Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘Where are we, and how did we get here?’
- 1 Narrative and the action film
- 2 The action body
- 3 The action sequence
- 4 Action women
- 5 Action men
- 6 Race in the action film
- 7 Homosexuality in the action film
- 8 Action cinema after 9/11
- 9 The ‘European connection’
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Television Series
- Index
4 - Action women
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘Where are we, and how did we get here?’
- 1 Narrative and the action film
- 2 The action body
- 3 The action sequence
- 4 Action women
- 5 Action men
- 6 Race in the action film
- 7 Homosexuality in the action film
- 8 Action cinema after 9/11
- 9 The ‘European connection’
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Television Series
- Index
Summary
Media responses to female heroes occasionally reveal a discomfort about the presence of these powerful women within action cinema. Choosing their words carefully, they describe the female action hero in hesitant terms that betray an underlying conviction that these women are moving in on a territory that should remain male. As I was finishing this study, much was made in the UK and US press of Angelina Jolie taking on a role that was originally to have been played by Tom Cruise, in Phillip Noyce's action thriller Salt (2010). Despite her previous action roles (the Lara Croft: Tomb Raider films (2001, 2003), Mr and Mrs Smith (2005) and Wanted (2008)), this casting ‘gender switch’ divided opinions about whether Jolie convinces in the film's scenes of physical action. While Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times approvingly noted that Jolie ‘continues to prove she can handle guns, grenades and the bad guys’ (Turan 2010: review tagline) Todd McCarthy of IndieWire complained that the film ‘glosses over how a lone woman, no matter how lethal a weapon, can repeatedly take out a dozen or more armed men’ (McCarthy 2010: paragraph 1). If we stop to think about McCarthy's statement, its dubious basis quickly becomes apparent. Male-fronted action cinema regularly posits situations in which the hero achieves the impossible feat of repeatedly taking out ‘a dozen or more armed men’, and as we have seen in Chapters 2 and 3, such situations are staged in a film world whose correspondences to real-world physics and physiology can be quite stretched.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Contemporary Action Cinema , pp. 76 - 93Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011