More Perspiration than Aspiration: The Last Action Heroes, by Nick de Semlyen

While the cinema of the ‘70s often focused on the ambivalent status of its characters, with anti-heroes common, and outright heroism a sign of naivety, by the mid-‘80s American film was indeed all about making America great again. Ambiguity was tantamount to treachery and what Ronald Reagan’s United States wanted was role models, but of a certain type. This was no longer John Wayne’s sour patriotism or Gary Cooper’s angelic decency, nor, at all, Henry Fonda’s paragon of fairness. It wasn’t even Clint Eastwood’s wincing disregard for a baddie. It was as though the body bags that came back from Vietnam in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s would be cancelled out by the body counts available to a new generation of stars. “America in the 1970s was crying out for a hero. In the last years of the previous decade, the nation had conquered the moon. But now things had gone awry. Abroad, a cataclysmic defeat in Vietnam had dented national pride” (p. 6), topped off by the Iranian hostage crisis that lasted 444 days, from 1979 to 1981. It looked like the US couldn’t even look after its own diplomatic corps abroad. Something, it seemed, needed to change.

A good place to start would be the shift from First Blood (Ted Kotcheff 1982), with Sylvester Stallone as a Vietnam vet the authorities try and push out of town, unwilling to entertain drifters in their community and uninterested in what past may have led John Rambo to see no place for himself in the world. Arrested, tortured and abused, Rambo has Vietnam flashbacks and manages to fight his way to freedom, escaping into the woods. Over the course of the film, he will defend himself but the kill count is zero. In First Blood Part II (George Pan Cosmatos, 1985), Rambo takes out 129 lives. From the anti-hero to the hyperbolic hero in three years, Stallone was at the cutting edge of movie mayhem, and while in the first film he relies on a survival knife to help him, in the sequel, there are handguns, shotguns, machine guns, assault rifles and even a bazooka. A film’s poetic license had become a license to kill, and far beyond the expectations of James Bond.

In The Last Action Heroes, Nick de Semlyen writes entertainingly about a decade of cinema, flashing backwards and forwards, cross-cutting from one person’s career development to another, all the while taking the era seriously while knowing that this is cinema that needs to be written about with a tongue carefully lodged against the cheek. De Semlyen tells us early on that Stallone’s father announced to his mother that “you’ve given birth to an idiot” (p. 14). His schoolteachers voted unanimously: he was “the Student Most Likely to End Up in the Electric Chair” (p. 14). Stallone would go on to live a long and healthy life, still going strong, and to the gym, into his late seventies. The secondary characters in many of his films have not been so lucky.

If the book has a hero it is probably Chuck Norris, and nobody appears more villainous than Steven Seagal; Schwarzenegger is agreeably and astoundingly ambitious, while Jean-Claude Van Damme couldn’t keep his mouth shut, his trousers on, or lines of coke away from his nose. The absence of trousers helped make him a singular star, with the Belgian actor telling director Sheldon Lettich on Lionheart (1990) that, in a scene where he exits the shower, he should drop the towel. Lettich agreed and later said, “I couldn’t describe the reactions, but there were reactions to that […] it became the signature for a while. Every movie had to have the bare ass scene” (p. 191). This could almost be deemed a false metonymy of the genre. Naked chests were much more important than naked buttocks, with the wardrobe departments of a typical ‘80s action movie employed to the minimum. While occasionally action stars in earlier decades would take their tops off, with Eastwood bare-chested in Play Misty for Me (Clint Eastwood, 1971) and The Beguiled (Don Siegel, 1971), Cary Grant in North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), and Newman in Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967), it wasn’t quite a feature of the film. They were shirtless rather than topless, while the pectorals in the eighties became as commercial a cinematic feature as women’s breasts. If Porky’s (Bob Clark, 1981), Bachelor Party (Neil Israel, 1984) and Revenge of the Nerds (Jeff Kanew, 1984) allowed the blokes to gawp at the girls, in turn the girls could look admiringly on at the guys no less topless. These were hardly films fighting for sexual fluidity: guys were gorillas and women a sight for male eyes.

But of course, men potentially had it all ways: few women were looking at the cameo nudity in sex comedies wishing they could have thirty seconds of disrobed fame. Many a geezer, though, would have exactly this aspiration: modelling themselves on Stallone and Schwarzenegger’s toplessness, including, of course, other actors muscling up to compete in the chest-beating stakes. Whether it was the cast of Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1985), Jeff Goldblum looking a lot more buffed in The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986) than he did in any of his earlier work, and John Travolta moving from svelte and flexible in Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977), to a sinewed hulk in Staying Alive (Sylvester Stallone, 1983), actors were taking the development of their bodies potentially more seriously than the development of their talent. Travolta “worked out furiously, bronzed his skin, and followed the dietary instructions laid out by Stallone to the calorie” (p. 73). He saw that “people like Sly can look at a body like clay and mold it. I never thought of designing a body” (p. 74). Aspiration involved perspiration, quite distinct from Robert De Niro’s physical transformation in Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980) – one that was willing to go both ways, weight gain to register the boxer’s later slothfulness, and muscle gain to capture the look of a successful middle-weight boxer. It was all about the role, and why De Niro is one of the few actors to win an Oscar for hitting the gym.

