The Most Dangerous Game airs today on TCM and the 1932 action/adventure movie stands in sharp contrast to another action movie I recently watched, though not for the reasons one might suppose. That other movie was Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which I liked, and while it contains plenty of action, there’s also more than a few “dramatic” scenes. I put that in quotes because they don’t play very well and, frankly, they’re unnecessary. They may not be unnecessary for the plot, as far as basic exposition goes, but the genre doesn’t need them at all. The other difference lies in what exactly constitutes an action movie and how that definition has changed over the years. Neither definition is more fitting than the other, just different. Still, I prefer one over the other, as most people do, and that preference gets trickier by the day.
Action as a genre can be defined two different ways (and probably a few hundred subsets of definitions below those two): One, as a story that relies more on action than dialogue to tell its story. Two, as a story that uses dialogue to tell its story but infuses it with several, high-energy action sequences along the way. Let’s examine both.
In the first, the “story that relies more on action than dialogue to tell its story,” that action can be simple action, as in following the physical exploits of our main characters as they complete a task or mission. For instance, in the 1940 film Northwest Passage, we follow Rogers’ Rangers, led by Major Roger (Spencer Tracy), in 1759 as they journey from Lake Champlain to St. Francis in Canada, in a quest to take the town from the Abenaki Indian tribe and the French, hoping for British reinforcements along the way. There are very few action sequences that could be described as “fast” or “turbo-charged.” Rather, we watch them slog through swamps, evade French patrols, and form a human chain-bridge across a raging river. The story is told almost exclusively through observing their actions, but those actions are not presented at a breakneck pace.
In the second, the one “that uses dialogue to tell its story but infuses it with several, high-energy action sequences along the way,” the action is usually frenetic and extremely fast. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, for instance, we first have a highly organized deployment aboard a pirated ship that involves dozens of split second edits, multiple fight shots (usually no more than a kick or punch, in rapid clips, as Captain America makes his weigh towards the pirates), and a few firefights as well. This action, the kind that purposely doesn’t let you catch your breath in an attempt to involve you in the action, is then followed by several dialogue scenes completely devoid of action. The filmmakers are betting that the highly charged action sequences will keep the audiences excited enough to “allow” the movie to have several expositional dialogue scenes necessary to the plot.
There’s a part of me that feels like providing well-placed action sequences surrounded by dialogue scenes is a kind of betrayal of the genre. It’s called “Action,” so give us action. One of the better examples of a true action genre movie that doesn’t shy away from its genre is Mad Max 2, aka The Road Warrior. MM2 is an action movie from start to finish. There are, in fact, so few scenes containing dialogue, that the movie’s entire screenplay could be memorized by a viewer after only, say, two or three viewings.
The benefit of making a first order action movie, like The Most Dangerous Game, Northwest Passage, or Mad Max 2, is that you don’t have to have any one sequence overpower another. Indeed, if you rely too heavily on heavily choreographed action, the audience will become exhausted after the first reel. The setback of this style is the action, if continuous, runs the risk of becoming monotonous fast.
The benefit of making a second order action movie, like most comic book or James Bond movies, is that you can contain the action to three or four big sequences and spend the rest of the movies filming your actors deliver lines in more sedate surroundings for the rest of the movie. The setback is the need to make bigger and better action sequences every time in an endless game of one-upmanship. For instance, an early James Bond movie, like Thunderball, may be content to have as its climax a short sequence involving a runaway hydrofoil and a fist fight between Bond and villain Largo. Leap forward to 2006, and the opening chase of Casino Royale, using methods known as a Parkour chase, is so choreographed, complex, and endlessly inventive that it feels, well, choreographed, complex, and endlessly inventive. That is, it’s so obsessed with raising the bar for future foot chases that it didn’t feel like a chase at all. It felt like a heavily storyboarded action sequence inserted to wow the audience. Now, there have been many heavily storyboarded action sequences in the movies, no doubt. The key is to not make them look like they’re heavily storyboarded (see most of Steven Spielberg’s action movie career, particularly Raiders of the Lost Ark, for great examples of how to do it right). The best action directors do that and can make a second order action movie a great thing, as long as they also know how to direct the dialogue scenes, which is never guaranteed.
When I watch a Marx Brothers movie, I never think to myself, “I sure wish the comedy would stop for a few minutes so we could have a few deeply emotional dramatic scenes.” When I watch On the Waterfront, I never think, “Okay, enough with the drama! How about three or four scenes, back to back, of some slapstick comedy, to break it up.” And when I watch an action movie, frankly, I prefer it be action, from start to finish. Yes, there’ll be some dialogue to give us a basic backstory but, for the most part, tell the story through the action. That means, for me, it’s the first order type of action movie I prefer but that kind seems to be in limited supply these days. There are some, last spring’s Godzilla comes to mind, and Pacific Rim before it (odd that both are also monster movies), but not enough. The second order can be very good as well but, really, I’d rather just see Steve Rogers fight the bad guys, not visit old dying friends and self-help groups to try and convince me the movie’s operating on some deeper level. To me, it only ends up feeling more fragmented. I don’t want a piece of the action, I want the whole thing. Anything less is an actionable offense.