Movies That Were Probably Made By a Spasm of Six Year-Olds on Acid: The Top 75 Action Films Poll Results Thread

its a double edged sword though, because its harder to connect with, your not seeing real people sweating and scrapping and tumbling, and the animes that get really over the top with exaggerated kinetic movement are even more distancing because you're just looking at it thinking 'what is this retarded crap'

akira's approach is highly stylized, but also selectively stylized - its more controlled than a lot of anime which crank the knob past 11, so the unreal moments are more effective

― RudolfHitlerFtw (Hungry4Ass), Tuesday, February 14, 2012 5:51 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

yah this is def true. but now we are seeing 'exagerrated kinetic movements' in real action movies too via cgi :(

yeah, matrix 3 comes to mind

i'm no judge of anime (don't much like it tbh) but akira seems like a huge amount of care was put into moments that go by in real-time, rather than say, stretching something out in slo-mo or w/e

when i first saw it, it was with a group of devoted fans (seeing it on a laserdisc for the first time, maybe? ha) and they kept pausing it and doing slow mo to see details that go by in seconds.

when the first motorcycle slams into tetsuo you can see, in like one frame, the explosion break around him in a perfect sphere as he unconsciously protects himself. that kind of thing.

― Critique of Pure Moods (goole), Tuesday, February 14, 2012 12:58 PM (7 minutes ago)

i first saw it with a serious anime head who kept pointing out how accurately the character's mouths are animated to correspond with the (japanese) dialogue, something he kept pointing out as exceptional for an animated film

you guys are gonna think i'm foolin', but this is seriously one of my fave action movies. should have given it a write-in vote. its like a trance film. you can watch the whole thing on youtube too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqyWuN7D0Kc

i think tombot was the only one with me on the HW:WR front when i brought it up once.

I did not vote on this poll, but I am very much enjoying reading through it.

Get Carter should be immediately viewed/reviewed by everyone. So, so so good.

Mycocaine is just awes.

omar, is there any way you could post the list of what has been revealed up to now?

#75 APOCALYPTO
#74 INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM
#73 GOLDFINGER
#72 VANISHING POINT
#71 DIRTY HARRY
#69 (TIE) THE HURT LOCKER
#69 (TIE) DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE
#67 (TIE) CON AIR
#67 (TIE) BRANDED TO KILL
#66 ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
#65 SIN CITY
#64 INFERNAL AFFAIRS
#62 (TIE) DEMOLITION MAN
#62 (TIE) TAKEN
#61 MAD MAX
#60 JAWS
#59 THE FUGITIVE
#58 CASINO ROYALE
#57 COLLATERAL
#56 THE INCREDIBLES
#55 ENTER THE DRAGON
#53 (TIE) MIAMI VICE
#53 (TIE) KUNG FU HUSTLE
#52 GET CARTER
#51 AKIRA

thanks, gr80!

thx gr80.
looking at that list, only two movies i haven't seen, get carter & branded to kill. will see them soon, as i will most of the movies on this list, cos i have an urge for actioooon thx to this poll.

infernal affairs - voted for this quite high. agree with edwardIII (iirc) about the fact that ia>departed. this may be because i saw ia when it came out, i stepped into a cinema showing cos i thought it looked interesting but i had 0 expectations coming in. was blown away. whereas for departed i already knew what to expect.

taken - voted for this too. most ppl already said what was good about it upthread. they already stressed what was terrible abt it too. i guess i have a soft spot for this movie (and the first bourne also) because they take place in a city i know well so it's always fun to try and guess where they are etc. this must be more common when u live in the us tho.

AKIIIIIIRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

'Infernal Affairs' is great but can't get my head around the idea that it's an action movie. IIRC the main action scene where Wong is killed and there's a gun fight doesn't happen until about an hour in. Having said that I think I voted for 'Get Carter' which doesn't have much more in the way of action.

yeah i bunged Get Carter a couple of points but was pretty uneasy about calling it an action movie.

AKIIIIIRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

should have been top 10

http://i1236.photobucket.com/albums/ff458/dearlylovedaimee/Funny%20Animated%20Gifs/Eyeroll.gif

Mostly I pushed things down that weren't that actiony, but Get Carter ended up high anyway. Dismal old Britain saturated in menace, really unsettling build to violence - John Osborne all-time creepy iirc.

