As you may have noticed here at CA Towers, we're big, no massive, no Incredibly huge fans of the Action genre. We've reviewed everything from 70s Action with the likes of The Yakuza, the wonderful era of the 80s, the grit of the 90s and the DTV boom of the 00's and 2010's.
We love the explosions, the car chases, the gun fights and the cheesy one liners so, while sitting here, reading about Action flicks and looking at my DVD and Blu-Ray collection, I wondered what the ultimate Action collection would look like, what would be included given there were no restrictions on copywrite.
We get a lot of releases from multiple different studios that have some films from a specific actor, take Stallone for instance; A boxset containing 5 Warner Bros movies like The Specialist and Demolition Man, but how cool would it be to have a collection with First Blood and Cliffhanger. Or how about an 80s Badass collection comprising of Commando, Rambo: First Blood PT 2, Die Hard and Robocop? The possibilities are endless. So this got me thinking, If I were to create or curate a collection of Action movies to have all in one place, maybe in multiple volumes, what would I include?
So going with that idea, I decided on a 3 Volume Collection, each comprising of 5 movies, giving us a 20 film overall collection. These movies range from big budget studio flicks to smaller, lower-budgeted DTV films. You never know, you might find Tough & Deadly in the same collection as Terminator 2, like I said, the possibilities are endless.
With that, what films do we have lined up for Volume 1?
THE ULTIMATE ACTION COLLECTION: VOLUME 1
Disc 1
FIRST BLOOD (1982)
What better way to start of Volume 1 with Stallone's first entry in the OTT Action Genre, 1982's brilliant First Blood. Based on the novel by David Morrel, First Blood follows drifter and Vietnam war vet, John Rambo. Having arrived in a small town, he's immediately clocked by the Sheriff, effortlessly played by the brilliant Brian Dennehy who escorts Rambo out of town and essentially tells him he's not allowed into town. Rambo refuses and starts to walk back into the small town. This forces Dennehy to arrest Rambo for vagrancy. While under arrest, Rambo begins to have flash backs to Nam and goes ape shit, escapes the jail on a Motorbike and heads straight for the mountains. The police put in a full on search party to look for Rambo but what they don't know is that John J, is actually a highly trained, special forces Green Beret who's been trained to adapt to his surrounding and an expert in Guerrilla combat.
It's an excellent film, probably the best and most human of the big 80s Action flicks. So defo worth a spot in the first volume.
Disc 2
AIR FORCE ONE (1997)
Han Solo vs Dracula on the President's plane. Solid action from start to finish even if it does end with some atrocious late 90s CGI. Harrison Ford play president James Marshall, who's flight is taken hostage by Eastern european terrorists posing as Cameramen. However, they didn't reckon on the president being a former Medal Of Honor winner and former combat soldier and before you can say "lets build a wall" o'l Harrison is going all Die Hard on these Commie sons-a-bitches.
Air Force one is a fun film, it's got some great tense moments, some pretty decent confined action scenes and two wonderful performances from both Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman as the main villain. Both men are supported by a cast of great character actors such as Glenn Close, Xander Berkley, William H. Macy, Dean Stockwell and everyone's favourite genre dude, Andrew Divoff.
Air Force One is an awesome film and great inclusion on Volume 1.
Disc 3
RONIN (1998)
John Frankenheimer's last but one film is for me a highlight of a career that lasted 50 years, a career that included films such as Bird Man Of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate, Seconds, The Challenge, 52-Pick-up and Reindeer Games just to name a few. It's one of my top 5 films of alltime and one of the last great fully practical Action films.
The film follows a group of mercs hired by a splinter group of the IRA to steal a case. One of the mercs is Sam, a former spook for the US government, or is he a former spook? that's one of the questions you start to ask yourself through the labyrinthine plot of double crosses, triple crosses and full espionage, all woven into a film full of shoot-outs and some of the best, most intense car chase sequences ever committed to film.
Featuring a very strong cast of actors including Robert DeNiro, Jean Reno, Jonathon Price, Natascha McElhone, Sean Bean and Stellen Skarsgard and featuring an uncredited screenplay by David Mamet, Ronin is a gritty, fast paced action flick, the likes of which we've not seen since.
