More Like Captain JERK: 7 Arrogant Action Heroes We Love to Hate

Of all of the retcon criticisms levelled by hardcore “Star Trek” fans against the J.J. Abrams reboot, the most contentious doesn’t relate to a change in style or tone. It has to do with the recalibrated personality of one Captain James Tiberius Kirk: though in the original series Kirk always had a smirk and an ace up his sleeve, the 2009 model leaned decidedly brasher, a few degrees closer to smarmy than Shatner could have ever pulled off. He became a quintessentially modern hero, updated for a more cynical hero: gallantry exchanged for quips, nobility traded in for a touch of sleaze, an air of total confidence upgraded to outright-arrogant cool. In the Abrams “Star Trek” films, in other words, Captain Kirk is kind of a jerk. A lovable jerk, of course, but a jerk nonetheless—an unabashed cheater, philanderer, and cocksure braggart, crashing headlong into danger with alarmingly little regard for his personal safety.

Fans bemoaned the change from the original vision (as fans are wont to do), but we ought to remember that the modern Kirk is proudly joining a long, substantive tradition of action hero assholes. And so, in honor of Kirk’s new outing this weekend, we’ve rounded up the great jerks of cinematic history.

- Errol Flynn as Robin Hood in “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938)

“The Adventures of Robin Hood” turns 75 this week, incidentally, which is as good a reminder as any that Errol Flynn basically birthed the action-hero braggart. It wasn’t enough for him to simply steal from the rich: early on the film finds him waltzing casually into the grand dining hall of the King to steal a chicken wing and basically mock his tormentors (from whom he escapes with ease, naturally). It’s proof positive that the merry men were also pretty badass.

- Harrison Ford as Han Solo in “Star Wars” (1979)

Though he was hardly the first brash charmer in cinema history, Harrison Ford’s take on everyone’s favorite space smuggler was so instantly iconic that it essentially set the template for the style going forward. No smarmy action heroes, sidekicks or otherwise, could ever emerge unindebted in his wake.

- Bruce Willis in John McClane “Die Hard With A Vengeance” (1995)

Though McClane was introduced to the world as a well-meaning family man with one-liners only for the villains, the second sequel in the “Die Hard” franchise made a show of seriously deglamorizing Bruce Willis’s beloved everyman schlub routine. Here McClane’s a hungover jerk dragged in off suspension, forced to save the town while enduring a day-long headache. It’s the reluctant hero as ne’er-do-well, a curmudgeon with a heart of gold.

- Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine in “Casablanca” (1942)

Rick Blaine was always more anti-hero than the regular kind, but, much like Kirk, his poor temperament came solely from a deeply felt loss. By the end of the picture it’s hard to feel anything but bad about Rick’s lot in life, even if he does make a show of fixing bets (for nice people) and lying to just about anyone (for a good cause).

- Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane in “Citizen Kane” (1942)

Welles was always a theater man, and it shows in the grandiosity of his aging and tormented Kane. But it’s as the young, fresh-faced Kane—taking over a newspaper for a lark, being treated to a song and dance number, or generally evading the queries of his family lawyer—that Welles most naturally embodied Kane-as-lovable-scamp, annoying old money as he put his inheritance to work like a kid in a candy store.

- Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe in “The Long Goodbye” (1973)

Philip Marlowe, as imagined by Raymond Chandler, was tough-as-nails and coolly professional, throwing out one-liners to cops and hired goons without a hint of a wink. But Gould’s take, as Robert Altman wrote it, was sort of the opposite: effortless cool with an emphasis on the “effortless”, gliding around a seedy Los Angeles lackadaisically, mumbling out witticisms instead of firing barbs.

- Guy Pearce as Snow in “Lockout” (2012)

“Lockout” wasn’t received with much enthusiasm when it came and when from theaters early last year, but the oversight was a real shame: Guy Pearce delivered one of his most appealing performances to date as an extended riff on the film noir anti-hero, his verbal sparring with the feds and heavies practically worthy of Dashiell Hammett. What’s not to love?

