Overview: By 1972, McQueen was Hollywood’s highest-paid actor, peaking with director Sam Peckinpah on The Getaway - just McQueen and Ali MacGraw going on the run after the proverbial Bank Robbery Gone Wrong. Here’s how our Action Hero Championship Belt has changed hands since 1968. Does the belt hinge on a largely unspoken, admittedly ambiguous collective attitude? Absolutely. You don’t stop being The Guy just because you didn’t make a movie for 15 months. And actually, that would have been a better idea than Last Action Hero.īut that’s the whole point of the belt: If you’re The Guy, then you’re The Guy. He could have released a one-man movie called Arnold Puts on Sunscreen and grossed $100 million. Arnold didn’t have to release anything after the historic Total Recall/ Kindergarten Cop/ Terminator 2 trifecta. ![]() For instance, you can’t take 1992’s belt from an idle Arnold Schwarzenegger just because that lovable asshole Steven Seagal made Under Siege. You lose the belt only if you (a) stop producing quality work, or (b) get blown out of the water by someone else. 3: The body of work from a particular run matters more than a single movie. Remember this rule when we’re tackling the Vin Diesel issue. If Liam Neeson is beating people up, I’m there. The fewer words you can use to rope fans into your next project, the better. 2: During our hero’s apex, I would have seen his action movie no matter what the plot was, and no matter how lukewarm the reviews were.Ī good analogy: You know in no-limit hold ’em when someone calls a bet without glancing at their cards? They’re effectively saying, “I’m so good at poker, and I have so many chips right now, I don’t even care what my cards are.” That’s the final stage for an action movie star. This rule disqualifies A-listers like Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Paul Newman, Keanu Reeves, Robert Redford, George Clooney, Will Smith, Ben Affleck and Tom Cruise a second time, as well as everyone who ever played James Bond, 1 Ethan Hunt, Jason Bourne, Iron Man, Batman or any other manufactured studio hero. If I am not 100 percent convinced that my dude is winning that fight - OR, if I find it far-fetched that he’s winning it as he’s winning it - then he can’t capture the belt. Imagine the scariest dude on the planet (say, Nikola Pekovic after being fed a 32-ounce Red Bull/cocaine/stanozolol cocktail) beating up an entire bar, and then eventually he comes after our beloved hero. 1: Over everything else, I need to believe our hero can kick everyone’s ass, in any conceivable situation, at any given time. ![]() How many actors won that thing? How can we figure this out? And is this piece a convoluted excuse to celebrate the surprisingly awesome Liam Neeson era - which peaked yet again with the recent success of Non-Stop? To that end, I sketched out the past 46 years using a complicated set of guidelines I created three minutes ago. ![]() Check out McQueen’s Mustang zooming through the streets of San Francisco, and keep in mind, this scene was basically Julius Erving trying to dunk from the foul line, or Jimmy Snuka climbing to the top of the steel case to leap on Bob Backlund.Īfter McQueen (spoiler alert!) kills the bad guy at the end, he should have hoisted the first-ever Action Movie Star Championship Belt. Hold on, the mob murdered a witness Bullitt had been protecting? Sayonara, rulebook!!! The movie’s signature scene: a revolutionary, way-way-way-ahead-of-its-time car chase that paved the way for The French Connection, To Live and Die in L.A., Ronin, The Bourne Supremacy, and the entire Fast & Furious franchise. McQueen had flexed his action muscles before - most famously with the motorcycle scene from The Great Escape - but these were different stakes. That poster’s formula (“gun-toting tough guy + dangerous word + aggressive tagline”) unknowingly created the recipe for five decades of cop movies. McQueen changed everything in 1968 with Frank Bullitt, a renegade San Francisco cop who … (wait for it) … PLAYED BY HIS OWN RULES!!!!! Check out the poster for Bullitt and tell me this movie couldn’t be remade right now with Mark Wahlberg. Occasionally, Hollywood threw a curveball like Cool Hand Luke, but even those movies starred accomplished actors and had loftier goals than just “Meet our hero … he’s about to kick some ass.” If you needed a testosterone fix, you survived on a never-ending slew of Westerns and war movies, or any plot in which our heroes took an inordinately long time to plan an escape. You never saw John Wayne trapped on a luxury yacht with scheming terrorists, or Paul Newman tearing through Paris to find his kidnapped daughter. ![]() Before Steve McQueen, Hollywood didn’t produce action movies in the modern sense.
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