Best Action movies

Bone to pick with The Professional....sucks......first, I think Luc Besson is a very corny man....his nadir came with the tekno opera fight scene in 5th element....corny corny corny when ya sweat.....but back to The Professional.....all I could think when watching this after hearing all the hype was....hmmm....let's count the possibly interesting angles here......well, there's basically one.......there is a CHILD.....so traumatized she's down with the 187....ok.....oh yeah, another thing.....that *CHILD* is *FUCKABLE!!!*......wow, the tension! subtly arising from this old guy chilling daily this *FUCKABLE..........CHILD!!!!!* That's genius!

As for The Professional, I loved this film. I would recommend that fans see the uncut version, titled Léon. The cut scenes were to, I assume, clean up the pedophilia for sensitive North Americans. After watching this version, I was surprised how unoffensive it was, but then I guess I'm not your typical viewer. Portman does basically flat out proposition Reno, but the whole situation is handled very maturely. Pooh pooh to the MPAA.

No, not calling you typical or any of that... Also, I said mature, not artful. Yes, NP is hyper-sexualized in the film, yes, that is surely a strong attraction for male viewers, no, it's not an inventive plot line. Anyways, I really liked that movie.

One other instance of camera rape was Crazy Beautiful, (not proud that I rented that one, but I just had to see the spectacle.) In the dvd 'director and star commentary' version, Kirsten Dunst says to her director, 'you never let me wear a bra in this entire movie!!' and he actually tries to play it off like, 'oh, really, what? Sure I did, what are you talking about!' If you've seen this one, you can appreciate the fact that he knew damn well the status of her breasts during every second of the movie.

Ron: Whoa, didn't mean to sound like I was fingering you specifically there.....the 'artfully' comment was a general gripe about shit in general my man, no need to correct......I respect your opinion on The PRofessional.....it's all good, you and me baby.....just braying like I did in last month's Ricci thread about the mass dishonesty in *general* when it comes to this area of movie talk and the often very sketchy conscious-or-not imputation of talent and movie genius in order to skirt talking about "it's wrong, but I'd split that shit triple times, shoot".

Oh great, now another phrase to get stuck in my head. You had me chuckling all day today muttering under my breath "beast out on that twig, what!" What would Kathleen Hanna think of me taking part in such a conversation? Please don't tell

update plz: what action movies are as good as Die Hard?

sci fi doesn't count btw

Point Break comes close.

Also Aliens, but apparently that doesn't count.

"i am not a crook!" yeah u know i think point break does come p close esp. with the swayze surfing mysticism element but it does have some longueurs iirc, been a while since i saw it, must rewatch soon

i can think of tons of gr8 sci fi films u see, but i have this kind of blind spot wrt action films w/o that element so this is kind of a noob rfi abt them i guess

The first Bourne is great, the second two good.

Has Kung-Fu Hustle been mentioned yet?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTmSJDyav-A

Con Air, Hard Target, most of Steven Seagal's pre-On Deadly Ground movies, first three Dirty Harry movies, Point Blank, Extreme Prejudice, 48 Hours.

gr8 like die hard gr8, u guys? just asking

I like Con Air better than Die Hard but I dunno if it is better. Die Hard's pretty perfect. All those I listed are solid 10s imo. Forgot Midnight Run.

Well I don't know if there is actually anything else that's Die Hard gr8.

really, Dirty Harry is an action movie? The rest of the thread leads me to believe this genre hadn't been invented in 1971.

So, for prehistoric elements like chracterization and plotting:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_jVsxsWgYMWk/S33ViuPevLI/AAAAAAAAClM/Sju4M-qbPyA/s400/WagesOfFear.jpg

Wages of Fear as an action movie seems fair enough. Dirty Harry is a definite stepping stone between the policier and the Action Movie as an 80s phenomenon.

while we're being genre nazis, midnight run, which i love, surely a raod movie/buddy movie smash bang fusion

thx for these posts ppl!

I thought about the buddy movie aspects of Midnight Run but yeah genres are permeable. By the same token 48 Hours is kind of a buddy movie.

watched The Wages of Fear on Netflix tonight due to this thread. wow, really great film. got a laugh out of the final scene ending really abruptly and shooting me back to the Netflix menu though. also enjoyed the fact that two of the main characters were named Mario and Luigi.

what do you like about die hard? I would recommend Ronin

this is probably challops but I don't think the action parts of Die Hard are great. movie's aged well because it has a sense of humor.

ronin's cool but it's kind of pretentious & slow, captures that le samourai sort of feeling p well but also a bit "i watched michael mann after he watched antonionionio". and like some of the character interactions are awkward and wrong & some of the spy stuff like i can't really remember but was p hokey and hard to give a shit abt but yeah it's p cool

Just watched Crank for the first time; clearly no Die Hard, but enormously enjoyable.

no repping for Lethal Weapon on this thread? up there with Die Hard imo. also set at Christmas time oddly.

Heat is way better than Die Hard. Can't believe this is the first mention on this thread.

Heat is great.

^^was about to say

as M Z Seitz points out here, this 1964 French thriller-spoof vehicle for Jean-Paul Belmondo has quite an Indy-influence vibe. Some very funny scenes, and great stunts.

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/that-man-from-rio-1964

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceB4bqJVEYg