Categories: Lists

Tags: Casablanca, Chris pine, Citizen kane, Robin hood, Star Trek Into Darkness, The Long Goodbye

Irony Man: Why Action Scenes Are Hurting Superhero Movies

The idea that you have to sit through mediocre “character development” to get to the combat fireworks is common to action films, but the first two “Iron Man”s inverted the genre’s traditional appeal: viewers slogged through unexceptional set-pieces to watch Downey be a smart-ass, enabled by capable actors on the same comic page. That was a semi-happy accident, a result of the movies moving into production without a locked script, as multiple actors confirmed; the resulting improv sessions wore their spontaneity transparently. The action sequences had to be figured out before-hand — CGI takes time — but they’re the least memorable components of the first two installments.

This method of construction isn’t unfamiliar: when Jackie Chan made “Police Story” in 1985, he conceived his desired martial arts sequences first, then had the screenwriter come up with a framework that could plausibly get him from one to another. Same process, different outcome: in the “Iron Man”‘s, you came for the comedy and put up with the action filler. With the exception of Jeff Bridges strapping on his gigantic-robot-villain suit at the end of the first film and Mickey Rourke causing racetrack havoc at the start of the second, it’s hard for me to remember any significant mayhem from the first two installments; the showdowns basically look like outtakes from “The Rocketeer.”

That’s no longer the case in “Iron Man 3,” whose plot that functions in ways that a screenwriting teacher would approve: there’s a prologue establishing (“planting”) characters that’ll re-emerge as villains, a first act establishing Tony “Iron Man” Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is suffering from post-”Avengers” anxiety attacks (a challenge to be overcome, though it’s forgotten halfway through), and a midway plot twist that simultaneously changes everything you thought about the villain while still keeping the movie on course towards an orgy of third-act CGI gasoline explosions and neatly resolved plot arcs.

Also check out: Our review of “Iron Man 3?

This isn’t to say that the first two films are an unqualified triumph (or that this new installment is suffocatingly mapped-out), but their comic sequences are surprisingly loose and delightful for overbudgeted superhero movies. Christian Bale’s Batman has angst, Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man has some really serious anxiety issues (so his tentative delivery suggests), but Robert Downey Jr.’s topspin on every piece of dialogue is predictable without lapsing into diminishing returns. The memory I hold onto from “Iron Man 2? is Downey and co-star Don Cheadle killing time until the ultra-big final showdown by cracking wise about who’s the big gun (Downey: “You have a big gun. You are not ‘the big gun.’”) This isn’t exactly Howard Hawks, but it’s closer to “Hatari!” than anything in recent tentpole history: narrative in the back, party up front.

It’s worth noting that this unintentional jaggedness went beyond production or elements director Jon Favreau could control. Mickey Rourke, for example, said that his “Iron Man 2? villain was conspicuously absent from much of the movie in which he’s ostensibly a major threat because “Favreau didn’t call the shots” and Marvel Comics cut his part. There’s no reason not to believe Rourke, since big summer blockbusters tend to work on a committee-times-ten basis. Accidental messiness is a welcome by-product of production turmoil, at least if you’re one of the perverse few who (like me) enjoys “Spider-Man 3,” in which Sam Raimi channelled his frustration with a top-heavy third installment spiraling out of control by shooting bizarro musical numbers or James Franco painting, resulting in an incoherent work with endearingly inexplicably moments attributable only to eccentric humanity.

This weirdness is a double-edged sword. “Spider-Man 3? and “Iron Man 2? are frustrated works that could have, at one time, hung together as coherent dramas, but instead come off as a series of comic tangents interrupted by obligatory, grudgingly executed action sequences. “Iron Man 2? went so poorly that Favreau simply didn’t return for another directorial round, but he returns to reprise his role as Tony Stark’s former bodyguard Happy Hogan. The big joke here is that Happy’s now in charge of security at Stark Industries, and he’s constantly worried about threats to everyone’s safety. The human element “in human resources is our biggest weakness,” he says, and he’s not joking, a statement that could double as the studio’s own nightmares about the franchise: Downey’s too distinctive a performer to replace (though Cheadle replaced Terrence Howard without too many complaints), but apparently Favreau can be swapped out no problem.

