OUG, HONEY," Sharon Stone coos to Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1990's "Total Recall" as he points a gun at her head. "You wouldn't hurt me, would you, sweetheart? Sweetheart, be reasonable. After all, we're married!"
Schwarzenegger shoots Stone right between the eyes.
"Consider that a divorce," he responds in that way only the upper echelon of action stars can. It's as if to say, "I'm so tough that even in this high-stress moment, I still have the cool and calm to say something witty."
Colin Farrell who takes over for Schwarzenegger as Quaid in the new iteration of "Total Recall," says something similiar - "I think it's safe to say we're separated" - as his "wife" (now played by Kate Beckinsale) this time chases after him.
But there's no joy in his voice as he says it because we're not supposed to be paying attention to the dialogue, but the CGI car chase on a highway in the sky. There are no winks nor nods. No tongues in cheeks.
That's the problem with the new "Total Recall" and many recent action movies. They're all business.
When and why did they stop being fun?
That's why moviegoers get so psyched about "The Expendables 2," in theaters today. The plot will be stupid, the dialogue will be stilted, and the acting will be barely non-existent. The villain, for goodness' sake, is named Vilain.
But what "The Expendables 2" has that recent action blockbusters lack, is a sense of joy, a revelry in its own silliness.
Seriously, "The Dark Knight Rises" is an almost-three-hour movie about a grown man who dresses like a bat and there's not enough time for a couple of jokes.
Director Christopher Nolan's admittedly excellent Batman helped usher in an unfortunate trend in which "gritty realism" has become shorthand for quality, as if placing a movie squarely in the real world makes it good. So the far-out nature of a movie like the original "Total Recall" - in which a construction worker who might be a Martian secret-agent lived in a candy-colored world of exploding animatronic heads and three-breasted women - is replaced in the new version by a post-apocalyptic class struggle.
Snore.
The older movies that purported to be based in reality were so thoroughly blown out of proportion that those larger-than-life scenarios created a sense of excitement. Most Vietnam vets could not take on a battalion of terrorists, but a bloated Rambo could. The same could be said for your average New York police officer taking on a German terrorist, but John McClane dispatched of Hans Gruber and his team quite nicely in "Die Hard."
Hollywood can't be the only one to blame in this situation. Audiences are constantly hit with images of violence as a part of the 24-hour news cycle, and Hollywood has mimicked that.
But it's not just reality-based movies that are stuck in a banal rut. Sometimes filmmakers go too far the other way. The magic of CGI and special effects dissipates when a movie is steeped in it. There's no more revelry in the impossible when everything is possible. Say what you will about the "Transformers" movies, they are cool to look at.
For 15 minutes.
But visual spectacle creates little more than eyestrain, distracting from the fact that a two-hour-plus movie has only about 20 pages of dialogue.
Before anything was possible visually, filmmakers had to work at creating distractions for their shortcomings. Plots may have been comically thin and easily replicated, but at least they existed. The dialogue may not have been good, but at least writers had to create memorable lines to distract audiences from the fact that what they saw made little sense, generally leading to moments of lightheartedness and humor.
The American action star has also gone the way of the hand-crafted explosions. But a serious actor slumming it will never compare with a guy like Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone, whose lack of acting talent was erased by their familiarity and comfortability. You believed it when they killed a man using brute strength, rather than complicated martial arts that the audience can't even fully see because of the camera's quick cutting.
Think about the action movies that have endured in popular culture: It's the fun ones. Chuck Norris' overly serious "Missing in Action" series doesn't often get cable repeats, but I can find at least one "Die Hard" on TV at any given moment.
The highest-grossing movie so far this summer, "The Avengers," raked in a lot of dough because of its 3-D ticket price, but it's the most fun blockbuster to take the top of the grosses list in some time. Writer-director Joss Whedon was like a kid playing with a very expensive toy box, adding levity to characters - Captain America, Thor, The Hulk - whose solo outtings were overserious slogs, despite how much money was thrown into special effects.
"The Expendables 2" will not reap the critical acclaim of "The Avengers," but I will have the same reaction when leaving the theater: a huge smile on my face.