To understand this shift from aspiration to perspiration, nobody better exemplifies it than Stallone. At the University of Miami he was interested in Edward Albee and Émile Zola, but he realised quickly that falling asleep during On the Waterfront (Elia Kaan, 1954), while wide awake watching a Steve Reeves film, was telling him something: that his future lay in taking people out rather than taking difficult texts on. Stallone would probably have remained a moderate star when people were looking for an actor who could convey well a sensitive underdog, a working-class man rarely offered the dignity he deserves. Both Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976) and First Blood are just about worth a second viewing, did well at the box office and gave Stallone two characters for which he could justifiably be remembered. He may never have conveyed quite the cultural capitalism his younger self may have wished, but he could convince a viewer without much difficulty of the authenticity of his world. But when cultural capitalism gave way to corporeal capitalism, when characters in film became unequivocally more thuggish than bookish, Stallone was one of the actors around to take advantage. Reagan was in the White House; the despondency of The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978) and Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978) may still have remnants in First Blood, though the film had enough action and heroism for Stallone to capture the shift in the American temperament.

In comprehending this change, it wouldn’t be enough to think of the body-building and the baby oil; also what mattered was a perception of being hard. A good way of conveying this was a background in martial arts. The divide here seems about fifty/fifty between those who worked their pecs (Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, Bruce Willis) and then those who knew their way around a tatami mat (Norris, Seagal, Van Damme and Jackie Chan). How well the latter knew the martial art they claimed as a background for their justifiable onscreen feats was a common cause for disputation, but then at a certain point this was moviemaking as tournament rivalry, with the sort of trash-talk you might expect from a boxing match, or a wrestling promo, infecting film. The viral host was probably Steven Seagal, who was happy to dis the dead. Bruce Lee was “a 110-pound rice bandit” (p. 141), while Norris (who appeared with Lee in Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973)) was someone Seagal didn’t rate. “I despise being compared with him in any way, shape or form. I wouldn’t mind being compared to anyone but him” (p. 142). Yet when he instigated those comparisons with others, he managed to speak disparagingly of them. Reckoning his character in Above the Law (Andrew David, 1988) was a serious action hero, he said, Nico Toscani was “not a cartoon character like you find in films with gratuitous violence without much of a story, like the Commando type of movie… The Rambo type is limited to me as an actor and in terms of telling a story” (p. 142). As for Van Damme, Seagal pretty much called him a liar on a major chat show. Van Damme claimed he was a martial arts champion, Seagal said, “there are an awful lot of people who say that’s not true” (p. 143).

Maybe this question of reputation became more pronounced in the martial arts figures than those more reliant on body-building. It wasn’t until 1988 that photoshop became available, and while more recently questions over an actor’s abdominal muscles and biceps might be ripe for rumours that they’ve been augmented by CGI, it was assumed in the ‘80s and early ‘90s that what you saw was what you got. It was there on screen. But martial arts skills were always going to be easy to fake, and would understandably fit into the history of the action scene, with the work more reliant on editing and camera movements than on the dexterity of the performer. It was no shame to have a stunt double, either, but Norris, Seagal and Van Damme were in the business partly on the assumption that they could parlay a gift for martial combat into cinematic stardom. As De Semlyen says of Seagal: “here, it seemed, was a genuine tough guy in a city full of pretend ones, and influential men in LA loved his half-told tales” (p. 137). Bad mouthing each other became a way of elevating themselves above the others, even if most of the trash talk came from Seagal.