Also check out: Changing Suits: How “Iron Man 3? finally fixes superhero movies.

[People who are way too worried about SPOILERS for things that happen in the first 20 minutes may want to check out at this point.] Happy’s subsequently seriously injured in an explosion and rendered catatonic for the bulk of the narrative — as neat an in-joke as any about being forced to watch someone else take control of the franchise he helped build. (Tony’s nightmares about New York work as a similar in-joke, in which the centerpiece of one franchise is tormented by memories of anchoring a totally different blockbuster.) Where former actor Favreau was good with helping organize riffing and keeping a potentially unwieldy production on track, new co-writer/director Shane Black melds the particular sense of humor he established himself with in “Lethal Weapon” and “The Last Boy Scout” with a firm sense of structural cause-and-effect.

The trade-off is that the film, eventually, has to shut up and explode: the now-planned-out riffing of the first half ceases as the generic action setpieces take over. (The first two are memorable, the rest increasingly watery; the finale’s really close to that of the recent “A-Team” movie, which isn’t a good thing.) These are the breaks: you can have unplanned human spontaneity without memorable action sequences, or you can have too many of the latter and too little of the former.

Categories: Features

Tags: Iron Man 3, Jon favreau, Marvel, Op-ed, Robert downey jr., Superhero Movies, Vadim Rizov

Why So Serious? How this Year’s Action Movies Are Proving that Fun is the Future

Antoine Fuqua’s “Olympus Has Fallen” hit theaters last Friday, and its arrival announces a possible new chapter in its director’s now twenty-year career. Fuqua has carved out something of a niche with his brand of gritty action drama, from the mud-colored theatrics of “King Arthur” to the crooked-cop morality play of “Training Day,” still his most successful film to date, but “Olympus” represents a surprising turn toward honest-to-goodness levity. A duly patriotic riff on the shopworn “Die Hard” template, “Olympus” seems from the outset like just another blast of urban grit and uncomfortable conservatism from a director known to specialize in both, but it quickly becomes clear that its intentions are markedly lighter.

Acutely aware of its own ridiculousness, Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt’s screenplay gently mocks the genre to which it so obviously belongs, exaggerating the extreme silliness of the proceedings without veering too far into parody. It’s a good look for a film otherwise defined by noxious hyper-nationalism and a simplistic moral framework, ultimately ridiculing its own agenda instead of positing it problematically. And it’s a savvy career move for Fuqua, who proves that he does in fact have a sense of humor.

What “Olympus Has Fallen” doesn’t do is go far enough. Though it abounds in humorous one-liners and slightly mocking plays on genre convention, the film is nevertheless a bastion of formal mediocrity, proceeding with such nondescript simplicity that it may as well have been shot and edited using a computational algorithm. Fuqua, however “gritty” his aesthetic sensibility, still approaches filmmaking as though it were a job to simply be completed on time and under budget, and the most generous praise one could offer him is that he is a perfectly competent craftsman. This approach makes for consistent and – in this case – surprisingly successful films, but it also makes for films that are hard to get especially excited about one way or another.

This is in part because filmmaking as a practice is rigidly, almost suffocatingly ritualized, the formula for setting up a Hollywood project and seeing it through to fruition a matter of literally going through the motions required. And when so much money is on the table in each case—the budget for “Olympus” was $130 million—it’s not hard to understand why studios would discourage the risk of even minor innovations. And so what we get is another film like the others.

