![]() ![]() ![]() The previous film in the franchise, Die Another Day, had featured an ice palace, an invisible car and that CGI surfing scene. See? Casino Royale was Daniel Craig's first run-out as the new 007, and 14 years on it's still the high-watermark (we're feeling very hopeful about No Time to Die, though). Without Bourne, you don't have Daniel Craig's it-hurts-me-when-I-hurt-you James Bond. This was the kind of action movie in which offing bad guys looked more like a job than a laugh, and where you felt every punch and car crash viscerally. Post-Bourne, everything got a bit gritty, a bit real, a bit hard to stomach. Before Jason Bourne, action movies were mostly about impossibly large men doing implausibly athletic killings and then mangling cheesy one-liners. The film that killed off Pierce Brosnan's James Bond and reshaped every action film that followed it. There's an odd circularity to how big-budget action films now exist mainly in the superhero film vortex, with protagonists who are the logical extreme of that improbably handy secret agent.Ĭertainly, we've not lost our appetite for watching people smash seven shades out of each other while searching for some McGuffin or other. The pure action film – the oeuvres of Schwarzenegger, Van Damme, Segal, Norris, Lundgren and the like, which use the nuts and bolts of thrillers to launch their enormous stars into a series of even bigger explosions – only really got going in the West in the early Eighties, after Hollywood had had its eyes opened to the majesty of the martial arts films coming out of Hong Kong and Japan.ĭr No was an early pointer too: Hitchcock's heroes tended to be resourceful and quick-witted, but the vogue for one who can think, blast or shag their way out of any tricky situation started with James Bond, and the Swiss-army-protagonist is still an action movie essential. ![]()
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