Conclusion: The Future of Active Masculinity

Abstract

As action cinema enters its second century—or third, if we rightly include the one-shot 1890s films that showcased the wholesale spec-tacle of physical motion—it has already begun to take on new forms and to reconfigure its existing structures. Yet some contemporary films do not seem to have registered these developments at all. An extended fire-engine chase sequence in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) appears pleasurably retrograded, with its innumerable car crashes and flying storefront glass. Meanwhile, the Denzel Washington vehicle and box-office success Man on Fire (2004) foregrounds south-of-the-border vigilante justice that recalls self-consciously ugly post-Vietnam films such as Rolling Thunder (1977) and many subsequent revenge dramas (though the newer film employs a highly contemporary, frenetic visual style and editing). Finally, the expensive comic-book adaptations League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) and Fantastic Four (2005) resemble a host of 1980s films in their relatively flat lighting design, their mostly workmanlike cutting, and their rosters of unfamiliar faces (in the former, in support of the durable Sean Connery).