What we need, far more than workmanship, is genuine artistry, and if artistry is too much to ask of action cinema, at least a more innovative craft. When it comes to movies, it’s always better to have an unpredictable failure than a predictable success, which is why we need films whose purpose is to entertain without limitations, to mock themselves in form and content, and to essentially approach the genre anew. The best action films of the past several years aren’t the ones concerned with monochromatic urban grit or an air of dour self-seriousness; they’re the ones that seem vital and vibrant, liberated from their own pretenses to be pure and simply fun.

Our best action filmmakers think about the genre in a different way: for Paul W.S. Anderson, whose recent ”Three Musketeers” set a new high-water mark for the 3D adventure spectacle, that means deferring to a sense of space and visual orientation, retaining a light touch and formal elegance through the chaos of its action; for James Mather and Stephen St. Leger, whose wildly underrated “Lockout” (aka “Space Jail”) transformed Guy Pearce into a sci-fi Philip Marlowe (replete with a host of amusing zingers), it means adopting full-blown cartoon physics, using CGI not to augment natural reality but to stretch and expand it. And for Neveldine/Taylor, the directorial duo behind “Crank” and “Gamer” and two of the most inventive action filmmakers currently working, it means rejecting convention and making a movie however it pleases them.

Neveldine/Taylor’s sensibility has a crassness and vulgarity that can make their films difficult to stomach, but in terms of film production the two have more in common with the jazzy on-set improvisation of Jean-Luc Godard than with any of their contemporaries. Shooting on inexpensive, lightweight consumer cameras that enable them to cover their action with striking proximity (and precariousness), the pair also somewhat notoriously serve as camera operators on their own productions; they’re known to follow their actors on rollerblades in lieu of any sort of dolly, stringing themselves up on bungee cords and harnesses for daring mid-air takes, fashioning their cameras to bikes and car bumpers and generally just tossing them around with a carelessness they couldn’t afford were they relying on a more traditional setup.

The results, especially in both “Crank” and its sequel, “Crank: High Voltage,” proceed with a remarkable briskness of pace, the camerawork frenzied and breathless; in a given scene, many of which featuring broken anti-hero Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) running for his life, the camera might track his feet at ground-level, cut to a shot inches from his sweating face, spin around him rapidly, and be interrupted by a non sequitur title card or strange sight gag. The style is certainly abrasive, but it’s uniquely their own.

“Crank” is the sort of film series in which a character speaking in another language is given unhelpful phonetic subtitles, a flashback dream sequence turns into an imagined daytime talk show, and two characters inexplicably transform into giant Kaiju versions of themselves to have a Godzilla-style battle—all of which occurs without need or explanation and none of which seems even slightly predictable or boring. (“Crank 2,” in particular, is veritably an avant-garde work.) What’s astonishing is how Neveldine/Taylor are able to achieve such formal radicalism under the aegis of a Hollywood studio, but the reason they’re afforded such creative freedom is because, much to their credit, their films are made quickly and under-budget, which means a small investment on a relatively impressive return. It’s proof that innovation can not only be accomplished within the mainstream, but actually thrive there. It’s also proof that our continuing acceptance of the monotony of bland action films is patently unnecessary, because genuinely visionary genre filmmakers are among us. This weekend’s big release – Jon Chu’s “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” – features a wordless nine-minute sequence in which rival clans of ninjas zipline around a Himalayan mountainpeak while playing a deadly game of keepaway with a bodybag, and that’s reason enough to hold out hope for the future.

Categories: Features

Tags: Action movies, Antoine Fuqua, Calum Marsh, Crank, Crank 2: high voltage, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Jason statham, Mark Neveldine, Olympus Has Fallen, Paul w.s. anderson

Is Bigelow Our Best Action Director?

When news of the horrific snubbing of Kathryn Bigelow by The Academy came down, we immediately looked around for ways to provide her some solace. Should we do a “Hurt Locker” live blog? How about a “Point Break” stage play? Once we realized both of those had already been done, we decided to investigate other accolades, ones that didn’t rhyme with “Mest Girector Jominee.” Hmmm, we thought, what about the title of “Best Action Director”? Does that fit a woman who is clearly at the top of her game? Let’s go that route!

