Well, not a new genre; only I’ve never come across it being labeled as such.
Man Fantasy
We have High Fantasy–unicorns, fairies, etc.–and all those other fantasy subgenres, including everything from LOTR to Neverending Story to yadda yadda yadda. Then there’s all those other subgenres, with other movies like The Craft, or Van Helsing, or Barbie Mariposa and Her Butterfly Fairy Friends, Muppets Take Manhattan–whatever; pretty wide open genre.
But the past few years it seems like your standard macho action movie has to have an element of fantasy in it: the stunts MUST be outside the laws of physics; the story HAS to be ridiculously baroque; the stakes impossibly high, the hero inhumanly heroic, the babes science-fictionally hot. In a word, fantasy. A starter list:
Crank 1, 2
Transporter 1, 2, 3
Eagle Eye
Taken
Wanted (more traditional fantasy as well; elements acknowledged within the film’s universe as supernatural)
And a special mention for the three awesomely awesome movies brought to us by, yes, the WWE; three of the most entertaining entries in the genre: The Marine
Condemned
12 Rounds
If you haven’t see these three WWE titles, run don’t walk. The purest examples of the Man Fantasy.
And let us also give thanks to the two fathers of this genre: Luc Besson and Michael Bay.
How would you distinguish between Man Fantasy (Mantasy!) and Fantasy? I think I could agree it’s a definite sub-genre of fantasy, what with the Bond movies and all.
I definitely think you’re onto something. When I was a kid, my father (then a med student) was watching Star Trek with me, and he remarked on the complete unrealism of a scene. It wasn’t that the scene involved a vulcan in a prison cell on another planet where humanoids had independently evolved that bothered him: it was that someone was hit on the head and knocked out, and there was the clear message that the person was in no danger other than waking up with a bad headache. “In real life,” he told me, “That person would probably be in a coma, if they didn’t die outright from hemorrhaging.”
I think this sort of fantasy probably goes back as long as “realistic” action narratives do. It’s much more fun to have nonlethal wounds be shrugged off almost instantaneously, to have heroes capable of fighting absurdly overwhelming odds, etc. Not very realistic, often not very good for pacing or tension, but it’s a sheer crapload of fun.
Mantasy tends to take place in modern times, and, initially at least, gives off the illusion that it could happen. That, given the right training, Jason Stathem really could make that car do a 720 spin while he shots a pistol dead on in the bad guy’s eye.
I think I have to agree; I think it started with Bond, as noted above.
I mean, a period fantasy can be pretty macho–knights, swords, decapitations, maidens–but I think, A) that’s already covered under the main rubric, and B**), I think it needs bullets and, well, silicone, to be unequivocally part of the genre.
I see them as live-action, R-rated Warner Brother cartoons, with the same level of seriousness and fidelity to real-world physics. The quintessential example, I think, is the Clive Owen-Paul Giamatti film Shoot 'Em Up.
The definition of this genre is specifically in order to distinguish it from Action. These are action films with a distinct fantasy element; the key elements have to be impossible in real life. See above re: laws of physics and size of titties.
But how are the laws of physics in say, Die Hard (the quintissential action movie), any more realistic than the physics you’d find in The Transporter? While I’d agree the Jason Statham oevure has a different tone than most other action movies, I’m not sure I’d call it a separate sub-genre. And definitely not “man fantasy”.
You can say that aboiut the most recent *Die Hard *film, in which Bruce Willis shot down a helicopter with a car; but while the first episode in the series may have stretched plausibility a bit, there was nothing there that was physically impossible.
No, I’m going to have to agree with Lissner, here. This is something new.
I suppose you have to give John Woo credit for inventing the genre, along with a few other HK directors. (Not Ringo Lam though, as his movies tend to be grittier and more realistic, even during giant shootouts.) Even though Woo found a lot of inspiration in Peckinpah, espcially The Wild Bunch he took things quite a bit farther.
Action stories have always included highly unrealistic and often impossible feats. The pulp action tales of the early 20th century were full of that stuff, and were also aimed at men. It’s not fantasy, it’s just fiction.
I disagree. The beating he took even if the first one was superhuman. Going off the side of a building with a rope or fire hose or whatever it was and then swinging down a bunch of floors so he hit a window and bounce of of it would have, in real life, battered the guy up so bad it would have ended right there, if sheer physical exhaustion and damage from earlier in the film hadn’t already done so.
I included **Taken because A), it was written by the godfather of the genre, Luc Besson, and therefore it B) contains such genre tropes as a completely unbelievable plot–but completely–and an airport digital camera kiosk that includes the kind of photo “enhancement” software usually reserved for CIA fantasies.
But yeah, it’s missing the stripper-wife and the planet-sized explosions. So I certainly won’t go to the mat on this one.
Yeah, John Woo’s one of the genre’s progenitors. I still consider him secondary (tertiary?) to Besson and Bay. Woo’s scenarios generally at least skirted the contours of reality (well, except the omnipresent doves–how did he get them to fly so slowly??). Bay, on the other hand, completely disregards reality; it’s somehow beneath him. And Besson gleefully transcends it: it’s to boring for movies.