Disc 4
COMMANDO (1985)
What action movie collection wouldn't be complete without Arnold Schwarzenegger's Iconic Commando. A Film of immense fun and OTT to the point of ludicrous, Action. Arnold plays the wonderfully named John Matrix, a retired, special forces black ops commando who now lives a life of peace with his daughter Jenny feeding deers, booping icecream on noses and carrying massive logs around because, well he can. His peaceful life is upended when a team of merc working for a despotic south American general show up and kidnap poor Jenny. Matrix has only the limited time frame of a flight to track down Jenny, the mercs and the general to save the day.
Commando if awesome, plain and simple, it's incredibly violent, especially the Island assault towards the end and the film dispenses one liners like they're going out of style. Along for the ride with Arnie we have Rae Dawn Chong, David Patrick Kelly, Bill Duke, Dan Hedaya and a very young Alyssa Milano as Jenny but the best of the support cast is in the form of Vernon Wells, playing chainmail wearing, moustache sporting hyper-villain who plays the character to grandiose levels of absurdity. Great action, good direction by Mark Lester and even though it re-uses James Horner's score for 48 Hours, Commando still kicks ass in more ways than most.
Disc 5
DIE HARD (1988)
All the big guns appear in Vol.1, the essential movies for Action fans. Die Hard is our Disk 5 movie. Why is it disk 5 and not disk 1? Dunno, just the way i've written this post I guess. Well Die Hard is probably the greatest action film ever made, it's massively influential, gave the world an action superstar in the form of Bruce Willis, has some of the best action cinematography and direction courtesy of Director John McTiernan and DOP Jan De Bont, a fantastic screenplay by Jeb Stewart and Steven E. DeSouza and the best villain ever put to screen in the form of Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber. There's just nothing bad to say about Die Hard, it's pretty much everything you could ask for in an Action film.
It's a shame that the proceeding films, with the exception Die Hard With A Vengeance, failed to reach the same adrenaline fueled pace and straight line narrative that the original did so incredibly well. There's just so much right with Die Hard, from the support actors such as Robert Davi as one of the Johnson's, Reginald ValJohnson as Al Powell, Bonnie Bedelia's Holly McClane, Hart Bochner's slimy scuzzbag Ellis, Paul Gleeson's Dwayne T Johnson and William Atherton's scummy news reporter, Richard Thornburg. Die Hard needs to be in the collection because it's THE action movie.
Disc 6
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (2012)
I know it's an odd choice to throw in to the first volume, especially considering the heavyweights currently sitting with pride in inaugural release but I like to throw some curve balls every now and then because Universal Soldier Day Of Reckoning may not have been seen by the majority of people who've watched the above films. It's a lower budgeted action film, the fourth official film in the Uni-Sol series and with exception to Roland Emmerich's original film, It's probably the best. Directed by John Hyams, son of acclaimed director and cinematographer Peter Hyams, himself very familiar to action fans for his directing work on Van Damn classics, Sudden Death and Timecop, John Hyams was essentially given free reign to make this film and what he gave us was basically a hyper-violent, surrealist, Lynchian, Kubrikian, Nightmare of science fiction, balls to the wall action, blood and stylishly shot mayhem. A film that punched way above it's DTV status and one that succeeds on many many levels. The plot gets a bit confusing towards the end but then Van Damme shows up, with half his head painted white and the other half painted black and acting like a new messiah just to make things that much weirder. If you switch off and watch the action unfold and the visuals stimulate your eyeballs, Universal Soldier Day Of Reckoning will definitely be a film you'll want to talk about, that's why it sits in Volume 1.
Disc 7
CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982)
Releasing the same year as our disk 1 movie and really catapulting Schwarzenegger into the mainstream, Conan The Barbarian is a brutal, violent and exciting, albeit, leisurely paced Fantasy Action film. It's not what most people would initially think would be an ideal candidate for The Ultimate Action Collection but stick with me. Conan follows the title hero from a child who witnessed his family and clan get slaughtered by a snake cult lead by the merciless Thulsa Doom. Taken and sold into slavery, Conan is eventually trained to become a pit fighter for his slave master, becoming the champion and a blood thirsty brute in the process. He's set free and sets out on a mission of revenge against Thulsa Doom, joining up with and falling in love with a female thief called Valeria.
