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It's hard to think of any action film from the 80s and 90s that hasn't been lambasted by movie critics. Try finding a good review from a critic for an action movie that isn't Die Hard, ALIENS, Terminator, and some of the more high profile action movies. You'd have a better time trying to find bigfoot. Movies like Timecop, Last Action Hero, Cobra, Tango and Cash, etc. were not received well by movie critics. Even today action classics are described as "cheesy" and "dumb" by reviewers and critics. What are your thoughts? Do you think these movies deserve more respect?
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The truth is, that these movies are "cheesy", "dumb" and simple.
But that's one of the reasons people love(d) them, they were fun to watch.
Yesterday I watched The Running Man with some friends. And the movie is still enjoyable. We had a big laugh, when the starting text crawl appears with "in 2017...".
We feeled well entertained, but to tell the truth: the movie is cheesy, with some quotable cheesy lines.
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I blame Terminator 2 for killing off fun, cheesy action movies. It's a genuinely good movie that teaches lessons and has characters that learn and grow as people, including a machine that's meant for nothing but to kill people (it's literally called a "terminator"), lol. After that, it's like Hollywood execs said "You mean, we can make action movies that people can take seriously? They don't need to be one man with muscles just killing random baddies that all attack him one at a time?" lol.
Arnold and Sly had a few decent ones in the 90's but slowly started falling down the Hollywood ladder. Van Damme and Seagal fell even quicker, Chuck Norris switched to TV, and all those "C-grade" action hero celebs faded even further into obscurity than they already were lol. IIRC, Jackie Chan is the only 90's action star that rose to prominence during the decade that the rest of them slowly disappeared.
Nowadays, all we have are those DTV low budget movies that always star the likes of Lungdren, Tony Jaa, Michael Jai White, etc... I've tried to watch some of them, but the godawful modern day action movie cinematography makes me sick both figuratively and literally. Why do they pay these black belt martial artists to make movies to show off their skills if the director isn't gonna actually show it to us? Thank God for the John Wick franchise. I think the reason they do well enough critically and commercially is because the fight scenes in those movies are a breath of fresh air from all the 'non-action' action movies we have today.
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Maybe critics used to actually look at movies from a normal person's perspective? Or maybe we just forgot about all the bad reviews from the past because we realized they were wrong.
Today's critics are often out-of-touch, too politically motivated or outright bought in my eyes.
