Part 2 – The Near Perfect
Series Navigation
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Mediocre |
Part 10: The Poor |
Part 11: The Failures
The hardest problem in action is the ensemble, and two films in this tier solve it the same way. The Magnificent Seven makes every recruitment scene a demonstration of a different skill, so seven men are distinct by the time the hiring ends without a word of biography. Tombstone does it with faces and a handful of scenes each.
The other thing this tier is good at is compression. Dredd is one building on one day. Escape from New York gives Snake a countdown in his own bloodstream. Police Story escalates by destroying progressively larger structures and nothing else.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the second of eleven parts.
The Magnificent Seven introduces seven men through seven tasks and never writes a biography. Build an ensemble the reader can keep apart using the Protagonist Handbook.
1. The Mummy Trilogy (1999-2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Mummy Trilogy (1999-2008)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"An adventure series wearing a horror franchise’s name, and the first one is genuinely good."
Stephen Sommers took a property Universal had been reviving since 1932 and made it an adventure comedy instead of a horror picture. The 1999 film cost around eighty million dollars, took over four hundred, and the decision to play it light is the entire reason it worked when the Tom Cruise version twenty years later did not.
Brendan Fraser is the load-bearing element. He plays Rick O’Connell as competent and faintly amused by his own situation, never winking at the audience and never taking the supernatural material more seriously than it can bear. Almost nobody else of that generation could hold both registers at once.
Rachel Weisz’s Evelyn is a librarian who reads hieroglyphs, gets drunk, knocks over an entire archive and is the person who actually solves the plot. The film treats her expertise as the reason she is present instead of a characteristic she happens to possess. John Hannah plays her brother across all three films.
The Mummy Returns in 2001 is louder and busier and still works on the strength of the same cast. The Scorpion King effect at the end is the most-mocked digital work of its year and it is genuinely as bad as its reputation, and the film survives it because everything around it is practical.
Tomb of the Dragon Emperor in 2008 is the collapse. Weisz declined to return, the setting moves to China with no connection to anything established, and the picture is a demonstration of what happens when a series keeps the premise and loses the people. Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh were brought in and neither could rescue it.
2. The Bourne Series (2002-2016) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Bourne Series (2002-2016)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"The films that made Bond stop and start again."
Doug Liman made the first in 2002 and Paul Greengrass made the two that defined the style. The films arrived while the Bond series was still doing invisible cars, and the contrast reset the entire genre inside three years. Robert Ludlum published the first novel in 1980 and died before the film was made.
The Waterloo Station sequence in Ultimatum is the best surveillance set piece anybody has shot. Bourne is directing a journalist by phone through a station full of watchers, the geography is established in advance, and the audience can track every position on both sides for eight minutes.
The fights are the series signature and the Tangier apartment fight is the one people cite. A rolled magazine and a hand towel against a knife, shot close, cut fast, and choreographed by Jeff Imada around Filipino martial arts instead of anything cinematic. Julia Stiles, Joan Allen and Brian Cox recur across the first three pictures.
The amnesia premise does more work than it usually does. Bourne discovers his own capabilities in the same moment the audience does, so every competence beat lands as a reveal instead of a demonstration. That structure is why the first film still holds up. John Powell scored all five and the Moby track closes every one of them.
Jason Bourne in 2016 is the one the series did not need. Greengrass and Damon returned, the character has nothing left to discover about himself, and the film has to invent a new revelation about his father to give him a reason to be moving.
3. The Dark Knight (2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Dark Knight (2008)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 9.0/10
"The film that set the post-2008 standard, and the villain has no plan he will admit to."
Nolan shot six sequences in IMAX, the first narrative feature to use the format that way, and the opening bank robbery was designed to be seen at that scale. The film took over a billion dollars and remains the highest-regarded comic adaptation ever made. Wally Pfister shot it and Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard scored it together.
Heath Ledger won a posthumous Academy Award for a Joker with no origin, no name and two contradictory explanations for his own scars. The character gives a different account each time and the film never indicates which one is true, because the point is that he does not have a history that would explain him.
The structure is a series of moral tests with no clean outcomes. The ferries, the hospital, the interrogation, the choice between Rachel and Dent. Every one is constructed so that winning costs something, and the film refuses to let Batman be correct without a price attached.