Yet whether gym bunnies or mat monsters, what mattered was coming across as onscreen killing machines. The modest bodily takeouts of earlier cinema became veritable My Lai massacres, and it is no surprise to find that when statisticians took to totting up actors’ kill counts, three of the top five were figures from The Last Action Heroes: Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Lundgren, with Arnold topping the list for topping the most, and Commando (Mark Lester, 1985) especially appealing for those seeking the low hanging fruit of superfluous villainy. Randal S Olson, notes that “Schwarzenegger’s highest single-film kill count comes from Commando […] where in the final island scene he racked up 74 kills: 2 throats slit, 51 people shot, 1 person stabbed, 2 people stabbed by circular blades, 5 people blown up by grenades, 5 people blown up by rocket launcher, 7 people blown up by planted explosives, and 1 unfortunate person impaled.”¹ But Schwarzenegger was also increasingly putting people out of their misery with witty one-liners. It might not have been a laughing matter for the victim, but who was watching a film by any of these guys while thinking about the sanctity of human life? This was desensitisation with a smirk, and so it made sense that Bruce Willis would join the party with Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988), and that the films would meet their impending end with the arrival of Tarantino. Noting this shift, Nigel Andrews said, “Before Pulp Fiction [Quentin Tarantino, 1994] there was pump fiction. These hero-stars were built by themselves, for themselves. They were self-born Frankenstein’s monsters whose hissing laboratories, though called ‘gyms’, contained much the same high-wrought mixture of steamy vapour, mad pseudoscience and sodden grunts of triumph.”² Both Willis and Travolta tried muscle, but they never bought into brawn quite as enthusiastically as the others. It made sense they would turn up in Pulp Fiction and contribute to bringing to an end pump action cinema. But it wasn’t only the relative success of Pulp Fiction; it was also the relative failure of The Last Action Hero (John McTiernan, 1993). Released a year before Tarantino’s film, it costed USD $85MM and made $137MM and was deemed a flop. Pulp Fiction cost $8.5MM and made almost twice as much money as McTiernan’s film. Schwarzenegger’s salary for The Last Action Hero was nearly double the entire budget of Tarantino’s movie. McTiernan’s film had humour and was self-reflexive, an action movie that wanted you to know you were watching an action film as the boy at the centre enters the fictional world and points out the various ways it contrasts with reality. But the film seemed all over the place and McTiernan reckoned “I was getting pushed in a lot of directions” (p. 272).

 If Norris was a minor figure next to Stallone and Schwarzenegger, he becomes a major one in De Semlyen’s book for possessing a sense of perspective only matched perhaps by Jackie Chan – who had the advantage of viewing Hollywood from an often-safe distance. Norris seemed less inclined to dismiss the others or claim for himself dubious past achievements. He was in the Air Force for four years, a karate champion for six years, and also helped train among others Steve McQueen, Priscilla Presley and Donnie Osmond. He seemed above the back-biting, drugs and egotism many of the others succumbed to, and has had two long marriages, and five kids. If you’re conservative, he is your kind of guy – and in films like Missing in Action (Joseph Zito, 1984), Invasion USA (Joseph Zito, 1986) and The Delta Force (Menahem Golan, 1986) you won´t be embarrassed by the jingoism. He has also given birth to a million memes, which are generally wittier than many a line found in any of the action heroes’ films, including “Chuck Norris once killed two stones with one bird”, and “Chuck Norris makes onions cry” (p. 237).

However, it is unlikely the book would have been written were it reliant on Chuck, and it opens with the big egos, Arnie and Sly, and their appearance at Cannes in 1990. “They had never been convinced to star in a movie together, but tonight they would share a terrace” (p. 5). That was when they were kings, so huge that they needn’t split screen space and were even reluctant to share terrace inches. But some years later, of course, their burliness battered just a little by time, they would, in Schwarzenegger parlance, be back, appearing in a series of action moves, The Expendables. The series proved they weren’t quite dispensable, even if they knew their place in the pecking order of power – spandex trousers had replaced the muscle vest. But there they were, in Expendables 2 (Simon West, 2012): Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Norris, Lundgren, Willis and Van Damme. In it there are references to Rambo; Schwarzenegger more than once announces he is back (with an accent still as thick as clotted cream), and Norris gets to propose he got bitten by a cobra. After five days of agonising pain, the cobra died. In the third, you can find Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Antonio Banderas and Wesley Snipes as the series became a retirement home for the geriatric giants of cinema’s past. Adam Mars-Jones noted, “there is now apparently no age limit to an action career in Hollywood. The expendables are no longer unemployables, and actors in their 60s and even 70s are high-kicking in can-can routines of choreographed violence.”³ Yet there is no place in the series for Seagal. Every story needs a villain, and there is always somebody who can’t make up and just shake hands.

The book ends where it began, with the various stars back in the South of France in 2014 to promote The Expendables 3 (Patrick Hughes, 2014). Atop two Soviet era tanks are Stallone, Lundgren, Snipes, Gibson, Ford, Schwarzenegger, Banderas. They may have been atop a couple of armoured vehicles but were no longer top of the world. Yet the films were making money and Expendables 2 the most of all, with an international box-office of almost USD $315MM. None of them will have problems meeting their gym fees for however much longer they keep going. Yet there might be something sad about cinema if an escape from the Marvel universe is into a sort of déjà-viewing, into watching once again stars from the past moving arthritically through screen space.

Nick de Semlyen, The Last Action Heroes: The Triumphs, Flops and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage (London: Picador, 2024).

Endnotes