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" From the true birth of the genre in the &amp;#039;70s with the grizzled cool of Clint Eastwood and the pioneering talents of Bruce Lee to our current ensemble of muscular pretty boys, action cinema has evolved considerably and continuously, generally to carry on fitting in with the tastes of the masses. The action hero has few universally definable traits, each era is distinct, but the action hero must always be ripped, he must always be easy on the eyes so the ladies aren&amp;#039;t intimidated, and he must always be prepared to smugly spit out a semi-comical one-liner should the situation call for it. In honor of this weekend&amp;#039;s Expendables 3, in which Schwarzenegger and Stallone once against reassert their physical superiority, age be damned, here&amp;#039;s an examination of the kinds of action heroes we&amp;#039;ve seen over the years. &amp;#039;70s: The Cool Loner  The foundations for the modern action hero were laid by two very different icons, who shared one trait: being able to say everything by doing nothing. On one hand you had Clint Eastwood, who, building on his work in Sergio Leone&amp;#039;s Dollars Trilogy, would create Dirty Harry Callahan, the vicious antihero who would go on to be the template for so many action heroes over the next four decades and counting. His snarling manner, effortless cool, and quotable lines would be emulated worldwide as the series of films, which were never really all that good, became the first real action franchise. And then on the other hand (and the other side of the world), we had Bruce Lee, one of the most recognizable men in movie history. The Western world had never seen anything quite like him. He transcended the work of the Shaw Brothers before him and he also changed the way Asian people were represented in American film. Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon, and Enter the Dragon emphasised Lee&amp;#039;s Jeet Kune Do and the masses gravitated toward his immense presence to see his flashy and deadly moves on the big screen, though much like Eastwood&amp;#039;s Dirty Harry, he would remain emotionally distant and let his weapons do the talking. The action movie, much less the action hero, was not yet concretely definable, but these two men, with their unique talents, would be pioneers for the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jason Statham. &amp;#039;80s: The Bloodthirsty Freak The &amp;#039;80s were big, deadly, brash, and everything was pumped up to the maximum. And that wasn&amp;#039;t just limited to general aesthetics. The bulging biceps of Arnold Schwarzenegger (who would go on to satirize his image in the still-underappreciated Last Action Hero), Sylvester Stallone, and Dolph Lundgren defined a generation of action movies in which the body counts were high, the one-liners endless, and the violence extreme and often beyond comprehension. Those three men are reuniting again for the third Expendables film as they refuse to grow up, or maybe it&amp;#039;s just because they don&amp;#039;t know how to be anything but lean, mean killing machines. Arnie and his ilk were giants among mere mortals, not just physically, but figuratively. There was no village that couldn&amp;#039;t be single-handedly destroyed with only a machine gun for company, and no amount of Russians impervious to all-American power. Even though Schwarzenegger is Austrian, he&amp;#039;s always been considered one of America&amp;#039;s own, perhaps because he so embodies the American ethos of individualism and self-determination so extremely, two long-running themes in the genre. Action movies in the &amp;#039;80s were a bombardment of viciousness, often featuring the singular figure taking on an entire establishment armed with nothing but the largest gun money can buy. The excessiveness of these movies, in particular the grotesque and gratuitous Rambo sequels, is often lampooned today, but there still remains something strangely endearing about a freakishly large man with one-percent body fat, who has taken the time to oil himself up and wrap a bandana around his head before going on a one-man war against the Soviet Union, while proudly shouting puns in broken English. &amp;#039;90s: The Eccentric Dude Grunge and everything alternative became popular and with that, the action hero had to change. The early &amp;#039;90s signaled the arrival of the genuine martial artist as Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal became huge box office draws with their ensemble of fast-punching combinations and spinning heel kicks. Yet both men wore out their popularity very quickly and became as antiquated as the &amp;#039;80s stars once it became clear that audiences&amp;#039; tastes had shifted from one-man-killing-machine movies such as Hard to Kill and Hard Target to something a little harder to define. A drastic change then undertook action cinema and the American hero. Onetime comedian and harmless hip-hop artist Will Smith found fame battling aliens and Miami gangsters in Independence Day and Bad Boys, respectively, and those two weirdos Nicolas Cage and Keanu Reeves became the two biggest action stars on the planet, despite looking like members of your college chess team. Cage appeared in three of the best action films of the &amp;#039;90s \u2014 The Rock, Con Air, and Face/Off \u2014 and Reeves&amp;#039;s career really found a high point when he indulged in genre flicks such as Speed and the pseudo-philosophical martial-arts/cyberpunk mashup that was The Matrix. Eccentricity was the most notable trait among the big action stars of the &amp;#039;90s. Audiences no longer wanted the brawn and brutality. They wanted something a little odd. They wanted action stars who looked like them. These guys had brains, not just muscle, and because they&amp;#039;re not physically intimidating, they would often be pitted as underdogs, leading to a sense of danger for the protagonist that hadn&amp;#039;t really existed in the &amp;#039;80s and earlier part of the &amp;#039;90s. &amp;#039;00s: The Lone Wolf 9/11 obviously had a huge impact on action cinema, and the keys to the genre were handed over to the superheroes. With that, the genre has become safe and that has been reflected in casting choices. Out of the many stars that have fronted an action movie since the turn of the century, only Jason Statham has carved out a niche for himself as a genuine 21st-century action hero. The rest just look like they&amp;#039;re in very expensive adverts for whatever product has been awkwardly placed in a scene. Statham&amp;#039;s Transporter franchise was a wonderful blend of European cool, Hong Kong action, and the American antihero, but the gravel-voiced Englishman&amp;#039;s frequently awesome films such as Crank and Safe get overlooked at the box office in favor of the PG-13 offerings that feature somebody barely out of puberty trying to be a tough guy. Every handsome guy in Hollywood has had a go at being an action hero over the last decade. For example, Mark Wahlberg, whose two or three mid-priced action-thrillers a year never make much money (Contraband, Max Payne, and 2 Guns immediately spring to mind). At some point during this decade, the action hero lost his edge and became ordinary, with Jason Statham standing alone, in a corner, still trying to get genuine action films made. 2010s: The Pretty-Boy Heartthrob Because of the wild success of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, action stars are getting increasingly younger, which means the films are being aimed at a teen audience that is often mostly made up of younger girls. Guys like Channing Tatum (who has proved himself to be a fantastic dramatic and comedic actor), Chris Pine, and Liam Hemsworth are the new brand of action hero, and each of them looks like he&amp;#039;s barely graduated college. Nobody has ever looked more uncomfortable than Channing in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, in which he was asked to be a tough, emotionless super-soldier when he&amp;#039;s really a quiet, likeable guy who mumbles a lot. The new school of action hero is clean-cut, cute, and likely to be adorned on a teenage girl&amp;#039;s wall, and while it&amp;#039;s great that more girls are going to action movies, it doesn&amp;#039;t feel quite right that the genre is being used as a showcase for the cheekbones of whatever heartthrob is all teens are currently thinking about. The grit and the dirt are long gone. Even the violence has been infantilized so that it means nothing, because hell will freeze over before a Hemsworth has his face distorted. As in all things, of course, Liam Neeson is the exception. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a29702/action-hero-types/>