What's the most perfect action movie?

Hello???

Ahem…

The Departed

It’s got all 4 of your criteria, in spades.

Ah yeah! Did you catch “Infernal Affairs”?

All right, after reading some of the remarks about these films, the only thing I can think of is Joe Bob Briggs , the Drive-In Movie Reviewer. Alas, the High Sherriffs took down his column before many of the films mentioned here were made. Here is his review of Action Jackson:

Aditional^3 nitpick: The Minigun was originally a specific gatling-style 7.62mm weapon developed by General Electric (the XM134). A “gatling gun” being any multi-barreled machinegun. Over time, the definition of minigun has expanded to include any externally powered gatling style weapon.

Kurt Russel uses a minigun in Soldier, although I wouldn’t call it a perfect action movie.

Would anyone be up for an ‘Action Movie of the Week’ sort of thing? We could list all the movies in this thread in alphabetical order and watch one or two a week and discuss them. Then we could really nail down the top action movies.

I can’t find my DVD of the movie at the moment as it’s packed away, but if I’m remembering the special features correctly it’s actually a BB gun and was only used because Jesse Ventura thought it looked cool.

I’ll try and find the disc tonight to confirm that though.

Ahh ok I thought that the Minigun was a gun with an external power source to rotate the barrels whereas a gatling gun used the exhaust fumes(?*) of the shells to rotate the barrels**.
*I’m not sure it’s actually called exhaust fumes, but for the life of me I can’t think of the term at the moment.

**This of course excludes the original guns where the barrels were turned by a hand crank, unless of course western movies have lied to me about that as well :slight_smile:

It’s called gas-operated reloading but in practice this isn’t enough to make the barrels rotate. The weapon in Predator had its own power supply for that; note how the barrels continue to spin after Mac has expended all the ammo, the spinning only stops when he releases the trigger.

“Gatling gun” technically refers to the multibarreled gun designed by Richard Gatling, Popularly, any multi-barrel gun is referred to as a Gatling gun. There was apparently a second generation of such guns that used gas operation, but then were later used with electric motors.

By the way, “chain gun” isn’t correct at all to use for such guns. There are such things as chain guns - they’re guns in which the action is driven by a chain attached to an engine. They’re not that common but there are some in use, like the 25mm cannon on the Bradley and the 30mm cannon on the Apache. Generally, chain guns are used in scenarios in which mechanical problems are not easily cleared by the user, and there’s space for an engine to be used. If there’s a dud round in a gas operated system, the system comes to a halt until the gunner manually works the action. In something like the sealed compartment of the Apache this is impossible, but a chain-driven action will keep working through.

Aliens, in spite of your requirement. that 45mins buildup made for a fantastic ride.

No! No buildup. Too many movies take forever to get to the point. I just want the movie to start in the middle of a kick-ass action scene and we don’t know what the hell is going on. Followed by another 1.5 hours of action. That’s all.

Like Shoot Em’ Up, I counted I think 2 minutes before a 70-something black Trans Am crashes into a parked car and a guy jumps out wanting to kill a pregnant prostitute. Now that’s filmmaking. :cool:

Not a bad idea, as long as we’ve got enough people that can and will obtain the movie of the week and take time to watch it.

Anybody else up for it?

Jet Li’s Fist of Legend. Each fight is a masterpiece of tension and performance, Jet’s badassery is already dialed up to eleven in the opening fight sequence, yet only gets higher and higher.

Bruce’s Enter the Dragon suffers a bit from “70’s slowdown” pacing, but is the pinnacle of its decade.

Yeah, that’s near the top of my list as well. You forgot about the scuzzball used-car salesman pissing himself, too (twice), and the classic response to the question “Have you ever killed anyone?” – “Yeah, but they were all bad.”

Plus a small piece of Florida effectively gets nuked. I was a little surprised when the movie plotline didn’t have a thread that somehow short-circuited that from happening.

I’ll nominate Jackie Chan’s Who am I.

I came in here to nominate:

  1. Die Hard
  2. The Rundown
  3. Predator

Guess I was beaten to it by about everyone else.

An oldie(sixties I think) Point Blank(not Gross Point Blank or Point Break) starring Lee Marvin based on the book The Hunter.

Its totally chilling,very violent and the hero is not a very nice man at all,even for an anti hero.

There are no “hero guns”,superhuman fighting ability or gymnastics.
Only genuine cunning gets him results.

It says something that usually I cant stand Lee Marvin movies.

Ahh cool thanks to everyone for the corrections :slight_smile:

I’m still looking for Predator, only 8 more moving boxes of DVDs to sort through :smiley:

The original “Get Carter” would be along similar lines. No car chases as such, but some nice shots of 60s cars driving about.

Having just watched this, I second “Shoot 'em up” - How many movies have a sex scene that is also (that is, not interrupted by) a shooting scene?

Also: deviant fetishes, loads of guns and loads of people getting killed using carrots.