Action Hero MoviesHigh expectations are set for action hero movie fans from 60 seconds in as Tom Cruise bumps into Jason Statham – this can’t not be a good movie now! The next 10+ minutes proceed to be a slow but mostly smooth character-building, scene-setting spout of drama as we follow a taxi driver around down. Around the 15 minute mark, Tom Cruise finally gets into the cab and hopefully some action will emerge. The energy is well paced thus far. The screenplay, cinematography and mood-setting is not bad. But the plot is very thin and the script is very slow thus far, so this movie seems like it could go either way – it could be an awesome concept or a terribly underwhelming stinker, let’s see.
In the end it turns out to be somewhere in between. I rate it Below Average. It’s got a cool concept, and a couple of cool actors, but is massively lacking in the action department. Although the genre is pretty good – it’s about a slick-moving professional assassin – the actual action is generally very slow – it’s more like a drama in that regard, minus most of the arguments. It’s not much ado about nothing, but it’s little ado about something. Slightly Below Average seems a fair rating for this movie which does remarkably well in holding attention considering so little is actually going on. It reminds me of an early Connery era Bond movie in this regard, except they had a bit more going on! The ending gets a bit gritty too – thus it’s highly skippable, along with many patches of this movie, if you’ve seen it before.