Aaron Eckhart’s Dent is the film’s actual subject and the reason the last act works. The Joker’s entire plan is aimed at him instead of at Batman, and the coin is set up an hour earlier as a symbol of a man who removes chance from his own decisions.
The truck flip on Lower Wacker Drive was practical, achieved with a piston in the trailer, and shot in one take with no digital assistance. Nolan’s insistence on doing things in camera is the reason the film’s action still reads as physically real seventeen years later.
4. Dredd (2012) [full review]
► Read the full review of Dredd (2012)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"A single-day siege in one building, and Garland wrote it."
Alex Garland wrote it, Pete Travis is credited as director, and the production history is disputed enough that Garland was publicly campaigned for a co-director credit. It cost around forty-five million dollars and lost money, and it is the best comic adaptation nobody saw. John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra created the character for 2000 AD in 1977.
The compression is the whole design. One block, one day, one drug, and Dredd never removes the helmet because Karl Urban insisted the character never does in the source material. Everything the performance needs has to come from the jaw and the voice. Olivia Thirlby plays Anderson and provides the film’s only point of view from outside.
The Slo-Mo sequences are the visual argument. A narcotic that makes time appear to run at one percent speed, shot at high frame rates with water, glass and smoke, and Anthony Dod Mantle photographs the drug as genuinely beautiful while the film treats it as a catastrophe.
Lena Headey’s Ma-Ma is the antagonist and the performance is built on total exhaustion. She is not theatrical, she does not enjoy the power, and she runs a block through violence because it is the only thing she knows how to administer. Paul Leonard-Morgan scored it and the Slo-Mo cues are built on slowed vocal samples.
The Joker gets two origin stories and neither is confirmed, because a man with an explanation can be predicted. Withhold the history using the Antagonist Handbook.
5. Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)
RLR: 9.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"The best Die Hard sequel, and its only real problem is not being the first one."
McTiernan returned for the third film and it is the only sequel in the series that has a structural idea of its own. The original screenplay was an unrelated script called Simon Says, rewritten to accommodate McClane. That is why the puzzle plot feels imported.
Samuel L. Jackson’s Zeus Carver is the reason it works. He does not want to be there, he is openly contemptuous of McClane, and the relationship never resolves into friendship. The film keeps them arguing about race, competence and responsibility for two hours. Jeremy Irons plays Simon Gruber and is the brother of the first film’s antagonist.
The riddles are the engine and Simon uses them as misdirection instead of obstacles. Every puzzle is designed to occupy the entire New York police department while a bullion vault is emptied under Wall Street, and the audience is being played alongside the characters. Colleen Camp appears briefly as an officer in the opening.
The water jug problem is the sequence everybody remembers and it is genuinely solvable on screen. Three gallons, five gallons, four gallons required, and McTiernan shoots it in real time with a bomb attached so the arithmetic carries actual pressure. It took over three hundred and sixty million dollars, the biggest in the series.
6. The Magnificent Seven (1960) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Magnificent Seven (1960)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"Seven characters, two hours, and every one distinct by the end of the recruitment."
John Sturges remade Seven Samurai as a western with Kurosawa’s blessing, and Kurosawa sent him a ceremonial sword afterward. Elmer Bernstein’s score is the most recognizable theme in American film and was written in about two weeks. Sturges went on to make The Great Escape three years later with several of the same men.
The recruitment sequence is the reason the film endures. Each man is introduced through a demonstration of a specific skill, so by the time the hiring ends seven people are distinct without a line of biography having been spoken. Britt’s knife, Vin’s marksmanship and O’Reilly’s silence do all of it.
Steve McQueen spent the production stealing scenes from Yul Brynner through small physical business, shaking shotgun shells, checking his hat, adjusting his position in frame. Brynner noticed, complained, and the behavior is visible in almost every two-shot. Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn and Brad Dexter complete the seven.
The film softens Kurosawa’s argument considerably. The farmers are less morally complicated, the gunmen are more heroic, and the observation that the villagers are the ones who win survives only as a closing line instead of the whole point. Eli Wallach plays Calvera and gets the film’s best villain speech about sheep.
7. The Wild Bunch (1969) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Wild Bunch (1969)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"Technically revolutionary and morally serious at once, rarer than its reputation suggests."