Akira is great, but again I don't think "action" is its primary genre. Are there even any major action scenes in it besides the (admittedly brilliant) motorcycle chase? Most of the other "big" scenes are more in the horror vein, and of course the main plot is a sci-fi fable on friendhship, human evolution, and stuff like that.

I saved my token anime vote for NINJA SCROLL, which is almost as pure action movie as you can get, as it's basically just a string of fight scenes tied together by a minimal (though surprisingly effective) plot.

oh come on akira is so actiony that explosions happen in the background with little to do with the main characters

can't wack the visceral thrill of a cartoon explosion

The last third of the movie is Kaneda firing at Tetsuo and a huge destruction bubble overtaking the city.

yeah that's just friendship

that's pretty inscrutable friendship imo

Yes, I know. There are also huge explosions in Dr. Strangelove, but that doesn't make it an action movie. Like I said above, IMO the basic requirement for an action movie is that its central conflict(s) are solved via physical action. That doesn't apply to Akira. Kaneda firing at Tetsuo is portrayed as futile; it's not a proper action scene in the same way the motorcycle chase is. (IMO the motorcycle chase is the only scene in Akira that follows action movie conventions.) Kaneda's conflict with Tetsuo is resolved in the mindmeld they have, and the Tetsuo's threat to the world is resolved by Akira appearing and helping him and the other mutant kids elevate to a higher level of existence. That doesn't ring "action movie" to me.

(x-post to mh)

the entire last third is explosions and chase and destruction btw

grudging formalism such a tired look

Whatever. When I chose the movies in my ballot, with every sci-fi movie I considered whether the "sci-fi" quotient in them was higher than the "action" quotient. That's why I voted for Aliens, which I think is more action than sci-fi, but not for Akira, which is the other way around.

Let's put this way: probably more than 50% of all movies, at least ones made in Hollywood, have action scenes. It wouldn't make sense to call them all action movies. IMO an "action movie" has to be one that is clearly driven by the action itself. Akira is not like that, it's first and foremost driven by its sci-fi/fantasy concepts and by interpersonal drama.

what formula did you use to calculate the quotients? I used f(x) = ((y^2 + 3x + 6)/x^4 * z)^1/2

Mine was a bit shorter, but the same basic idea.

I think it's an outlier on this list but tagging things with a single genre is for video stores, not for polls.

Warhol's Empire is my favorite action movie. That bird flew by HARDCORE. DAMMMNNN.

eurgh tuomas. you know which movie should just be tagged as one single genre? a bad movie. aliens is totally BOTH. are you also dispelling war films or westerns or comedies or horrors even if they are totally fucking awesome action in them?

aliens is awesome

I think Akira was the first movie I watched which was downloaded from the internet. I should watch it again, it's probably better when you don't see all those huge pixels and compression artifacts.

if The Guns of Navarone doesn't place high on this list I will REALLY be kicking myself for not voting

Seven Samurai, too. That has some of the greatest sustained action of any film in any genre, ever.

eurgh tuomas. you know which movie should just be tagged as one single genre? a bad movie.

100% this ^

I'm not saying a movie should be tagged single genre, I said that if the other genre was clearly more prominent than "action", I didn't vote for it. You gotta draw the line somewhere, otherwise you could vote for any movie that has at least one action scene, which wouldn't make sense.

That said, there are plenty of excellent single-genre action movies, including the one that will probably win this poll.

are we allowed to start guessing what's going to win, or is that too tedious? i'm guessing BR.

I'm guessing DH. Which arguably is also a romcom!

When it gets down to 20 so I'll post up the stuff that should get in, hopefully more than 20 :)

guessing die hard, children of men outside chance

Can't see Die Hard coming in higher than The Matrix, in fairness!

tuomas have you considered the idea that perhaps you've made your point and you don't need to keep making it over and over?

"have you considered the idea that perhaps you've made your point and you don't need to keep making it over and over?"

the board descriptions just write themselves...

are we allowed to start guessing what's going to win, or is that too tedious? i'm guessing BR.

It'll definitely place pretty high, but I don't see BloodRayne taking the top spot.

tuomas have you considered the idea that perhaps you've made your point and you don't need to keep making it over and over?

Well, people keep arguing against my point instead of just accepting that this is how I defined a genre in a genre poll. But I won't repeat it again, no worries.

And yeah, my guess for #1 was DH, which is more or less a single-genre action movie.

id say die hard is a friendship movie