Once upon a time, it was Arnold and/or Sly. But those days are long gone.
So who holds the title today? I was thinking about this the other day and a strange choice popped into my head: Angelina Jolie.
Her recent resume features The Tourist, Salt, Wanted, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
Is there anyone else out there with a better claim to the title? Christian Bale…maybe. But that’s for playing one character in three movies. Same thing applies to Robert Downey, Jr.
Like him or not, it’s Tom Cruise.
Jason Statham
What’s Matt Damon doing these days?
I’d probably go with Bruce Willis. I think he’s the only actor other than Jason Statham who brings audiences to a movie, rather than the character (e.g. Iron Man), the plot (Safe House), or the direction (Michael Bay). And of the two, he’s bigger.
I totally dig Bruce, but that means our biggest action star is what… nearly 60 years old?
I think the genre is out of fashion, so our action “stars” are a bit older than might be expected.
Just like America.
The concept of the “action star” is a 1980’s phenomenon. It didn’t exist before that, and it doesn’t exist now.
Ayup. Of course, these days the big action draws are comic book movies which tend to hide the actor behind the character. I think only Hugh Jackman (44) could have turned his run into the start of an action hero career, but instead he’s next appearing in a musical.
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is a name that comes to mind.
If so, some enterprising Hollywood type should take advantage of the lull and reintroduce the genre. The superhero movie is probably the closest modern equivalent, and I think it’s on the wane.
Hey, there’s lots of action in a musical, with the dancing and prancing and mincing and stuff!
You gonna say Singin’ in the Rain wasn’t an action movie? It’s got more wall-running than Spider-Man!
There isn’t really a standout “biggest” just a list of current action stars. Jason Statham, Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, Tom Cruise, Jet Li, Clive Owen, Daniel Craig. For female action stars, there’s Milla Jovovich, Angelina Jolie, Kate Beckinsale, Michelle Rodriguez.
I don’t think you have action stars these days, you have actors who act in action movies. I mean, IMHO, the best action sequence in any movie in 2010 was the hotel gunfight scene from Inception, and that featured Joseph Gordon-Levitt - who is non-one’s idea of an action star.
With a good enough director and a big enough SFX budget, *anyone *could be an action star. Was the latest Mission Impossible so good because it starred Tom Cruise, or because it was directed by Brad Bird? I say the latter, if only because the action sequences in the Incredibles were better than almost any of their live-action counterparts in recent years.
Jason Statham came to mind first when I saw the thread title. Bruce Willis is also a good pick. Dwayne Johnson has been doing exclusively kid-friendly movies these days so he’s out.
I think Angelina Jolie is actually an excellent choice too, possibly even better than Statham (because of name recognition) or Willis (because of age and other movies he does besides action these days)
He’s in a new one, with the stupid title of Premium Rush, as a bike courier who parkours his way through a city to escape the bad guys. Definitely an action movie.
I dunno; Errol Flynn was pretty much exclusively an action star in his early years, and moving through history there was Steve Reeves, Sean Connery, Bruce Lee, Clint Eastwood - which digresses a bit into the cowboy genre, but his films were more about killing than cow-ing - did I mention Bruce Lee? I admit the genre had its heyday in the 1980s though.
Least of all his own. I remember when GI Joe was coming out he said he took the role of Cobra Commander because he always wanted to do an action flick, but since nobody’d ever mistake him for an action star, that was pretty much the only chance he’d get. (Clearly, he was wrong…)
And Matt Damon was the furthest thing possible from an action star before Bourne. It just proves my point - any good actor in reasonably decent physical shape can be an action star, if cast as one.
Forgetting the occasional “happyness”-type movie, clearly Will Smith.
Bad Boys 1 and 2, Independence Day, Men in Black 1,2 and 3, Enemy of the State, Wild Wild West, I Robot, I am Legend, Hancock…