Conan, like I said is a leisurely paced film, it's not the full on action assault of what you'd expect from a Schwarzenegger Fantasy film, a fact that was supposedly rectified with Conan The destroyer but that film is pretty damn sucky, so don't go into it expecting a lot of action. While it does have action, writer Oliver Stone and director Jon Milius focus more on Conan's character, a rare feat for a Schwarzenegger movie, this allows Arnie to try acting, not that he wasn't before, but to try something more than what he previously did in Hercules In New York or Cactus Jack and it sort of works but he was cast due to the fact he looks like the Frank Frazetta artwork. Conan The Barbarian is a fantastic fantasy action film that was influential in the 1980s and led to alot of imitations and it's also fucking awesome.
Disc 8
FAST FIVE (2011)
Hands down the best of the Fast & Furious series. This is mainly due to Chris Morgan's script, evolving the series from street racer drama to full on heist action and the inclusion of Dwayne Johnson's Luke Hobbs as an Interpol agent on the trail of the recently escaped Dominic Torretto. Fast Five takes us out of LA to the mean streets of the Brazilian Favela's for a film that's jam packed with gun battles, beat downs and one of the most incredible chase scenes ever made, where a safe is dragged through the streets of Rio while being pursued by police, smashing the shit out of anything that stands in its way. Not just the action, but the story is also very good for a F&F movie and gives a little more character development and humanity to the "family". The franchise was feeling a little stale by the end of the fourth film, it was still a series about street racers and undercover cops but Fast Five took them to the next level. While not realistic, it's still more grounded in reality to what the series has become, the street racer themes have almost completely been eradicated and the series is more on a par with the movies coming out of Marvel, souped up, superhero action with too much of a reliance on CGI, but, and I say this as a fan boy, I still do love me a Fast & Furious film.
Disc 9
JOHN WICK (2014)
John Wick came from nowhere and set the world on fire with it's super choreographed, brilliantly shot Action and comeback for Keanu Reeves, who embodies Wick to the point one wonders where Wick ends and Reeves begins. The training and determination Reeves put in to Wick can only be described as breathtaking. John Wick is a rather lower budgeted action film about a widower who's beloved dog, the last gift from his wife, is killed by some thugs out to steal his bitchin' muscle car. But the thugs, who work for a Russian gangster, didn't realise who's dog they killed and who's car they stole. They killed the dog of John Wick, the single most proficient Assassin in the world, or as Vigo, our crimeboss explains, he's the man you call to kill the boogeyman. Wick goes on a roaring rampage of revenge for the death of his dog that takes him deep into the criminal underworld of New York, a world we would go much deeper into in the subsequent sequels, taking out henchman after henchman with a double tap here, a head shot there and more Brazilian Jiu-jitsu you can shake leaf at. How did Wick become such a big hit? Well It's to do with the simple, liner narrative, the near expert levels of cinematic world building and of course, it's bone crunching, bullet riddling action, much more stylish and surprisingly grounded fight scenes compared to Reeves' other Action trilogy, The Matrix. John Wick is modern action filmmaking at it's best and we should all bask in it neon, bullet spraying glow.
Disc 10
FIRESTORM (1998)
A bit of an odd choice for this first volume but there's just something about Firestorm that sticks with me. The photography by DOP Stephen Windon (Fast & Furious 5,6,7 & 8) is fantastic and even more so under the direction of Oscar winning DOP Dean Semler (Mad Max 2, Dances With Wolves), the score by J. Peter Robinson is pretty good and we have a stellar cast of action including but not limited to Scott Glenn, William Forsythe, Barry Pepper and Suzie Amis and starring in his first lead role, former Defensive end for the Oakland/L.A raiders and Pro football hall of famer, Howie Long. Long plays a smoke jumper, the firefighters who jump into forest fires to put them out from the inside and he's actually not a terrible lead, he's pretty good and Firestorm is great lead role for Long who reminds me of another former NFL player turned action star, Brian" the Boz" Bosworth, star of the critically acclaimed, well by me anyway, action extravaganza, Stone Cold (1991). The plot follows the smoke jumpers who find themselves up against a group of escaped cons lead by William Forsythe. I'm not going to go headlong into the plot for Firestorm but imagine Die Hard in a forest fire and you're almost there. It's great fun and at a minor runtime of just 89 minutes, it's the perfect way to spend a rainy afternoon. Whatever did happen to Howie Long? He only made one more movie after Firestorm, the Elvis heist thriller, 3000 Miles To Graceland. He definitely could have done more within the Action genre.
THE ULTIMATE ACTION COLLECTION VOL.1
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