A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

Melanie’s lovely piece last week put me on a streak of rewatching some of the Nineties movies I used to love. The Nineties were a great era for film. Action films in particular. There were not only films in the style that originated in the American New Wave of the ’60s, but also the rise of the ’90s Independent boom pioneered by the likes of Tarantino, to name just one. But this time, I wanted to focus my rewatches not so much on the perennials (the ones I periodically rewatch anyway) but the more mainstream ones I remember fondly in a particular style. A specific example of these are the Shane Black actioners. Black came to fame with the Lethal Weapon series (1987 – 98), but a conflict with the studio early on sent him on a bit of a detour, before he became involved with big franchise films like The Predator (2018). His scripts were distinctive. Self referential, with a particular style of dry one-liners. “Oh, honey,” Geena Davis’ character jeers at her foe in The Long Kiss Goodnight as he threatens her with a knife, “only four inches?” They’re self-referential too, as when, in the closing scenes of The Last Boy Scout, Bruce Willis’ PI explains to Damon Wayans’ character that punchlines are integral to the work. Not so much the work of being a PI, but of being an action movie hero. They straddle comedy punchline and dad joke: “Surf’s up” is the line for hitting someone with a surf board. You get the idea.

These are action movies in a very particular vein, a style of which Die Hard (1988, mind you), which Black did not write by the way, is perhaps (still) the most famous exponent. “Yippiekayay, mf-er.” Violent, dark, funny and highly stylized.

The missteps in these later ones – and this goes for The Long Kiss Goodnight as well as The Last Boy Scout – however, are quite as unsubtle as the action. The Last Boy Scout, is about an alcoholic PI (former Secret Service, who’d have thought) who finds himself embroiled in a case of corruption in the highest echelons of sports, money and politics. True to its genre, it’s one of those “buddy actioners” in which two disparate very macho characters forge a bond through adversity. It has an honest-to-God fridging (Halle Berry’s exotic dancer is brutally murdered, which sets the plot in motion), it has villains who are psychopathic beyond camp, and it has the kind of lead who, despite being a complete dysfunctional mess, emerges as the unlikely (or perhaps not so unlikely) hero. In scenes such as the one in which Joe (our PI) comes home, suspects (and verifies) his neglected wife may have been cheating, he responds by not just drawing a gun – but threatening to put a bullet through the wardrobe in which the man may be hiding. This type of thing is symptomatic of the film’s flaws. We’re supposed to take it as a given that he’s a good guy at heart, that he won’t literally hurt his wife or her lover: and yes, that’s how it ultimately reads. But it leans way too lazily, again, on the antihero trope to really pull off this kind of toxicity. Chelsea Field (Sarah, the wife) is game for this part (she was also in Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (1991) – and I’m being complimentary when I say she has a post-doctorate in “feisty”), but had it been less blatant of a genre exercise, it would have been unwatchable.

Joe is also exactly the kind of movie alcoholic, whose substance abuse barely has any effect on his prowess as a gut-puncher, and is mainly there to signal he has been “brought down in the world”. Not an unusual cliché, by any means, but again lazy. Willis is a charismatic lead, and perfectly capable of being disarmingly insufferable without it. Wayans has plenty of presence, and though the two don’t seem to have much chemistry together, they make a compelling enough duo to sell the film as a whole.

The saving grace of movies like these is that they don’t take themselves very seriously. They’re self-consciously genre movies. They’re supposed to be fun and gritty and self-referential, which is not to say that this necessarily absolves them, in any way, from criticisms such as the above.

Another saving grace of these movies is that they’re smart enough to assume the audience knows what they’re watching. We know the rules, who the hero is, and what should be his due. The love of his estranged wife, his family, a happy end. But in terms of gender politics: in the subgenre of dads going after criminal daughter-kidnappers with pithy one-liners: even Taken (2008) seems like a comparative pinnacle of political correctness.

Be that as it may, and my very real gripes aside, are they still watchable? Yes. I think so. They’re reasonably well done, spectacular, oftentimes darkly funny – and anyway, violence (and alcoholism) has been the calling card of the noir-style hardboiled detective since before The Maltese Falcon. In that sense, they know what they’re doing. That’s Black’s strength as a writer: he knows his cinema, he knows his zeitgeist, he knows his (very male-centric) nostalgia, and he can write dialogue.

Are these the movies that, on their own, manage to hold up in our current time? Mostly they don’t, to my mind. They’re just not quite clever enough for that: some are so much of their time that much of the jokey wink-wink-nudge-nudge towards the audience gets lost in translation. And they are also not groundbreaking, like the aforementioned – and even more hyperbolic – “independents” of the era that we all came to know and love. Surprise mass hits like Pulp Fiction (1994) (with callbacks to similar types of action tropes and roles, interestingly). Whereas these films mainly dealt in nostalgia, even then: and from the time when Boy Scout was released (1991), until The Long Kiss Goodnight flopped in 1996, the genre had long been firmly in decline.

While these types of actioners have been done before the ’90s, and sometimes better – as the movies these films themselves reference will attest – it has rarely been done since. Not really. Even franchises that ran long, such as Bad Boys (1995, and, incidentally, Lethal Weapon and Die Hard as well), really only expand on the original. Lazily in many cases. There’s not enough taste for them in Hollywood, more generally. Not, as is abundantly clear from current Hollywood fare, because things have gotten ‘more PC’ or (much) more progressive. But simply because this particular type of irreverence fell out of fashion.

As for Shane Black himself, big franchises aside, his directorial debut was the action comedy Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang* (2005). Though a bit messy, to my mind it’s one of his more quirky, self-aware and interesting films. (Undeniably very NSFW, not to say crass, considering the type of script we’re dealing with.) But it was a bit too niche to make a real dent, even if it received a fair bit of love here and there (and from me). It was, for modern viewers, admittedly perhaps a bit much. After all, in a way, the films it references always were.

*The too-clever-by-half title itself, it is worth noting, references Pauline Kael’s general criticism, in her book of the same name. In her words:
“Perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this.”
(Quote sourced here from Brian Kellow’s, Pauline Kael. A Life in the Dark, Viking Press, 2011, citing Pauline Kael in her book Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Atlantic Press, 1968)

**Screen captures from The Long Kiss Goodnight, Renny Harlin 1996 © New Line Cinema, and The Last Boy Scout, Tony Scott 1991 © Warner Bros, used under fair use for commentary/criticism.