A point in Kat-Big’s favor is that the action genre is in a state of shambles. Sure, there are plenty of comic book films you could label as “action,” or young adult novel adaptations that have moments of action embedded within. But purely visceral heart-thumping cinema? It is hard to find these days, and the pushers of pulsating moments of peril are at all an all-time low. Which means the title of “Best action director” is wide open! Here are the contenders for Bigelow’s rightful crown:

J.J. Abrams
Pros: “MI3? and “Star Trek” are worthy adversaries.
Cons: “Super 8?. There aren’t any decent action films starring children this side of “Goonies”.
Overall Action Rating: Eight out of 10. Abrams is legit.

Michael Bay
Pros: “The Rock,” “Bad Boys,” and “Armageddon” formed an action triumvirate the likes of which the world had never seen.
Cons: “The Island,” “Transformers,” and “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” formed an action triumvirate the world would prefer to forget.
Overall Action Rating: Seven out of 10. Which Michael Bay can we expect these days? The one that’s phoned in the past decade? Or the one that’s bringing a stripped-down “Pain and Gain” to theaters, hoping to reclaim his title?

Peter Berg
Pros: “The Kingdom” is underrated! “The Rundown” is underrated! “Battleship” and “Hancock” are … oh, okay, I now see the problem with his candidacy.
Cons: Our culture may never come back from the scourge that was “Battleship”. The Mayans didn’t get us, but Berg’s alien robots from the sea did irreparable damage.
Overall Action Rating: Five out of 10. He once was glorious, but it’s been five years. What have you done for us lately, Peter?

James Cameron
Pros: “True Lies” and “Terminator 2? may be the best action films we talk about all day.
Cons: “Avatar” had more sermonizing than action, and Cameron only makes one film every six years. That’s not enough action for us action junkies.
Overall Action Rating: Five out of 10. He used to be the king, but he abdicated the throne. Also, James Cameron does what James Cameron does because he’s James Cameron. Man, that clip never gets old.

Joe Carnahan
Pros: “The A-Team” and “Smokin’ Aces” remind us of a simpler time, when action films used to crush it.
Cons: “The Grey” didn’t have nearly enough wolf-y action. It was all full of feelings!
Overall Action Rating: Eight of 10. I still believe in the Carnahan, I still believe.

Rob Cohen
Pros: Ooooh, “xXx” and “The Fast and the Furious.”
Cons: “Stealth” and “Alex Cross”? Why must every action director take a hard turn toward mediocrity?
Overall Action Rating: Five out of 10, but we hope he makes it back.

Jon Favreau
Pros: “Iron Man” and “Iron Man 2? are the strongest bullet points on his resume.
Cons: Then you have “Cowboys & Aliens” – not the strongest bullet point on any resume.
Overall Action Rating: A solid six out of 10. His case would be augmented by a huge action film, and luckily he’s working on “Jersey Boys”.

Paul Greengrass
Pros: His contributions to the “Bourne” franchise were sizable, and his framing of action scenes is quite strong.
Cons: “Green Zone” was a huge letdown, wasn’t it?
Overall Action Rating: Only four out of 10. It’s starting to seem as though he just inherited a great franchise and maintained the quality.

Justin Lin
Pros: “Fast Five,” “Fast and Furious,” and “Tokyo Drift”. This may be the best action series going, topping “Transformers” and “Die Hard”.
Cons: “Annapolis” is almost worth watching to to see the the lows James Franco can hit on screen.
Overall Action Rating: Seven out of 10. If Lin shows ability outside the “Fast and Furious” franchise he’d be eligible for to top slot. But as the last one made $626 million worldwide, he’ll have plenty of financial incentives to just keep cranking those titles out.