Peckinpah cut the opening massacre using six cameras running at different frame rates and assembled it from over three thousand splices. The film has more cuts than any American picture made to that point and the technique changed screen violence permanently. Warner Bros. cut the film after release and the full version was not restored until 1995.
The premise is a group of aging outlaws who have outlived their profession. Pike’s crew are not romantic, they are obsolete, and the film’s interest is in men who know their methods no longer work and have nothing else available to them. Lucien Ballard shot it in Mexico across seventy days in extreme heat.
William Holden plays Pike as somebody carrying a specific failure he cannot stop revisiting. The flashbacks are brief and unexplained, Robert Ryan’s Thornton is hunting him under duress, and the two men were partners in a life neither will discuss. Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates and Ben Johnson fill out the crew.
The final walk is four men crossing a courtyard toward a machine gun. Nothing is said, nobody explains the decision, and Peckinpah holds the shot long enough that the audience understands they are choosing to die instead of continuing to live as they have been. Jerry Fielding was nominated for the score and lost.
8. Dirty Harry Pentalogy (1971-1988) [full review]
► Read the full review of Dirty Harry Pentalogy (1971-1988)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"Five films across seventeen years, and the first is still argued about."
Five films across seventeen years, and the first one in 1971 is a genuinely uncomfortable piece of work that the sequels spend their time softening. Don Siegel directed it and Frank Sinatra, John Wayne and Steve McQueen all passed before Eastwood took it. Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink wrote the original screenplay.
The original’s argument is explicitly about procedure obstructing justice, and the film is not subtle about which side it is on. Callahan throws his badge into a pond in the last shot, a gesture Eastwood argued for and Siegel initially resisted. Andrew Robinson plays Scorpio and was threatened by viewers afterward.
Magnum Force in 1973 is the response to the criticism. Callahan hunts a death squad of young officers doing exactly what the first film was accused of endorsing, and the screenplay by John Milius and Michael Cimino is the most interesting in the series. Ted Post directed the second film and had worked with Eastwood on Rawhide.
The Enforcer and Sudden Impact are the franchise as routine, with Sudden Impact supplying the make my day line that outlived every other thing in the sequence. The Dead Pool in 1988 is a television episode at feature length with an early Jim Carrey. Buddy Van Horn directed The Dead Pool and had been Eastwood’s stunt coordinator.
9. The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974 and 2009) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974 and 2009)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"A hijacking as a test of whether a city can physically deliver a million dollars in an hour."
Joseph Sargent’s 1974 film is a procedural about a subway hijacking where the hardest problem is bureaucratic. A train cannot go anywhere except forward on a track the authorities control, so the hijackers’ plan has to account for an escape that appears impossible. Peter Stone adapted John Godey’s novel, published two years earlier.
Walter Matthau plays a transit lieutenant with no heroism available to him at all. He is tired, sarcastic, and spends the film on a radio doing the only job the situation permits, talking. Robert Shaw’s Mr Blue is precise, military and entirely unbothered. Jerry Stiller plays the transit officer alongside him.
The color-coded aliases were lifted directly for Reservoir Dogs and Tarantino has said so repeatedly. David Shire’s score is a twelve-tone jazz arrangement that has aged considerably better than most seventies thriller music. Martin Balsam and Hector Elizondo play the other two hijackers. Godey was a pseudonym for the novelist Morton Freedgood.
Tony Scott’s 2009 remake with Denzel Washington and John Travolta replaces the bureaucratic problem with a personal one and loses the premise in the process. The original works because nobody in it is exceptional and everybody is constrained by the system they work inside. Shire went on to score All the President’s Men and The Conversation.
Escape from New York puts the countdown inside the protagonist’s neck so it cannot be disarmed or handed off. Install pressure that holds, in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
10. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"Starts as one film and quietly becomes another without announcing it."
Eastwood removed Philip Kaufman as director two weeks into production and took over himself, an episode that produced a Directors Guild rule preventing exactly that. He has called it the best film he made in that decade and the argument is reasonable. Forrest Carter wrote the source novel and his own biography turned out to be invented.
