Going soft: the changing face of Hollywood action cinema in the 1990s

It’s fair to say that the mainstream action film as it is typically thought of today – the kind of narratives in which musclebound action heroes single-handedly take on entire armies of bad guys – was forged during a particularly conservative period in American history.

Following Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election, the nation lurched to the right politically, socially, culturally and economically. Reagan deregulated Wall Street and cut welfare programmes, reignited the Cold War, intensified the so-called ‘war on drugs’ and espoused traditional Christian values centred on the nuclear family. Reaganite women were wives, mothers and homemakers, while Reaganite men were breadwinners: husbands, fathers and sons, strong in body and mind, who could provide for and protect their family, their community and their country.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that it was in the 1980s that physical performers such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris rose to prominence as action stars at the very forefront of American popular culture, with the likes of Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren and Steven Seagal joining them towards the end of the decade. 

According to Susan Jeffords in her influential book on the action genre, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (1994), these actors came to embody the political landscape; their imposing physicality, dispassionate approach to violence and righteous determination to destroy forces of evil all came to represent the strong, patriarchal form of masculinity at the heart of Reaganite ideology.

Some of these action narratives spoke to domestic issues, and particularly Reagan’s apparent determination to tackle organised crime, drug trafficking and domestic terrorism: Code of Silence (1985) pits Norris against Colombian drug runners; in Cobra (1986), Stallone plays a cop tasked with eliminating a politically subversive cult; and Raw Deal (1986) allows Schwarzenegger to smash the Italian Mafia with extreme prejudice. 

Others emphasised America’s strength on the world stage and its ironclad opposition to communism: Invasion U.S.A. (1985) pits Norris against Soviet and Cuban invaders; in Commando (1985), Schwarzenegger takes on a former South American dictator in the fictional country of Val Verde; and Red Scorpion (1988) dispatches Lundgren to Africa, where he is supposed to be supporting Soviet forces before he eventually ends up joining an anti-communist movement.

But if we accept that action cinema in the 1980s was broadly conservative (and that’s a big if with caveats too innumerable to mention, not least that it is impossible to generalise about the overarching politics of any genre), that changed dramatically in the next decade. By the early 1990s, the Cold War had thawed, the apparent threat of communism was receding and Reagan’s brand of ‘New Right’ conservatism was falling out of favour; in 1992, his former Vice President George H. W. Bush suffered a resounding defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton, who ushered in the first Democratic administration to be inaugurated since 1977. 

Of course, Clinton’s brand of ‘Third Way’ neoliberalism was far from perfect and ultimately served to entrench the economic disparity that had been growing under Reagan – but its promise to reform the welfare system and softer approach to social issues did represent a political change from the staunch conservatism that defined the Reagan and Bush eras.

And the action genre changed too. While conventional wisdom would have it that the American action film has always been unfalteringly right-wing, it was in the 1990s that new, more progressive – even subversive – forms of the action film began to emerge. For proof of this, we need look no further than Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break (1991) – as much a scathing attack on capitalism as an exercise in entertainment. Released before Bush was even voted out of office, the film famously features a band of thieves who don masks modelled on former United States presidents – Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Reagan himself – to pull off bank heists in a mockery of a political system stacked in favour of the rich. 

These criminals, a group of free-spirited surfers led by Brodhi (Patrick Swayze), are ostensibly the film’s villains; Keanu Reeves’ FBI agent Johnny Utah infiltrates their gang to bring them to justice. But it’s hard not to sympathise with thieves who reject the capitalistic mainstream and steal to fund an “endless summer” divorced from a daily grind that, by the end of the 1980s, Americans had been conditioned to accept. By the film’s end, even Utah can see the appeal.

Keanu Reeves was a new face in the action genre, having appeared in a raft of comedies throughout the late 1980s. But there was an evolution even in vehicles for established action stars. Take Lundgren and Van Damme, for example. In 1988, Lundgren had taken the starring role in Red Scorpion, while JCVD had played a villainous role in Black Eagle as a KGB agent; both were films designed to play on America’s deep-seated fear of communism. By 1992, Lundgren and Van Damme were co-starring in Universal Soldier, in which two servicemen are killed in Vietnam only to be resurrected decades later to serve in an elite anti-terrorism unit. 

Any memory they might have of their previous lives has supposedly been erased, but Sergeant Andrew Scott (Lundgren), driven insane by his experiences in Vietnam, soon begins to remember. A critique of American militarism, Universal Soldier was released following both the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Gulf War. It dared to suggest that the United States military might be just as corrupt and unconscionable as any nation in its long list of enemies.

Lundgren and Van Damme would go on to make similarly subversive action films over the next few years. Men of War (1994) – which boasts a screenplay written by John Sayles, a filmmaker well-known for biting political satire – is an attack on American imperialism that reworks the basic plot of 1980s action films such as Commando and Red Scorpion. Lundgren plays Nick Gunar, an ex-soldier hired as a mercenary to displace the indigenous population of a small island so that it can be exploited for its natural resources. Ultimately, Gunar abandons his mission in favour of defending the island’s native people against their capitalist oppressors. The previous year, Van Damme had made Hard Target (1993) with director John Woo, in which he takes on a ruthless cabal of ultra-rich hunters who stalk the unhoused for sport.

Even Schwarzenegger and Stallone adapted; both men significantly softened their star personas at the dawn of the 1990s. Schwarzenegger’s hyper-masculinity was first eroded in Twins (1988), released in the year Reagan handed over the presidency to Bush, and was further deconstructed in Kindergarten Cop (1990), Last Action Hero (1993) and Junior (1994). 

Kindergarten Cop and Last Action Hero are especially significant here; both films actively lampoon the action-star persona that Schwarzenegger had previously cultivated in the likes of Commando and Raw Deal. Last Action Hero, in particular – in which Schwarzenegger’s character literally steps out of an archetypal action film – draws attention to the fact that the hard-bodied masculinity of the 1980s was more of a Hollywood construction than a reality. 

Stallone, too, turned to comedy in films such as Oscar (1991) and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992), while the villain in his more straight-faced Cliffhanger (1993) – the self-aggrandising Eric Qualen (John Lithgow) – is a former military intelligence operative driven entirely by petty greed.

In her essay ‘The Big Switch’ for Film Theory Goes to the Movies (1992), Jeffords argues that this shift in masculine representation in 1990s action cinema is attributable to Hollywood’s embracing of the ‘New Man’: a “kinder, gentler” form of post-Reagan American manhood. There was, in other words, no place for the likes of Commando’s John Matrix or Cobra’s Marion Cobretti in the new decade. 

There was more room, though, for women; it was in the 1990s that Cynthia Rothrock rose to prominence in the direct-to-video arena with China O’Brien and Martial Law (both 1990), while the successful Bridget Fonda vehicle Point of No Return (or The Assassin, 1993) presaged an explosion in female-led action films in the 21st century. Even more male-dominated genre movies increasingly found space for female characters: Sandra Bullock supported Stallone in Demolition Man (1993) and Reeves in Speed (1994) before taking a starring role in The Net (1995).

So, the American action film has not always leaned to the right of the political spectrum. It was in the 1990s, as the nation began to reckon with the legacy of Reagan and Bush, that the genre began to shift and evolve to move in more progressive and even countercultural directions. Where the action cinema of the Reagan era made villains of the nation’s foreign and domestic enemies, the next decade saw the genre question whether the United States – and its deeply entrenched ideologies – might be the real bad guy after all.

Point Break 4K restoration is in cinemas and on BFI Player from 8 November.

Art of Action plays in cinemas across the UK and online on BFI Player from October to December 2024.