The Long and Short of Violence in Dumb Action Movies
This week I'm wrong about rituals of violence on film, plus the newest worst thing to ever happen to me
First: Vote Undecided in Your Primary
Today is New York State’s primary election day, and I joined the growing movement voting undecided (or in the case of NY, submitting a blank ballot) in protest of President Biden’s continued support of Israel’s genocide and starvation of Gaza, where children are dying of hunger—support that includes continuing to send weapons used to kill innocent civilians and international aid workers, attacks that have also prevented the delivery of desperately needed aid.
I encourage you to vote undecided in your own primaries as a way to demand a change in American policy that could save lives.
Jake Gyllenhaal Has More Abs Than Emotions
Over the past few days, I watched Amazon Prime’s new streaming film Road House, a Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle directed by Doug Liman that did scratch my itch for a truly mindless action film. Set in the Florida Keys (a change from the Patrick Swayze original, which was far gorier), the film centers on Gyllenhaal’s Dalton, a former UFC fighter who is hired to be a bouncer for a bar suffering from a rowdy clientele. It turns out there’s a conspiracy to steal the Road House by a local fratty-rich boy, and Dalton has to fist-fight an increasingly violent line-up of goons in order to save the bar (and potentially the livelihood of the residents of this small community? The film carries its politics like a used dog-poop-bag). There are also women in the film.
The film takes a lot of time to emphasize that Dalton is uncomfortable with his violent nature, which he expresses with a few cryptic lines about how “nobody wins a fight” and “I am afraid,” and he ups his emotional range from “tired babysitter” to “angry tired babysitter” by the climax of the film. A beautiful woman decides to project a few more emotions onto him so he has someone to save later on.
Part of me really enjoyed this movie. The early action scenes are fun and well choreographed—quick, propulsive moments that highlight the characters involved. Gyllenhaal creates just enough nuance from his vocal fry to keep it engaging. But as the film progresses, the action becomes tonally haphazard and the stakes become increasingly untethered from any of the earlier emotional stakes. And it’s because the movie can’t decide on its lane as an action movie—what tradition and style it wants to follow.
Historically, some of the best action films have featured only brief, fleeting moments of violence. Action as a genre owes a tremendous amount to the early western, where the focus was far more on the lead-up to a shoot-out than the shoot-out itself (a feature that developed as much from the Hayes Code as from film-making sensibilities). If you watch Once Upon a Time in the West, a lot of people get shot—but the focus is on the preparation for conflict, on the positioning of characters, on the way they reveal their internality through how they approach the coming brutality. The shooting itself is only seconds of the total film. Because of the focus on the preparation of literal and thematic conflicts, even moments that end peacefully are imbued with desperation. Action becomes a synergy between the civilized ritual and the uncivilized cruelty of power.
More recently, violence on film has become increasingly cartoonish and extended. Individual moments in fights are less impactful—punches and strikes have only fleeting impacts on the state of play—which both allows action sequences to last longer and robs them of their impact. That trend is especially clear in the superhero films of the last 20 years, where action almost takes the place of dialogue (which is also why those films feature witty one-liners throughout their fight scenes, because their insignificance and the impossibility of actual consequences is understood by the audience)—but has also bled into other parts of the action genre. At its best (such as in Liman’s addictively ridiculous The Edge of Tomorrow), the lack of stakes is built into the premise of the film and opens up comedic and storytelling possibilities. At its worst (such as in most of the MCU’s recent output) it makes everything feel unbearably stupid.
There is a middle ground—a sweet spot where the best action films make their living. A place where violence feels significant—feels powerful—feels, often, (appropriately), deeply wrong and disturbing—where the moments before and after that violence are given their space to breathe and create stakes—and lasts exactly as long (and more importantly) as briefly as that emotional impact requires. I wrote a few weeks ago about Shōgun, a show which takes this approach with quick and brutal action scenes. The best pure action movies of the last 40 years, from Die Hard to Alien to Mad Max: Fury Road to Point Break have all had the same approach. There is a balance between spectacle and impact that elevates the emotional and physical stakes at the same time. Doug Liman also directed one of the best examples in this category, with The Bourne Identity, where a surprisingly small amount of the film features direct violence—a scarcity which is used to emphasize and escalate the fear and self-loathing and confusion of its main character.
Road House, unfortunately, never decides what kind of action film it wants to be. The early action understands the value of restraint—of building tension—but by the end of the film combatants are literally driving through walls in their eagerness to get a fight started. Early fights make each punch feel painful—but by midway through the film characters are getting hit by golf clubs and stabbed with knives and immediately performing outlandish martial-arts moves. Parts of the film show how devastating a concussion or a broken bone can be—allowing the focus to be on the trauma of violence—but in the final fight Gyllenhaal (and a hilariously bad Conor McGregor) go from somber moments acknowledging the profound damage they are doing to one another to quips about pianos, and then back again. Dalton is a character whose entire arc revolves around the unresolved trauma from the impact of his violence in UFC—and as previously mentioned, most of his “depth” comes from his initial reluctance to use violence because of that trauma—but the film (cowardly) refuses to make the impact of his decision to revert to murderous force feel costly. The result is a tonal mishmash that fails to reach its genre potential or meet the capabilities of its stars. The action in Road House undercuts its own best ideas.
If you need to kill 2 hours and you want to be able to count your cumulative thoughts and emotions on one hand, it’s not a bad choice. Otherwise, you can join me in eager anticipation of Dev Patel’s Monkey Man hitting theaters.
The New Worst Thing That’s Ever Happened to Me
It finally happened.
On Saturday, I enjoyed a day wandering Manhattan checking out bookstores and watching basketball before going to my friend’s flag football game.
Without about half an hour to kill, I decided to walk into a small dive bar and have one drink. It was moderately crowded, but as I walked through the door I immediately made eye contact with a young woman playing pool. It was a moment I’ve always known would come, that I’ve been dreading, that makes me feel ready to walk into a retirement home.
The young woman—let’s call her “Maggie”—was my former student and JV girls soccer player at my first job teaching high school in 2017. Someone who knew me as “Coach Brown,” who had asked me for help with her homework, who I had run warm up laps with every afternoon when I was 24 years old.
Now she was (completely legally) having a drink while dominating (as far as I could tell) her friends in a game of pool. I almost walked out on the spot.
We did end up having a lovely conversation—she is on her way to a masters degree and it was genuinely a thrill to see how confident and accomplished she was as an adult—it’s always a relief when your tiny role in someone’s development didn’t end up ruining their life—but the moment I left the bar my back started hurting and I wondered if I should look for my AARP membership offer in the mail.