Action stars used to be Stallone, Arnold, Willis, JCVD. Norris for the low brows.
Now we have the rock, marky mark, vin diesel and this guy.
B tier actors that should be only relegated to b movies, but are not.
WTF is wrong with hollywood nowadays?
Why are charisma and competence totally out of the equation?
Also, we have Jason Momoa!
shareYou really wanna compare Schwarzenegger's acting skills with Grillo's? Or even Stallone's? And, if you look at Willis, up to 1995, which is about the time the action movie era you speak of started to dwindle, he had maybe 5 or 6 action movies, 3 of those being Die Hard. JCVD mostly made B movies, and so did Norris.
shareAll those guys were perfect for their roles, I don't think anybody, starting with great actors, could not deliver better performances in their action films. They are part of movie history, wether you like it or not.
Grillo is not much of an actor himself anyway, but the problem here is he's a very poor excuse for an ACTION star.
My seventy-five-year-old great aunt rode a motorcycle. I see silly girls and wimpy hipster boys with tattoos every day. It takes more than that kind of stuff to make a convincing tough guy.
shareAh ah ah, I'm picturing your great aunt in a chopper with a red wig riding alongside Grillo and Whalberg.
And she is the tough looking one in the trio!
So you are saying that Dwayne Johnson is incompetent and not charismatic? He's got nothing to envy to Stallone or Schwartzy. He's even roïded up like them! I can easily picture him in the role of John Rambo or John Matrix and do a great job filling up their boots.
Robert Downey Jr is charismatic and competent. Playing in Iron-Man and The Avengers, that qualifies as action.
What do you think of Jason Statham? I think he's pretty good as an action actor.
Keanu Reeves is also still kicking respectable ass at 55.
Tom Hardy is not to be shunned either, I think.
I find it funny... because you compare actors saying the firsts are so much better but I find them to be very much alike. Stallone and Grillo. Arnold and The Rock. Mark Wahlberg and Jean-Claude Van Damme (JCVD is a superior in martial artist but Wahlberg is a better all around actor).
Anyways.. the 80's are gone and their actors are grandfathers now. They had their time and it was great, indeed. But you can't have the same people forever... and it's a good thing.
Except for Keanu, none of those you mentioned are action STARS. They are merely guys in movies with lots of action. Iron man is a kiddie sci fi comic book movie, not an action movie, and RDJ is an old character actor.
Keanu is a new type of action star, embodying the idea that anybody can be a hero. He made this work with a lot of luck and good choices, but he doesn't hold a candle next to real action stars of the past.
I understand better what you mean.
But I have to disagree about the very first Iron-Man. It didn't quite feel like a superhero movie to me. It was more about the man than the superhero. I thought it really was a good movie all around. Now.. all the others like Spider-Man, Avengers and such... yes. I agree with you.
Aside from Keanu, are there other actors, right now, that you consider worthy of being called action stars?
The Rock is trying, but somehow he doesn't take it seriously, and it shows.
Nope, cannot think of anyone, it's a genre that has forgotten its stars, its stories, its core (the action) and replaced it with...... cgi :-(((((
Yeah... CGI sucks when it's overdone. It's taking way too much space in today's movies. That's why I like Mad Max: Fury Road so much... the only CGI was that shot of the big ass sand storm because that was the only thing they really couldn't recreate by other means.
As for The Rock, I get what you mean. Maybe it's because of his pro wrestler background where he had to always be entertaining and provoke a reaction. Maybe that's what's transpiring. It's true that there's a "lightness" in his acting that's kind of always there.
Not only that, but he also always picks wrong project, always tongue in cheek n cartoonish. Or just plain bad (hercules).Nothing that you would watch twice.
I guess he's happy like this, he can buy another house...
Dude, Grillo may not be as big, physically, as those guys (and those guys are the best!), but Grillo definitely trained in MMA for quite some time for some of his roles! Definitely a badass! Don't knock him just yet...!
shareWhy not? He's as over the hill as Stallone, he can equal him in that.
shareI VERY MUCH ENJOY GRILLO..DUDE IS AWESOME.
shareHARDY,STATHAM,THE ROCK,GRILLO...NOT ACTION STARS BUT KEANU IS...I LOVE KEANU BUT THERE IS NO DISCERNABLE LOGIC IN YOUR STATEMENT.
shareI LIKE FRANK GRILLO..GOOD ACTOR AND WORKS WELL IN ACTION.BEST THING ABOUT THE SECOND AND THIRD PURGE FILMS.
shareAction stars used to be Stallone, Arnold, Willis, JCVD. Norris for the low brows.
ACTION STARS AND ACTING ARENT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE
shareThey're not but the OP is specifically arguing on that basis.
shareWho said anything about them being "good actors"?
