of this kind of front-heavy filmmaking, all star wattage, a credible but non-authorial director employed (Phillip Noyce and James Mangold respectively), and a plot which turns everything into an undeveloped McGuffin in order to better focus on the face and body of the star. Yet Salt’s box office figures were not unhealthy (roughly making back its budget in the US, as opposed to Knight and Day’s domestic loss of nearly $50 million), and poor ticket sales can easily be blamed on a combination of recession-hit consumers (and inflated cinema ticket prices) and the proliferation of free media (including pirated recent releases).
The summer of 2010 has also seen a concerted consolidation of an alternative: the ensemble action film. This is not a new genre, but it is certainly coming of age, and seems to be crowding individual star vehicles and buddy films out of multiplexes. The wannabe titan of the bunch was of course Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables, which took much mileage (all of it, actually) from the action credentials of the cast. Unfortunately, the concept never quite made it off the drawing board, leaving the likes of Terry Crews and Randy Couture (who?) to fill out the special ops team, rather than the intended Wesley Snipes and Steven Segal (who somehow gain credibility by turning the job down). We are still left with Sly, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren and Mickey Rourke. Arnie and Brucie have cameos. But there’s no excitement to this agglomeration, and it’s all a bit like a High School reunion – everyone pretends to have a good time, and they dance a little with each other, but at the end of the evening they’re all leaving wondering why they came at all and going home to their frumpy wives. We’ve all moved on.
Marginally more successful was The A-Team, which was polite enough to cast talented actors who could ape their televisual antecedents without overly humiliating themselves. Whenever they talked about their moral dilemmas, or their dreams, we winced; but the easy camaraderie of the group was more convincing than The Expendables, and was more successfully engineered into the plotting (what little of it there was). Better still was the blatant A-Team rip-off from earlier in the Summer, The Losers. Moving with a light touch not evident in the effects-heavy, noise-tastic splurge of Hannibal Smith’s plans coming together, The Losers was like a glass of cheap fruit squash: of no nutritional value and with a plastic taste, but just what you need on a hot day. “The bit when we were on fire was my favourite, but the shootout, man, that was good times,” says Chris Evans’ character Jensen towards the beginning. This is the action film as hanging out; movement as breezy weightless spectacle.
Both The A-Team and The Losers depict a team of American soldiers betrayed by the CIA on foreign soil, who then fight their way back to America and end up in the Port of Los Angeles (their term) to face down the villain. Their appeal is spending time with alpha males whose non-threatening easiness with each other can be read either as the re-emergence of the unapologetic macho identity, or a desperate scramble to convince us that such uber-masculinity is still vital in a world of metrosexuals and post-traumatic stress disorder. But both films consistently undermine their males, like John McClane’s blue-collar loser in Die Hard, and in this they vary radically from The Expendables, with its valorisation of muscular display and violent triumph at the expense of logic, coherence, or significance. For all its inference of unity, Stallone’s film is about male action in isolation.
Whether this move towards ensemble adventures will continue remains to be seen, although it is worth mentioning some forthcoming Marvel projects. Thor, directed by Kenneth Branagh for some reason, has unknown Chris Hemsworth in the lead role, while The Avengers (due, exhaustively, in 2012) is designed around this group dynamic. Perhaps the assembly of a team is becoming the de facto expression of relaxed homosocial banter, while lone heroes are expected to suffer their loneliness as inaccessible martyrs, as in The Dark Knight. So, speaking of Christopher Nolan, let me end by pointing out that even a film as relentlessly subjective and isolationist as a thriller set inside dreams still relies upon squad-based plotting and humour (“don’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling”). For all the readings applied to Inception we might also add that it emplots the conflict between the successful and enjoyable experience of group enterprise with the ever-present spectre of personal secrecy and isolationism, and leaves us in limbo as to the victor of this ontological battle.
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