The Ultimate Ride: A Comparative Narrative Analysis of Action Sequences in 1980s and Contemporary Hollywood Action Cinema

Introduction

the action film genre has the dubious honor of being both the golden goose and the black sheep of the contemporary American film industry. Immensely popular among an increasingly globalized audience, the American action film can be considered the most commercially viable of all film genres in today's Hollywood landscape (Purse). A close look at the highest-grossing films of the last five years reveals that more than half in the list carry the label "Action" on IMDb. At the same time, the genre is disliked by cinephile bloggers, professional critics, and film theorists alike for a number of reasons. Bordwell summarizes the criticism neatly: "The action film has become the emblem of what Hollywood does worst" (104). Although this antagonism is present on different levels, one of the major grievances against the genre has been the supposed lack of narrative sophistication that characterizes the action film. Higgins remarks that "[i]n mainstream discourse, the genre is regularly lambasted for favoring spectacle over finely tuned narrative" (74). These discourses and their disdain for the "anti-narrative" action film are noticeable in both popular film criticism and academic analysis and often intersect with accusations directed toward the political economy of Hollywood. Welsh describes action films as "products designed by committees of writers and armies of technicians with one goal in mind: building bigger spectacle in order to generate millions of box-office dollars" (169). The most avid critics of the action film combine formal criticism with a type of ideological critique, with some authors considering such blockbuster products to be the ultimate expression of Debord theories on spectacle society (Polan; Warner; Crary).

However, in the last couple of years, a new tendency to bring the action film genre under reevaluation can be noted in film criticism and film studies alike. Anticipating the Academy Award nominations of 2018, a series of popular articles in magazines such as Sight and Sound (Pinkerton) and Big Think (Beres) addressed the longstanding bias against the action film among critics as well as award shows and attempted widespread acknowledgment of the genre's political and aesthetic significance. Recent academic contributions from Jones and Kendrick contribute to a similar shift in discourse, with the authors noticing a greater complexity in the action film form and themes than traditionally assumed. Nevertheless, the other side of this debate is also accompanied by a new wave of commotion, one lambasting the contemporary action film for becoming increasingly chaotic and superficial.

This article situates itself in the reconfiguring debates on narrative and spectacle in relation to action film by offering a comparative analysis of action sequences in two eras of action cinema. First, the concept of action cinema is discussed, and a synthesis is given of the relevant debates centering around the relationship between narrative and spectacle within the genre. Following this overview of contemporary debates, a theoretical framework is introduced that adopts a multangular approach to action and narrative. After elucidating the research's methodology, this article investigates how the action film form has developed over two eight-year periods (1981–88 and 2009–16). These results will be further elaborated upon through a comparative case study of Point Break (1991) and its remake of the same name (2015). Thus, the contribution of this article is threefold: First, through construction of a multangular approach to action and narrative, new perspectives are revealed to look at old questions. Second, by combining a qualitative and quantitative textual analysis, this article widens the understanding of how narrative and spectacle operate in the action film by way of the action sequence. And third, the comparative analysis and its complementing case studies provide an empirically grounded and lucidly illustrated overview of how action has changed in the action film genre over the course of three decades. Before outlining these results and their theoretical implications, however, the article provides an overview of the concepts and discussions relevant to the article's research question.

Spectacular Stories

Before the action film can be discussed, there is the problem of defining it. Although the action...