McG
Pros: There was a time we thought “Charlie’s Angels” heralded a bright new star on the action scene.
Cons: Everything else, especially the mess that was “Terminator: Salvation”. Also, he should have to go by his real name, at least until they let me go by “McDuck”.
Overall Action Rating: Two out of 10. The ship be sinking.

Christopher Nolan
Pros: “Inception” was a taut thriller, and “The Dark Knight” is the best superhero film that ever was.
Cons: Superhero films have a hint of surrealism which true action films avoid. Action is about real “life and death” situations, and a guy in a cape takes you out of that place. Think “Cliffhanger” vs. “Superman” and you’ve got the disconnect.
Overall Action Rating: Six out of 10, but only because he doesn’t really fit in the genre, though he could if he felt the need.

Guy Ritchie
Pros: “Snatch” is amazing. Have you watched “Snatch” lately?
Cons: “Sherlock Holmes 2? confirmed a few of our deeply held fears about Ritchie, namely that he might be addicted to slow motion.
Overall Action Rating: Seven out of 10. The man gave us the original and well conceived “Sherlock Holmes” plus the aforementioned “Snatch” and “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels”. That’s heap of action.

Ridley Scott
Pros: “Gladiator” and “Black Hawk Down” are probably his strongest entries into the record.
Cons: Well, he’s really more of a sci-fi fellow.
Overall Action Rating: Six out of 10, but only because he doesn’t particularly care about being a better action director.

Quentin Tarantino
Pros: “Kill Bill” had some exceptional fight scenes, remember that one in the garden?
Cons: Tarantino loves tension, but the “action” genre feels a little bit beneath him, as he simply adores complex story arcs.
Overall Action Rating: Three out of 10. Quentin doesn’t make action films, he makes dramas that have some wild and crazy scenes within.

Paul Verhoeven
Pros: He directed the original “Total Recall,” the good one, plus “Robocop”. He’s also got “Starship Troopers” to his resume if you’re feeling particularly generous.
Cons: “Showgirls” and “Basic Instinct” are reason enough to exercise complete veto power here.
Overall Action Rating: Four out of 10, especially because he’s largely abandoned stateside filmmaking and broad action films.

Len Wiseman
Pros: “Underworld!” “Live Free or Die Hard!” This guy is a shoe-in.
Cons: The “Total Recall” remake. Ugh, see what we mean by the whole “action genre in shambles” take?
Overall Action Rating: Three out of 10. He’s rebooting “The Mummy,” a formally proud franchise that was recently reduced to rubble.

And finally we get to it. She may be on the outs with The Academy, but is she strong enough to take out the rest of these interlopers?

Kathryn Bigelow
Pros: “Point Break,” and the “The Hurt Locker” form her pedigree.
Cons: Technically, as a Best Director winner, she’s above the label. But “Zero Dark Thirty” has the best action scenes of the year, and she’s managed to fuse drama with action to create an entirely new style of film.
Overall Action Rating: Nine out of 10, and the crown!

You’ll finally get a chance to see “Zero Dark Thirty” this weekend, here’s hoping you come down on the same side!

Categories: Features

Tags: j.j. abrams, james cameron, kathryn bigelow, mcg, michael bay, Peter Berg, rob cohen, Zero Dark Thirty, Zero Dark Thirty

Has ‘The Expendables’ Rejuvenated the Careers of Its ’80s Action Stars?

When “The Expendables” hit theaters back in 2010, nobody really expected much. A bunch of over-the-hill fossils spitting out cheesy one-liners and mowing down hordes of faceless bad guys like it was still 1987? That’s going to bomb for sure, right?

Well, instead it became a surprise box office smash, spawning a successful sequel earlier this year with a third installment already in the works. And that’s not all: As the release of “Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning” this Friday shows, it also seems to have revived interest in some of the franchise’s many forgotten heroes.

Which brings us to our big question: Has “The Expendables” actually rejuvenated the careers of its ’80s action stars? Or are fans only interested in seeing them packaged together with their fellow museum relics?

