While suffering through the ludicrously over-rated Hellboy 2 the other day, I was given to a few thoughts. One being that bad comic book writers are ruining cinema. The other that nobody knows how to film a fucking action scene anymore. I’ll get back to the damage shitty comics are wreaking on the industry later, right now I want to ponder this action movie problem. We’re at a point, technologically, where with stunts, wire work and CGI, filmmakers are capable of putting any kind of fight scene imaginable up on screen, and yet for the past several years almost every big action scene out there has totally sucked.

FAIL

Take Hellboy 2 for example. There’s lots of flipping around and swinging of swords and seamless stunt work, but I was bored as hell watching it. Perhaps the problem is that while filmmakers can use CGI to make everything look photo-realistic, the scene just don’t pass the eye test. You see some dude on screen doing too many impossible flips, leaps, spins and kicks, and you just start to tune it out. And most of the time, unless they’re going for some hyper-real insane sugar rush karate explosion movie funtime like Speed Racer, all those millions of dollar up on screen are just a bunch of sound and fury.

The main culprits:

1) The cuts are too quick.

FAIL

I blame Ridley Scott for this, among others. Maybe they were doing some really awesome stunt work on the set, but the shots are cut so fast (and in Michael Bay and Paul Greengrass’s case so close-up) that you can’t even appreciate what’s happening. Ridley Scott ushered this annoying habit in with the ultimate bullshit justification of “combat is confusing and chaotic in real life, so it should feel the same in the movies.” Asshole. Just because Spielberg used the Shaky-Cam for some iconic D-Day scenes in Saving Private Ryan doesn’t mean the rest of you hacks get to use it to hide your poor directing chops. Special No-prize to Bay for throwing up tens of millions of dollars in effects work every outing and then framing his shots so poorly you can’t even tell what’s happening. Think of all the really awesome fight scenes of the past decade: Keanu in the first Matrix, Obi-Wan vs. Darth Maul, the Cripple Fight from South Park, the dual duels at the end of Episode 3, Crouching Tiger showdowns; they’ve all got one thing in common: really good stunt work that the camera isn’t afraid to show us. I think one of the reason the Matrix was so effective was because that was actually Keanu fucking Reeves doing all that kung fu.

2) The odds are too steep.

FAIL

There are too many movies now with too many characters who are superterrificawesome fighters who can take on 50 bad guys at once with just a couple of pistols and a lot of spinning around. I’m looking at you, Mr and Mrs. Smith. Making the odds ridiculous works every once in a while, when you’re dealing with Jedi or superheroes or Olympic Gold Medalist Kurt Thomas, but since most Action Movie Heroes are supposed to be Everyman Protagonists to some degree, watching the good guy do the impossible over and over again takes the thrill out of things. This is the genius of Indiana Jones: the guy gets his ass kicked and fails miserably in almost every scene, but is able to, with help and luck and quick thinking, get out of a jam. Audiences always appreciate smarts over raw power and ability. Note: This rule does not apply to 80s action movies as it is perfectly reasonable to assume that Arnold Schwarzenegger can take on a whole private army by himself and win.

3) The moves are too perfect.

MEGA FAIL

Think the Legolas vs. an Oliphaunt scene from Peter Jackson’s craptastic Lord of the Rings adaption, or the King Kong vs. T-Rexs fight from Jackson’s craptastic King Kong remake (sensing a theme here? Also, side note: any time your big fight is between two all-CGI characters, you have failed) or that last crappy Die Hard movie with John McClane vs. helicopters and fighter jets. Sure it might look real enough, but the agility on display is too precise to be believed. There’s no way you can watch that T-Rex/Kong fight and not assume that Naomi Watts is getting shaken to a bloody pulp in Kong’s hand during all the action. Wanted, which had some decent action scenes, also had some of this going on. It’s like the filmmakers are more interested in showing off their technique than creating a good scene.

Lastly, a small example of why Hellboy 2 sucks: We first meet the bad guy as he is doing a martial arts routine in a sewer. Just a lot of swinging a knife around, doing kung fu and shit for no reason at all, other than to tell the audience that this guy has moves. And also to see that he has a magic knife-sword thing that elongates into a spear (via Shi’ar technology, I assume). If Guillermo del Toro had any desire to tell a decent story, he would have a) come up with a good reason (any reason) to show off the bad guy’s fighting moves, and b) saved the reveal of the knife turning into a spear for some crucial moment in a later fight scene. But Del Tor seems far more interested in making stuff look COOL! than putting any meaning behind his visuals.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go watch the duel from Revenge of the Sith again, which is still a better action scene than anything else to hit the screen in the past five years.