Our Action Franchise Tournament has become a bloodbath, as it had always promised. After a few rounds where underlings and henchmen were blown away without a second thought, favorites have started to fall. Genre-shaping franchises like Die Hard, The Terminator, and James Bond met their makers, bowing to more consistent and spectacular fare. Today’s Final Four matchup will get no easier. This is now a showdown between legends.
Will Tom Cruise’s death drive overcome the chaotic, literal drive for survival in Mad Max? Can Jackie Chan’s Hong Kong masterpieces beat out the essential sci-fi films that grew from that action environment? Below, you’ll find the winners of round four. Our reader poll also continues, which has opted to say “yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker” to Jackie Chan and blown The Matrix away with the indefatigable pageantry of Bond.
Police Story vs. The Matrix
Winner: Police Story
One of the definitive high-concept sci-fi series squares off against a blood-and-bruises franchise that began by reverse-engineering a collection of all-timer stunt set pieces. Setting Jackie Chan and Stanley Tong against the Wachowskis and Keanu Reeves isn’t a pure battle of low and high action cinema, but it does contrast the struggles of the glaringly human with all the ways one could transcend such limits.
The Matrix‘s thought-provoking collision of Eastern and Western influences blew minds, and how it interpreted its myriad affections through its computer and camera effects changed the future of how action films looked and moved. But, much like how Neo downloaded martial arts knowledge directly into his brain, the Wachowskis absorbed their ability with fistfights and shootouts in part from the Police Story school of Hong Kong action.
Choreographer Yuen Woo-ping infused The Matrix with the skills he’d honed since his directorial debut, Snake In The Eagle’s Shadow—a film which helped define Jackie Chan’s star-making brand of slapstick action. Yuen, whose mark has been all over the franchises in this bracket (ranging from Once Upon A Time In China to In The Line Of Duty to Ip Man), gave Chan his big break while also allowing him the freedom to figure out his own identity outside of aping Bruce Lee. After Snake, the two made the excellent Drunken Master together, and from there, Chan took off. When he finally achieved his auteurist dreams in Police Story (he directed the first two films), his warm, silent-era-like comedy and legendary stunts contributed to a personal showcase as deft and ballsy as any ever committed to film.
Walking out of a Matrix film can lead to heady discussions regarding personal freedom, our relationship with ourselves and the world around us, and how slick it would be to dress in all black and wear tiny sunglasses. Walking out of a Police Story film after watching the credits reel of stunt outtakes means staring mortality in the face, and finding a visceral appreciation for what those who just dazzled us put on the line to do so. While the former makes The Matrix excellent sci-fi whose sometimes plodding ideas are invigorated by tons of breathless action, the latter makes Police Story a truly elemental representative of its genre.
Mission: Impossible vs. Mad Max
Winner: Mad Max
Much like in the previous round, where Mad Max stared down John Wick, this is another case where one franchise is flooring it towards the Grim Reaper while the other is hitting the nitro in the other direction. Both of these long-running franchises deal with an old world, an old way of life, slipping from one’s grasp, replaced by a new one that one only hopes they have a hand in shaping.
George Miller’s opus concerns a vehicular apocalypse, humanity’s basest desires literally driving us to our dusty doom. Persevering through it, finding what scraps of decency there are to be foraged from the desert, is the only reason to keep running up the odometer. In this hazy sandstorm of a series—fired into perfectly clear glass by the flames of its chase sequences—characters and actors blur into one another. Recastings and returns add a surreal sheen to the bad dream, where Hugh Keays-Byrne and Bruce Spence shift into new characters before our eyes and people are named things like “Pig Killer,” “Master Blaster,” and “Pissboy.” In that realm of the absurd and the assured, in a franchise that has only gotten bigger, better, and more batshit bonkers since The Road Warrior got souped up into Fury Road, the world Miller builds is just as exciting and engrossing as the rusted-cartoon mania he fills it with.
The same can’t quite be said of the world inhabited by Ethan Hunt and the Impossible Mission Force. Whether it’s a personally stylish director behind the camera like in the first few entries—ranging from John Woo to Brian De Palma to Brad Bird—or a journeyman whose working relationship with star Tom Cruise solidified his longevity with the franchise, Mission: Impossible has always been less about the espionage and MacGuffins threatening society, and more about the fantasy of personally defying death while sprinting towards it.
As Cruise’s hero collected a charming ensemble worthy of sacrificing himself for (or mourning when their members become collateral damage), his age becomes an asset of even greater importance than all his hacking gizmos and surveillance tech. The process-oriented films, which thrive when specifically tracking how a complex plan is pulled off, inch us closer to the edge of our seats the more impossible their missions seem. The villains of the franchise have never been great (Philip Seymour Hoffman being the outlier), but its true big bad has always been something more existential. As its star got older, as his insistence on reality and danger became even more strident, the exquisite set pieces took on an air of rubbernecking—how could anyone possibly make this punishment look cool? The reasoning behind these spectacles fell away like a motorcycle in midair, the plots and character relationships only cluttering the screen and clogging a direct cinematic pipeline from Cruise’s adrenal glands to our own.
But though the M:I action blockbusters are amazing, there is something inherently disposable about them as well. Their imagination is limited and targeted. While the Mad Max films get goofy and even repetitive, the imagination never runs dry—each new scene in each new movie teases an entire universe of oddities just beyond the edge of every exciting frame.
Readers Poll
The latest decisions are here, and the readers have split away around one full remaining fight. It still could mean that we all end up in the same place, but it’s getting more likely that the champions might not match up. And speaking of matchups, vote below and follow your heart. Check back tomorrow for the results of the poll, along with the last set of fistfights to vote on.