The structure is accumulation. Josey starts alone and collects an old Cherokee, a young Navajo woman, a family from Kansas, a dog and a town, and the film never once has anybody articulate that a new family is forming. Sondra Locke plays Laura Lee and met Eastwood on this production.
Chief Dan George’s Lone Watie has the best material in the picture. His account of the delegation to Washington, delivered flat, is the film’s most effective statement about what was done, and it is funnier than that description suggests. Bruce Surtees shot it and worked with Eastwood across a dozen films.
The confrontation with Ten Bears is the scene that distinguishes it from every other western of the period. Two men agree terms on a plain with no violence at all, and Eastwood shoots it as a genuine negotiation between equals with something to lose. Will Sampson plays Ten Bears a year after One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
11. Escape from New York (1981) [full review]
► Read the full review of Escape from New York (1981)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"Manhattan as a maximum security prison, and Snake has a countdown in his bloodstream."
Carpenter wrote it in 1974 after Watergate and could not sell it until Halloween made him bankable. It was made for around six million dollars and the whole of Manhattan is played by East St. Louis, recently burned and available. Nick Castle co-wrote it and had played the shape in Halloween three years earlier.
Snake Plissken is a design masterpiece of economy. The eyepatch, the name, the assumption that he is dead, and a history the film never explains at any point. Kurt Russell built the voice on Clint Eastwood and the performance never breaks it. Debra Hill produced it with Larry Franco for Avco Embassy.
The timer is the structure. Explosive charges in his neck, twenty-two hours, and a countdown the audience can check at any point. Carpenter puts the clock inside the protagonist’s body so it cannot be negotiated, disarmed or left behind. Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasence and Adrienne Barbeau are all in it.
The Duke’s chandeliered Cadillac, the Broadway stage show, the boxing match in Madison Square Garden. Carpenter builds the island through details that imply an entire society nobody explains, and the film is ninety-nine minutes long because it never stops to. Russell has said Carpenter let him build the character with almost no direction.
12. Conan the Barbarian (1982) [full review]
► Read the full review of Conan the Barbarian (1982)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
"One of the strangest mainstream studio films of the eighties, and it means every word."
John Milius wrote it with Oliver Stone and shot it in Spain with Schwarzenegger at thirty-four, in a part that required almost no English. Basil Poledouris scored it and the Anvil of Crom is one of the few pieces of film music that entirely justifies a picture.
The first twenty minutes have almost no dialogue. A village is destroyed, a boy is chained to a wheel for years, and the film tells the whole of its setup in images while Poledouris carries the emotional weight. Almost nothing about it is conventionally structured.
James Earl Jones plays Thulsa Doom as a man who has genuinely stopped being interested in violence. The snake transformation is practical and slow, and the speech about flesh and steel is the best-written material in the film. Robert E. Howard created the character for Weird Tales in 1932.
The riddle of steel is the spine of the whole thing and Milius resolves it correctly. Conan’s father says the steel is what matters, Doom demonstrates that it is not, and the film ends without anybody stating the conclusion out loud. Schwarzenegger trained for months and performed nearly all of the swordwork.
13. Police Story (1985) [full review]
► Read the full review of Police Story (1985)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"Chan established his entire template here, and the pole slide nearly ended him."
Chan directed it himself after a bad experience on The Protector, and the whole film is a corrective to American action filmmaking of the period. It was made for around ten million Hong Kong dollars and the production injured most of the stunt team. Chan co-wrote it with Edward Tang and the two worked together for two decades.
The hillside shanty town sequence is the opening and Chan destroys the entire set with cars driving through it. The buses, the umbrella hanging from a moving double-decker and the pursuit on foot are all real, and the shot of him hanging from the bus is one take.
Chan burned both hands badly on the pole, dislocated his pelvis and damaged a vertebra performing the slide, and the production shut down while he recovered. Outtakes over the closing credits show the injury happening. That became a signature of every film he made afterward.
The shopping center finale is the most dangerous thing he ever filmed. He slid down an electrified pole through several floors of glass, burned his hands badly, dislocated his pelvis and damaged a vertebra, and the film shows the stunt from three angles before cutting.
The comedy and the violence are held in the same register throughout. A telephone sequence with four handsets, a courtroom farce, and a fight where Chan is genuinely losing, and none of the three modes undermines the others. Maggie Cheung plays May and was injured during the production herself.