There’s only one way to answer that, of course. So grab your headband, load your bazooka and start thinking of corny jokes, because things are about to get mighty ’80s up in here.

Sylvester Stallone: Stallone’s career resurgence actually began a few years before he created the fake ’80s franchise “The Expendables” thanks to the revivals of his actual ’80s franchises. But while 2006's “Rocky Balboa” and 2008's “Rambo” were successful at the box office, they weren’t exactly huge hits, nor did they convince anybody that Stallone had anything new left in him. After “The Expendables,” though, which he also wrote and directed, Stallone has more juice than he’s had since his “Rocky” heyday three and a half decades ago.
Has His Career Been Rejuvenated: Yes.

Dolph Lundgren: Lundgren is an interesting case study. Prior to “The Expendables,” his last major theatrical release in America was 1995's “Johnny Mnemonic,” which was a complete disaster. Over in Europe, though, he has remained a major action star, turning out no less than 25 films that basically never saw the light of day on this side of the Atlantic. Now, however, he not only had an expanded role in this year’s “The Expendables 2,” he has a new film opening in the U.S. this week with “Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning.”
Has His Career Been Rejuvenated: America is where it’s at, so yes.

Jean-Claude Van Damme: JCVD co-stars with Lundgren in “Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning,” so you would think this would be a slam dunk, but not so fast, friends. Considering he wasn’t in the first “Expendables” and ended up getting himself all killed to death in the sequel, he doesn’t have quite as much momentum — or potential momentum — to work with as his fellow action heroes. Is he good for a cameo or a one-off villain like he played in “The Expendables 2?? Sure. But is he back to being big enough to anchor his own films again? Considering he’s got Lundgren supporting him this time around as well…
Has His Career Been Rejuvenated: No.

Jet Li: You don’t really think of Li as being an ’80s star, but in fact the 49-year-old martial arts master made several films back in the day. He’s also never entirely lost his career mojo like some of his co-stars in “The Expendables,” but in recent years, like Lundgren, he has begun making the majority of his films overseas as Hollywood lost faith. While “The Expendables” has proven that he can still kick some butt when he needs to, it may be telling that the only film he currently has lined up is… “The Expendables 3.”
Has His Career Been Rejuvenated: Not yet anyway.

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Of all the folks on our list, Schwarzenegger may be the smartest one; when his career began to collapse in the late ’90s, instead of just fading away or turning into a desperate has-been, he turned to politics and got himself elected governor of California. Now that his political career is over, “The Expendables” franchise has given him the perfect vehicle to prove he can still kill bad guys and declaim badly written dialogue at the same time. He said he’d be back, and he didn’t lie.
Has His Career Been Rejuvenated: Yes.

Bruce Willis: Well, look, Bruce Willis’s career never needed to be rejuvenated because unlike everyone else in these films, he’s remained an A-list movie star the whole dang time. In fact, taking on a role in “The Expendables” wasn’t an opportunity to revive his career, it was actually more of a risky gamble. If it had turned into a dud, after all, he might have found himself lumped in with the rest as a has-been, which may be one reason he only agreed to a cameo in the first film before expanding his role in the sequel once he knew it was going to be a hit.
Has His Career Been Rejuvenated: No, but it hasn’t been hurt either.

Chuck Norris: We get it, Norris is a legend. He’s also, by the way, 72 years old and hadn’t appeared on the big or small screen in seven years before his walk on role in “The Expendables 2.” During that time, he found a second career as an internet meme, but unless his next movie is about finding the Fountain of Youth, it looks as though Norris is going to stay happily retired. He’s earned it.
Has His Career Been Rejuvenated: Chuck Norris is above such petty concerns. But no.

Categories: Features, Lists

Tags: arnold schwarzenegger, bruce willis, chuck norris, Dolph Lundgren, features, jean-claude van damme, jet li, sylvester stallone, The Expendables 2, The Expendales, universal soldier: day of reckoning, The Expendables, The Expendables 2, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jet Li, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris