From Swashbucklers to Supermen: A Brief History of Action-Movie Heroes
There’s a moment in Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation — Tom Cruise career-saver, franchise MVP and the summer’s best non-Imperator Furiosa action blockbuster — where the CIA director refers to the film’s relentless hero as “the living manifestation of destiny.” As a government official talking about an unpredictable agent, the line is patently (if knowingly) ridiculous. As Alec Baldwin talking about Tom Cruise, the dialogue sounds right on the money. That phrase could be dropped into the first sentence of his biography and nobody would think twice.
When the superstar first stepped into the role of superspy Ethan Hunt 19 years ago, it was unclear what kind of action hero the spritely and hyper-intense Rain Man star was going to be. Now, five movies later, the answer is clear: All of them. As the franchise has progressed, Cruise has done nothing less than take 100 years of action movies and collapse them into one (very compact) person. If we take a closer look at the archetype at the end of the Summer of Rogue, would it confirm that we’ve reached the logical conclusion of the Hollywood action hero as we know it? Or might we be on the precipice of something new — hanging on to the edge of a cinematic jet by our fingertips as it soars into parts unknown?
As the tentpole-über-alles season slouches toward Bethlehem (a.k.a. awards season), we’re taking one last look back and tracing how this staple of Hollywood movies has morphed over the decades. It’s the evolution of the action hero — from the 1920s to the present day — in just 10 easy steps.
The Acrobat
Action has been a staple of the movies since Edwin S. Porter sent a locomotive barreling straight at the audience, but the first proper action heroes were actually comedians. You do not get Jackie Chan without Charlie Chaplin; Bond — James Bond — is virtually unthinkable without Buster Keaton; and it’d be impossible to imagine Ethan Hunt without a clock-hanging Harold Lloyd.
The silent era’s funnymen are remembered as clumsy agents of chaos, but they were also daredevils who’d risk life and limb for a good laugh and laid the groundwork for virtually all the derring-do that followed. Nobody exemplified this better than Keaton — watching him grab on to moving cars, jump across chasms, swing across waterfalls, leap around and on top of moving trains (including one stunt that left him with a broken neck), and ride a motorcycle on its handlebars, you can feel your pulse quickening. Even when he did stunts that made it seem as if the action was happening to him — like the famous falling house sequence from Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928) — the comedian had a knack for making the act of standing still seem totally kinetic. Forget the Western tough guys; the modern action hero really starts here.