Men in Black processes aliens through immigration and RoboCop hides its politics in the advertisements. Two ways to build a world in the World Builder’s Handbook.
14. Highlander (1986) [full review]
► Read the full review of Highlander (1986)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"Sixteenth-century Scotland and 1985 New York, scored by Queen."
Russell Mulcahy came from music videos and the film is shot like one, with whip pans, wide lenses and transitions that cut between 1985 New York and sixteenth century Scotland on a matched movement. Queen wrote the score and it is inseparable from the picture.
The casting is famously inverted. Christopher Lambert is a French actor playing a Scotsman and Sean Connery is a Scottish actor playing a Spaniard with an Egyptian name. It should not work and Connery’s forty minutes of screen time carry the entire film. Gregory Widen wrote the first draft as a student screenplay at UCLA.
The premise is the durable part. Immortals who can only be killed by decapitation, a prize nobody will describe, and centuries of accumulated loss the film delivers through one flashback of a wife aging while the protagonist does not. Roxanne Hart plays the metallurgist and Beatie Edney the wife in the flashbacks.
The Kurgan is Clancy Brown at maximum volume and the church sequence is the best thing in the film. He is genuinely funny, genuinely frightening, and the performance operates at a scale nothing else in the picture attempts to match. It failed in cinemas and became a substantial success on video.
15. RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1993, 2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of RoboCop (1987, 1990, 1993, 2014)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"One of the most accomplished critiques of corporate America ever put in an action film."
Verhoeven’s 1987 film is a satire that most of its audience took at face value, the risk it accepted. The violence is deliberately excessive, the advertisements between scenes are the argument, and the film is about a corporation privatizing a police department. Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner wrote the original screenplay.
Peter Weller trained with a mime for months to build the movement, and the suit was so difficult to work in that he lost significant weight during production. The performance is almost entirely jaw, mouth and posture, and it is the reason the character reads as a person.
Verhoeven has said he read the script, threw it away, and was persuaded to reconsider by his wife, who pointed out what it was actually doing underneath the violence. The satire is the reason the film survives and the reason most of its first audience missed the point entirely.
The 1990 sequel was written by Frank Miller and heavily rewritten, and it keeps the satire while losing the structure. RoboCop 3 in 1993 is rated for children, removes the violence the satire depended on, and is the clearest demonstration in the series of what the tone was doing.
Jose Padilha’s 2014 remake is competent and has no argument. It makes the corporation ambiguous, the violence bloodless and the protagonist aware of his own history from the start, removing the reconstruction that the original film was actually about. Rob Bottin built the suit and the ED-209 was stop-motion by Phil Tippett.
16. Lethal Weapon (1987) [full review]
► Read the full review of Lethal Weapon (1987)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"The film that set the buddy-cop template for two decades."
Shane Black wrote it at twenty-four and sold it for a quarter of a million dollars, making him the highest-paid new screenwriter in Hollywood. Richard Donner directed and softened the script substantially, and Black has been public about which version he preferred. Black went on to write The Last Boy Scout and direct Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
Riggs is genuinely suicidal in the first act and the film does not treat it as a character quirk. The sequence with the pistol in his mouth is played straight, at length, and Mel Gibson commits to it in a way that makes the buddy comedy that follows harder to dismiss.
Danny Glover’s Murtaugh is the actual innovation. He has a family, a house, a boat he cannot afford and an age he mentions constantly, and giving one half of the pairing a settled domestic life is what generates every scene of friction between them. Mitchell Ryan plays the General and Tom Atkins appears in the opening.
Gary Busey’s Mr Joshua is an antagonist built as a mirror. Same training, same war, same damage, and no attachments at all. The final fight is on a lawn in the rain and the film stages it as two men who recognize each other. Michael Kamen scored it with Eric Clapton and David Sanborn playing throughout.
17. Total Recall (1990) [full review]
► Read the full review of Total Recall (1990)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"Never resolves whether any of it is happening, and every element supports both readings."
Verhoeven adapted a Philip K. Dick story of about twenty-five pages into a sixty-five-million-dollar picture and kept the central ambiguity intact. Rob Bottin built the practical effects, the film won a special Academy Award for them, and almost none of it is digital. Dick published We Can Remember It for You Wholesale in 1966.
