It's been a frankly disastrous year for big, rubbish action films. Usually, you can count on someone making something like "Con Air", "Face/Off", or "X-Men", which might or might not have a brain in its head.
We've had to sit still for "Charlie's Angels" and "Tomb Raider", "Pearl Harbor" and "The Mummy Returns". All of these, frankly, are tosh - the pity is that they aren't even good tosh. Overlong, underplotted, dreadfully scripted, badly-acted, and full of expensive CGI effects that still look cheesy and cheapskate, the level of quality has been set so low that even slightly less mediocre efforts like "Evolution" (which at least has an idea), "Jurassic Park III" (so it's a sequel - it's got Pteranodons!), and "The Fast and the Furious" (an unpushed drag racing redo of "Point Break" out in the UK later this year) look good.
It seems to me that the key to making a good 'bad' action movie isn't how much you spend on the explosions or whether you get the comic book/ computer game tie-in sorted out, but how good (or bad) the villain is. Think of the Bond films - the ones you remember are the ones with the best baddies, the most outrageous schemes, the vastest underground lairs. This year's crop is decidedly short of good villain roles, as if franchise wannabe stars like the Angels girls or Angelina ('Lara Croft') Jolie had it in their contracts that they weren't to be upstaged by the likes of John Malkovich, Alan Rickman, or Jeremy Irons.
Real heroes know they look better with proper competition: Sean Connery's Bond stands up to scene-stealers like Gert ("Goldfinger") Frobe or Donald ("You Only Live Twice") Pleasence, but Pierce Brosnan's 007 makes sure potentially fine players like Sean Bean, Jonathan Pryce, and Robert Carlyle don't get any of the good lines. Neither "Mission: Impossible" films have dared give Tom Cruise anyone charismatic enough to compete with him. "Face/Off" solved the problem by letting Nicolas Cage and John Travolta both play the good guy and the bad guy, while "Hannibal" just gave up and admitted the villain was the hero by pitting Anthony Hopkins against another, even more horrible character (Gary Oldman).
At any given time, there are probably more first rate-character actors available to play villains than there are action hero stars, so there's no excuse. If any of this summer's thin films get sequels, they'd do well to remember that they can easily hire Brian Cox, Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, Dennis Hopper, Terence Stamp, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Keitel, Linda Fiorentino, Wes Studi, William Forsythe, or Lance Henriksen.
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