You did in your original post. Or at least you listed modern action stars as bad actors and not up to snuff to the likes of Arnold and Stallone, which implies your opinion is based on acting ability.
shareNo, I was talking about their real rank in the star system.
Whalberg is not a movie star, he's an ok actor with not much charisma that in other times would have been a second banana cop in a buddy movie, not the most payed actor of his time. It shows how badly we have it now.
NOBODY watches his movies because of him, and in most of the planet they barely know his name. Name me one of his heroes, I dare you. Or a good action movie he's been in.
Statham is a natural born second banana, even now he is not a star, but still he's what we get. Vin Diesel, too shitty on all accounts, especially script picking.
They are not top tier actors, nor action stars.
They are leftovers.
Whalberg was in The Departed and Boogie Nights off the top if my head.
As for Statham and Vin Diesel, are the Fast and Furious movies any different than say, Cobra or Red Heat?
The times and people have changed.
Boys used to grow up outside and mostly played physically. Street gangs were a common thing even if most of them were groups of teenage boys messing around together. Remember The Warriors? Martial arts were a new cool thing in the west which fascinated these boys for the obvious reasons. Bodybuilders were a rare breed before the 80s. There was also a certain cultural zeitgeist among the youth. The fashion, the music, changing societal norms and values. And the 80s/90s action hero embodied all that!
Take Cobra (Stallone) for example: A young cop with no bullshit attitude, dresses up like a street thug would few decades ago, survives on a diet of frozen pizzas, single, handsome and most importantly he's as cool as it gets. Some boy or a young guy watching this in the 80s must have thought this guy is the greatest character ever! The champion of all that he and his buddies consider cool and it's all fairly new.
Now take Frank Gril... actually let's first take modern potential audience for action movies, obviously boys and men, mostly young men. They grew up in a different world. Probably played a lot of videogames. Many of them never got into a fight. Technology. Martial arts lost their mystique and novelty. Internet. Superheroes. Not a single archetype to clearly represent what they consider cool because their opinions are split into million pieces regarding that.
And now take Fra...actually let's take modern action stars in general. From the perspective of modern youth, they're like boomers. Many of them actually are boomers trying to remain relevant. But they just aren't aligned with the flow. They don't represent what is hip, cool and trending to modern generations. It's the superheros who do it or at least get close enough. Or totally-not-superheroes like John Wick.
Tldr; no demand, no supply.
I don't see why would they not need a supply of kickass action heroes like in the eighties to inspire them.
Exactly because there are more sources nowadays, I'd expect whatever I use my time on to be all the more involving and worthy. Videogame action heroes have evolved into deeper and cooler characters.
Seems like movie action heroes couldn't keep up. So they gave up.
But the demand is there.
Demand, but not for the same thing as in the 80s. John Wick is the best recent example and he's played by Keanu who you just can't put into same box as action stars we're talking about here. Basically, I think studios realized they can get away with casting ordinary actors as ultimate badasses. And in such an environment, where's the need for classic tough guys? What would martial artists like Van Damme have to offer these day to hollywood with their wooden acting?
Ok you have a valid point about Hollywood there, but here's my reply: they are legit.
We all know they are (bad) actors pretending to be badasses on screen, fighting aliens or beating up everybody.
But Bruce Lee had the fame of being a lethal weapon in the real world.
Arnold was really mr. olympia and his muscles were real.
Stallone had his own thing of being a dumb, tough, resilient common man.
Van Damme was a wooden piece of crap, but he had legit moves and muscles.
Norris was a martial art champion. ETC
Hence, once you watch them in a movie, a movie based on those characteristic (that doesn't need Lawrence Olivier to portray Conan or Rocky, but needs a presence), they sell the whole concept much better than a finer actor could, because their real life personas fit those characters.
Eminem in 8 mile is awesome for the same reasons, etc.
I understand that Hollywood thinks it can get away with anything, but Keanu had to build his reputation as an action star before being able to pull off John Wick. Even so, it's quite a stretch.
In the past 20 years, only The Rock seemed capable to replace the classics, but his choices are so poor he squandered any credibility he had.
Marky Mark is not an action star, nor is Downey JR, nor was Paul Walker, nor was DMX, nor am I or you (I suppose).
It's a specialized job that needs legit players.
My point is that modern audiences don't seem to care about such stuff these days.
Martial arts lost the charm they had back then. Otherwise guys like Scott Adkins or Michael Jai White wouldn't be forced to star in straight to DVD B-tier crap.
Then you have bodybuilders, who again nowadays come dime a dozen and people prefer to see them geting their ass kicked by a guy half their size instead of kicking ass. What you want is a really charismatic bodybuilder and they sure are rare, but we have Rock. Right? So why isn't he a modern Arnold? Because that shit doesn't sell anymore like it used to. Didn't Rock star in plenty of old shool action movies before? But eventually he realized where the real money is.
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