The ambiguity is properly maintained. Every element of the Mars adventure was described in the Rekall sales pitch before Quaid bought the package, the doctor who arrives to explain the delusion sweats at the wrong moment, and the film never resolves which reading is correct.
Verhoeven’s satire is running underneath the whole picture. The Johnny Cab, the news broadcasts, the corporate control of the air supply, and the framing of a colonial administration as a customer service problem. The violence is cartoonish on purpose. David Cronenberg spent a year developing a version that was never made.
Schwarzenegger is well used here in a way he rarely was. Quaid is confused for most of the running time, discovers he was a worse person before the memory wipe, and the film gives him an actual decision at the end about which version of himself to be.
Conan opens on twenty near-silent minutes and The Wild Bunch ends without anybody explaining the decision. What to leave unsaid is in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
18. Tombstone (1993) [full review]
► Read the full review of Tombstone (1993)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"A western that works as an ensemble instead of a duel."
Kevin Jarre wrote it and directed the first month before being removed, and George P. Cosmatos took over with Kurt Russell directing substantially in practice. Russell has said as much publicly and Cosmatos is dead, so the account stands unchallenged. Jarre also wrote Glory and had been developing this for several years.
Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday is the best supporting performance in any western. He is dying throughout, he knows it, and the performance is built on a man using wit as the only resource he has left. The huckleberry line is delivered as a genuine invitation.
The ensemble is handled through faces and short scenes instead of biography. Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Michael Biehn, Powers Boothe and Stephen Lang are each established in two or three moments and the audience can keep all of them apart. Robert Mitchum narrates the opening and closing.
The gunfight at the O.K. Corral happens at the midpoint and lasts about thirty seconds, historically accurate and structurally correct. The film is about what happens afterward, and the vendetta ride is the material the other Tombstone films leave out. It was released six months before Kevin Costner’s rival Wyatt Earp and beat it soundly.
19. Starship Troopers (1997) [full review]
► Read the full review of Starship Troopers (1997)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"One of the most misunderstood films of the nineties and one of its best satires."
Verhoeven never finished Heinlein’s novel, found it repellent, and made a film advertising the ideology it is attacking. It cost around one hundred million dollars, lost money, was reviewed as an endorsement of fascism, and has been steadily reassessed ever since. Heinlein published the novel in 1959 and it won the Hugo Award.
The propaganda broadcasts are the argument and they are placed where advertisements would go. Would you like to know more, children handling live ammunition, a newsreel about civic responsibility. The film’s position is stated entirely through material the plot treats as background. Ed Neumeier wrote it, ten years after writing RoboCop for the same director.
Verhoeven grew up in the occupied Netherlands and has been explicit that the film is about what he watched as a child. He never finished the novel, found what he read of it repellent, and made a picture that advertises the ideology it is attacking without a single scene of commentary.
The casting is the joke most people missed. Every lead is blond, symmetrical and delivering lines with the sincerity of a daytime soap, because Verhoeven cast them from exactly that world on purpose. Neil Patrick Harris arrives in the last act in an SS uniform.
The bug sequences are the reason it still plays. Phil Tippett’s creature work holds up almost thirty years later, the Klendathu landing is a genuine slaughter, and the film never gives the audience a victory that is not immediately undercut. Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards and Dina Meyer lead the cast.
20. Men in Black (1997) [full review]
► Read the full review of Men in Black (1997)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"Structurally the most efficient science fiction comedy of its decade."
Barry Sonnenfeld made it from a small comic nobody had read, cast Tommy Lee Jones opposite Will Smith at the height of his charm, and built the whole thing on a premise that generates comedy automatically: aliens are real, bureaucratic and extremely dull to process.
Rick Baker’s creature design is the durable achievement. Practical puppets and suits for almost everything, with digital work reserved for what could not be built, and the creatures have weight in the frame in a way the sequels lost immediately. Lowell Cunningham created the comic for Aircel in 1990.
The world-building is delivered as paperwork. Forms, waiting rooms, a licensing department, a tabloid rack used as intelligence. Every fantastic element arrives attached to an administrative process and the film never stops to marvel at any of it. Ed Solomon wrote the screenplay and had come from Bill and Ted.
