In the Journal of Film and Video, Lennart Soberson stated that the action film genre has been a subject of scholarly debate since the 1980s.[4] Soberson wrote that repeated traits of the genre include chase sequences, fights, shootouts, explosions, and stunt work while other scholars asserted there were more underlying traits that define the genre.[4] David Bordwell in The Way Hollywood Tells It wrote that audiences are "told that spectacle overrides narrative" in action cinema while Wheeler Winston Dixon echoed that these films were typified by "excessive spectacle" as a "desperate attempt to mask the lack of content."[3][5] Geoff King argued that the spectacle can also be a vehicle for narrative, opposed to interfering with it.[6] Soberson stated that Harvey O'Brien had "perhaps the most convincing understanding of the genre", stating that the action film was "best understood as a fusion of form and content. It represents the idea and ethic of action through a form in which action, agitation and movement are paramount."[4]
O'Brien wrote further in his book Action Movies: The Cinema of Striking Back to suggest action films being unique and not just a series of action sequences, stating that that was the difference between Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Die Hard (1988), that while both were mainstream Hollywood blockbusters with a hero asserting masculinity and overcoming obstacles to a personal and social solution, John McClane in Die Hard repeatedly firing his automatic pistol while swinging from a high rise was not congruent with the image of Indiana Jones in Raiders swinging his whip to fend off villains in the backstreets of Cairo.[7] British author and academic Yvonne Tasker expanded on this topic, stating that action films have no clear and constant iconography or settings. In her book The Hollywood Action and Adventure Film (2015), she found that the most broadly consistent themes tend to be a characters quest from freedom from oppression such as a hero overcoming enemies or obstacles and physical conflicts or challenge, usually battling other humans or alien opponents.[8]
By late 2010s studies of genre analysis, the term "genre" itself is often replaced or supplemented with the words "mode" and "narrative form" with all three terms often being used interchangeably.[9] Johan Höglund and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet said that the difference between these concepts are elusive, but stated that genre could be defined as belonging to specific historical and cultural moments while "mode" and "form" can refer to a larger pattern that operates across a wider historical and cultural field.[9] In their book Action Cinema Since 2000 (2024), Tasker, Lisa Purse, and Chris Holmlund stated that thinking of action as a mode is more helpful than thinking of it as a genre.[10] The three authors suggested that action frames a certain manner of filmmaking and viewing exceed genre without eclipsing it stating that websites such as IMDb and Wikipedia rarely label films by a single genre and that streaming services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix similarly dilutes what is marketed and received as action.[10]
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I'm with David Bordwell and Wheeler Winston Dixon. I'm not going to answer your question
@SteveSS
