Gonzo

Top Ten Gonzo Action Movies

These are the flicks that pack enough action for Dixon.

And as ever, if you're interested in checking out the flicks for yourself, just click on the title to be whisked away to Amazon...

Die Hard (1988)
Starring Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman
This one made Bruce Willis box-office and established him as a blue collar hero. After twenty minutes of set-up the film sprints to the finish with lots of bleeding and sweating and grunting. Firefights, fistfights and more. A half dozen hateful villains. Funny and thrilling. Pure popcorn adrenaline.

Full Contact (1992)
Starring Chow Yun Fat and Simon Ringo, subtitled in English
Chow Yun Fat and Simon Lam in Ringo Lam's Hong Kong crime epic. Chow's a low-level hood who's left for dead by his gang after a hold-up in Thailand goes terribly wrong. Chow's revenge ends in a pile of bodies. An unforgettable gunbattle in an ice warehouse. The first movie to do the "follow the track of the bullet" gag that's common in movies now. Stylish and mean.

Predator (1987)
Starring Arnold Swarzeneggar, Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura
Arnold, Carl Weathers and the one-time Governor of Minnesota versus Sandanistas and a vicious alien in the jungle. Blistering firefights (Jesse with a gatling gun!) and a hand-to-hand fight with the titular alien is a bruiser. Arnold looks miserable as he had walking pneumonia while filming this. That just adds to the believability.

Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)
Starring Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, and Jeremy Irons
Willis and MacTiernan again with Die Hard 3. This time he's teamed with Samuel L. Jackson for the best Batman movie ever made. Bruce is after a sick professional criminal (Jeremy Irons) who leaves riddles and corpses all over Manhattan.
Chases, gun battles, fistfights and explosions follow one upon the other. Great heist sequence. And brilliant casting of pop singer Sam Phillips as a silent femme fatale who knows how to handle a knife.

Hard Boiled (1992)
Starring Chow Yun Fat; subtitled in English
Not the best of the Chow Yun Fat/John Woo efforts but certainly the most action packed. It opens with a tremendous gunfight and just picks up speed from there. The closing half hour where the bad (REALLY bad) guys take an entire hospital hostage has to be seen to be believed. Chow at his most charming and deadly.

Big Trouble in Little China (Single Disc Edition) (1986)
Starring Kurt Russell and Kim Catrall
Disjointed and strange but filled with surprises. Kurt Russell and a mostly Asian cast "shake the pillars of Heaven" with a series of firefights and kung-fu battles and nasty traps. Some truly funny scenes and great delivery from Kurt.

Extreme Prejudice (1987)
Starring Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe, and Maria Conchita Alonzo
100% guilty pleasure. Nick Nolte, as the toughest Texas Ranger ever, against slimy Powers Boothe with Maria Conchita Alonzo and a cast of unfortunate Mexican stereotypes caught in the middle. Throw in a whacky, redneck-on-acid played by Bill Forsythe and mix with lead! Walter Hill goes over the top and never comes back as the cast backstabs, shifts loyalties and shoots anyone who moves in Hill's homage to THE WILD BUNCH.

Supercop (1996)
Starring Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh
Jackie Chan's most punch crazy movie. And THAT's saying something. Jackie's a Hong Kong cop on the trail of druglords in the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia. He's partnered with the astounding Michelle Yeoh (who showed Pierce Brosnan how it's done in TOMMORROW NEVER DIES) as a soldier from mainland China. Amazing martial arts sequence and a high octane gunfight in the jungle are just the beginning as we head for a wild chase and fight in Singapore involving trucks, cars, a freight train and the most consistently dangerous helicopter in cinema history.

Siege of Firebase Gloria
Starring R. Lee Ermey and Wings Hauser

You're gonna have to go on ebay to find this one. R. Lee Ermey (the drill instructor from FULL METAL JACKET) and Wings Hauser (straight to video action king) star as Marines in Vietnam who man a forgotten firebase that is being encircled by what seems like the entire North Vietnamese army. Nasty, wicked, take-no-prisoners stuff. Favorite scene; Ermey holding up two severed heads of guys decapitated by VC when they fell asleep on guard duty. "These are BAD Marines," R Lee shouts in his famous frog croak/drawl.

Not yet available on DVD.

High Risk
Starring James Brolin and James Coburn; with Lindsay Wagner, Ernest Borgine, and Anthony Quinn
Another one to look for on ebay. This one tanked at the box office. It opened the same weekend as RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. Talk about bad positioning. James Brolin leads a bunch of his unemployed blue collar pals down to Colombia to rip off billionaire cokelord James Coburn. Great action and a jungle chase. Some funny stuff and a cornball ending that works. And the Bionic Woman is in it!