The ending is the best idea in the picture. The galaxy is on Orion’s belt, the belt is a cat’s collar, and the film closes by pulling out until the entire universe is a marble in a game being played by something else. Danny Elfman scored it and was nominated for the main theme.
Honorable Mentions: Action Films Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in this tier or close to it and each is on the list.
Mad Max (1979)
Miller made it for around four hundred thousand Australian dollars with real motorcycle clubs riding as extras. The film was dubbed into American English for its first release there and the original track was not restored for decades.
Hard Target (1993)
Woo’s first American film, with Van Damme hunted through New Orleans by men paying to do it. The studio cut it repeatedly and the surviving version still contains the best action Woo shot outside Hong Kong.
Once Upon a Time in China (1991)
Tsui Hark gave Jet Li the Wong Fei-hung role and built the ladder fight around genuine wushu instead of wire work. The film is also a serious argument about Chinese modernization that the fights never interrupt.
Supercop (1992)
Michelle Yeoh rides a motorcycle onto a moving train and Chan hangs from a helicopter ladder over Kuala Lumpur. Yeoh performed her own stunts throughout and several of them are more dangerous than his.
Ip Man (2008)
Donnie Yen plays the Wing Chun master who taught Bruce Lee, and the ten-man sparring sequence is shot wide and held. The film is careful about its history in a way the three sequels progressively were not.
SPL (2005)
Also released as Kill Zone, with Donnie Yen against Wu Jing in an alley with a baton and a knife. The fight lasts ninety seconds, was choreographed in a day, and is the most efficient thing either man ever filmed.
Exiled (2006)
Johnnie To staged a gunfight around a rolling can and let the choreography follow physics instead of intention. Nobody in it explains the plot and the film is better for treating loyalty as something already established.
The Mission (1999)
Johnnie To put five bodyguards around a triad boss and built the shopping center standoff almost entirely on stillness. Nobody moves for long stretches and the tension comes from sightlines instead of action.
Merantau (2009)
Gareth Evans and Iko Uwais before The Raid, with silat shot in long takes in a Jakarta the film treats as genuinely dangerous. The elevator fight is the blueprint for everything they did afterward.
Warrior (2011)
Two estranged brothers end up in the same tournament and the film earns the coincidence across two hours of family history. Nick Nolte was nominated and the last fight is almost entirely about an apology nobody makes.
Cross of Iron (1977)
Peckinpah made the only major Western film about the Eastern Front from the German side, with James Coburn as a sergeant who despises his own officers. Orson Welles called it the best anti-war film he had seen.
633 Squadron (1964)
Mosquito bombers flying a Norwegian fjord at low level to destroy a factory under an overhang, filmed with real aircraft. Lucas has acknowledged it as a direct source for the Death Star trench run.
Dishonorable Mentions: Action Films That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had the budget, the cast or the premise and lost it somewhere between the pitch and the edit.
Green Lantern (2011)
A protagonist whose power is limited only by imagination, given a film in which he mostly produces a fist and a car track. The suit was added digitally over a motion capture bodysuit and never looks attached to him.
Catwoman (2004)
Halle Berry won an Academy Award and a Razzie within three years, and collected the second one in person. The villain’s plan is a cosmetics product that disfigures anybody who stops using it.
Elektra (2005)
A spin-off from a film nobody liked, built around a character who was dead at the end of it. The action is shot so close and cut so fast that the choreography is genuinely impossible to follow.
The Spirit (2008)
Frank Miller directed alone and applied the Sin City visual scheme to material that was never noir. Samuel L. Jackson appears in a Nazi uniform in a scene the film does not explain at any point.
Max Payne (2008)
A game built entirely on bullet time, adapted into a film that uses the effect twice. The hallucinatory valkyries are treated as literal and the plot resolves through a corporate conspiracy nobody set up.
Assassin’s Creed (2016)
Michael Fassbender spends most of the film strapped to a machine watching somebody else have the adventure. The historical sequences are shot through dust and cut so heavily that the parkour never reads.
What Do You Think?
This tier is where the ensemble problem gets solved and where compression does the heaviest lifting. Dredd is one building on one day and it is rated with The Dark Knight. Tell me whether that holds.
Continue the Series
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Mediocre |
Part 10: The Poor |
Part 11: The Failures