80's Action Movies

Where's my shirt? How come I can outrun explosions on foot? Why can't any of these terrorists shoot straight? Oh yeah, I'm an action hero and it's the 1980s!

Just The Facts

  1. The 1980's was an era that celebrated excess- inspiring big hair, big sunglasses and big budget movies
  2. Also, there must have been some kind of cocaine tsunami in Hollywood at the time
  3. eriously, some of the action movies born in this era aren't so much films as they are an attempt to high-five god...

The Birth and Death of Awesome

Pinpointing the emergence of the 80's action hero is relatively simple- it's just a question of evolution. We already had the tough talking Phillip Marlowes of film noir, the one-man-army shootists of the spaghetti western and the death or glory soldiers of America's take on World War II (The Revenge or the World Wars). Add to this the success of kung-fu cinema and super sass mouth of blaxploitation flicks and all the pieces are there.

Now all we need are the right circumstances. Cue the 80's, where Reaganism values and an added emphasis on financial gain lead to a culture where patriotism was redefined as the indelible right to success in all its forms.

Also a shitload of coke.

Pictured: original script for Die Hard

And there we have it- the birth of the average blue collar joe, who plays by his own rules, defeats improbable odds, gets the girl and incidentally is built like a tank made flesh. The 80's action hero wasn't just the American dream. He was America. High-fiving and shit-talking his way to the to the top of the world, shortly before blowing it up and fading to the credits (cue Journey's Don't stop believing).

So what happened to him? Did he run out of people to shoot? Did the beer and cigars finally catch up to him? Did the Chief actually decide to hold onto his badge and gun for longer than twenty-four hours this time?

No. The 80's action hero was killed off by, of all things, a girl.

Fuck you

It wasn't long before Hollywood cottoned on to the fact that you didn't need to have muscles and a beard to fight foreigners. With the coming infatuation with miniaturization, smaller, sleeker action heroes began to take the stage, using fancy-dancy kung fu that exceeded the tried and tested 'rage and roundhouse kick' combo that had always been good enough for its predecessors.

With girl power coming out in force, and with special effects lending a helping hand, it soon became apparent that the ability to crush a polar bear's neck with your biceps was a redundant quality in a protagonist. By the mid nineties, if you saw a waif thin blonde girl squaring off against 300-pound wrestling god with a chainsaw dick, you'd be more than certain that blondey was going to kick some ass without breaking a sweat.

Invincible, apparently.

The 80's action hero had gone the way of the dinosaur. Changing politics and attitudes had made him redundant and replaced him with younger, sleeker, less intimidating models. The story of the 80's action hero is very much the story of the American car industry, the classics slowly replaced in time by models that, though in countless ways superior, will never be quite as awesome.