Why I Love... 80's Action Movies

With the imminent release of Snakes On A Plane and the recent late night reruns of pretty much every 80's action movie ever made, surely the time is right to return to the Golden Age Of Bad Action Films. The problems with modern action movies are myriad, but, in short it comes down an absence of just one thing - and I hate to say it : hunks. Name the last major Hollywood movie star there was. Has he got muscles? Has he got an impenetrable accent? Has he got a name that nobody in their right mind would ever give a child? Sylvester? Arnold? Jean Claude? Shucks, even Vincent? What Hollywood needs is neurotically named children who overcompensate with immense muscles and a burning desire to live in mansions and fuck, then divorce, supermodels. What Hollywood needs is a movie star who looks and acts like he can actually think witty dialogue for himself.

When you saw Stallone as Rambo, when you saw The Governator as John Matrix, when you saw Bruce Willis as John McClane, you weren't watching the character. Plot and names were just excuses for explosions and all fucking hell breaking loose. You were watching a movie star pretending to be someone else so he could duff people up and throw them off exploding cars into massive off-screen cushions. This is a time when high-fives were not ironic, when sidekicks were expendable and bandannas and dirty vests were required by law.

What Hollywood needs is a Movie Star: someone unafraid to make big, dumb movies. And someone too big to walk through a door without having to stoop, not girly-men wimps like Affleck and DiCaprio pretending to be heroes. What Hollywood needs is someone who looks like he actually can lift a car without the aid of a bunch of backroom computer geeks who are busy calibrating physics engines. Someone who doesn't look as if he will get tired if he runs down the shops. What Hollywood needs is to make decent action movies again. Trawl the Mr Universe competition if you must. We grew up watching films like this - and we want them back. I don't want to watch a CGI Scrappy Doo being the Bad Guy anymore than I want to gut and kill Paul W.S. Anderson (and I want to gut and kill Paul W.S. Anderson a lot).

For too long, these films have been stuck in a mire. A place where action movies have pop-rap crossovers, where singers become sidekicks, and where Generation X has grown up and become Generation Why? Most films these days are stuck in a rut of awful CGI and even worse, self-referential scripts. We're raising a generation that get maudlin when an evil drug-runner dies, and stare off into the distance whilst listening to a Moby CD, pondering over the fragility of life. We need a generation that throws the bad guys off cliffs, jokes that "he had a lot to drink" as he drowns in the sea, and then goes off to bed women with plastic tits. How the hell else is America going survive? The next generation of soldiers have been taught that remorse is a virtue thanks to a whole plethora of 'Tortured Superhero' movies that have plagued our multiplexes. The only way it could get worse is if Paul W.S..Anderson The Franchise Slayer invented a cloning machine.

I've seen films where people don't laugh with the film, they laugh at it. During Die Another Day, someone even shouted "BULLSHIT!" at the screen when Bond surfed the cheapest CGI wave ever made. A baddie with a face made out of diamonds? Oh, Come The Fuck On. The last thing Hollywood wants is yet another 'remake' of an Eighties TV show with an ironic re-imagining and a post-modern plot. What it needs is to play it straight, dumb, and loud, and ditch the crappy CGI. Nobody gets excited when a bunch of manipulated pixels are thrown near another set of Weird Science- style, digitally enhanced pixels. There's no excitement in it. I miss the days when stuntmen actually got injured or even died on set. That was real. Movies have regressed to an infantile state of make believe. Remember the car stunt in The Man With The Golden Gun? In those days, they actually built the bridge and drove the car over the bridge. These days? If George Lucas had his way, the car wouldn't even have existed except as a computer programme, let alone been driven across the river. We've all got Xboxes and we've performed bigger stunts in Grand Theft Auto.

Despite what the propeller-heads will tell you, I know better. If thirty- two years of watching bad movies and worse remakes has taught me one thing, it's never beam down in a red shirt. Oh, and how to spot digital fakery a mile off. We deserve movies with a sense of danger, a sense of fun, and an awful soundtrack of dumb pop hits on. I want to go to the movies and not feel insulted by a producer looking for a PG-13 to get a bunch of bored, popcorn chewin', non-stop yakkin', text-message giggling idiots on their holidays into the movies. I want to see massive man-mountains chewing scenery, demolishin' dialogue like Godzilla, wisecrackin' like Bond, skiing down mountains, blowing up oil rigs, running away from explosions, and doing one last job to save the woman (or daughter) they love.

Fuck it - get me Ernest Borgnine, Chuck Norris, David Hasselhoff, Sylvester Stallone, Lance Henriksen and Michael Ironside. Make them a Dirty-Dozen style set of Grizzled Ole' Bastards busting drug-runners in L.A. Pop in a few car chases and a handful of dumb blondes. Ban CGI and make quipping mandatory. Shoot people with spear-guns and joke that 'He Got The Point'.

Just make damn good action movies instead of piles of lame crap. Any homo-erotic subtext you want to add... well, that'll just be a bonus.