Zach Vasquez
Upon a recent re-watch—my first in over ten years—of one of my personal favorite action films, 1997’s Con Air, I was surprised to discover how openly racially-provocative the movie was. This is not a case of shock over a 24-year-old movie (especially one as ridiculously macho as Con Air) not conforming to modern-day political sensitivities; indeed, I well-remembered several of aspects of the film which would be considered legitimately problematic today, including a several uses of racial invective.
But the re-watch revealed more than just the occasional slur; from beginning to end, the movie betrays its proudly reactionary point of view by having one of the lead villains be a Black nationalist and making a (clearly sincere) joke about Denzel Washington playing him in a movie. As with many films of its stripe, the movie’s politics are wildly confused—for all that it conveys a reactionary and even racist perspective, and for as much as it engages in militaristic fetishism, it also consistently displays a distrust and even disdain for authoritarian white male power figures and indeed the larger legal system. (It also makes the aforementioned Black separatist character a charismatic, even loveable scoundrel, although much of that is the result of Ving Rhames absolutely owning the role).
More interesting to me than the individual politics of Con Air though is how representative it is of a particular type of movie that is rarely seen anymore: the racially-charged action film.
American action movies, to whatever subgenre they belong, always contained a noticeable racial element. Look no further than the Western, which often centered around the history of violence between white settlers and Indigenous Americans. Early examples served to reinforce the mythology surrounding Manifest Destiny, casting the Native peoples as faceless, murderous hordes, but as the genre took on more psychological depth in the ‘40s and ‘50s, there was a greater willingness on behalf of filmmakers to at least wrestle with (if not necessarily to acknowledge the full extent of) the brutality of white genocidal colonialism: see John Ford and John Wayne’s classic The Searchers for the clearest example of this.
After the studio system collapsed in the late ‘60s, the generation known as New Hollywood doubled down on this sense of moral greyness. The films of the following decade were more openly racially charged than ever before, with two of the biggest cop thrillers of the time—The French Connection and Dirty Harry—featuring protagonists who regularly and casually engage in racial bigotry (so too does the villain in the latter). Though many a viewer mistook their depiction for endorsement, you couldn’t accuse the films of ignoring the volatile realities of their political climate.
This same period also saw the creation of films for the ‘urban market’, which has become (not entirely fairly) synonymous with the Blaxploitation genre. These films, the majority of which belonged to the action/crime genre, gave their audiences the prurient catharsis so long denied them by Hollywood by having black heroes openly denigrate the white social order and violently overcome the white power establishment.
Blaxploitation petered out relatively quickly, but the drive for action filmmakers to engage with racially charged material didn’t dissipate. Rather, it found a foothold in the flashier, more expensive and bombastic action films of the ‘80s, which exploded onto the market following the industry-changing success of Jaws and Star Wars. Although the mixed-race buddy action movie as we know it took root in the ‘70s (the groundwork was laid by 1968’s Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night), with the likes of Freebie and the Bean (as wildly problematic as it is endlessly enjoyable) and Hickey and Boggs, it was in the next decade where it would really take off, starting with 1982’s 48 Hrs.
Directed by Walter Hill (who wrote the script for Hickey and Boggs), the film pairs Nick Nolte’s gruff, casually racist and abusive police detective with Eddie Murphy’s fast-talking, wily ex-con for a gritty but rollicking demolition derby through the streets of San Francisco. Along with launching Murphy into the stratosphere, it also kicked off a run of black-and-white buddy action movies, including the even more successful Lethal Weapon franchise, in which (although the racial divide is not as central to the main duo’s relationship as in previous examples) race itself does come into play — particularly in the second and third entries, which tackle South African apartheid and inner-city gang violence, respectively.
Examples of mixed-race buddy cop movies would continue through the years, with the two highest grossing examples—the Men in Black and Rush Hour franchises—coming out in the late ‘90s (although it should be noted that Rush Hour 2, the number two most financially successful buddy cop movie, was released in 2001). The first of those, being a broader, more family-friendly property, doesn’t really address race, but the Rush Hour movies—which star Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan—found their main appeal in (relatively speaking) edgy ethnic comedy between its two minority protagonists.
Granted, the Rush Hour movies don’t actually have anything to say—nor do they try—about race relations, but the other examples from the ‘90s very much do. The first half of the decade saw a renaissance of the neo-noir thriller, which included a renewed interest in urban thrillers. Several of these, including Abel Ferrara’s King of New York, Mario Van Peebles’ New Jack City, and especially Bill Duke’s highly political Deep Cover, are as much action movies as they are crime thrillers and social dramas, and the racial and economic realities of the time play large parts in all of them.
Around this same time, less outwardly political action-thrillers started layering in more and more racial elements, including three films by the man perhaps most synonymous with the ‘90s action blockbuster: Tony Scott. His underrated black-white buddy action movie of 1991, The Last Boy Scout, follows the template set by previous examples, milking the cultural clash between its mixed-race heroes (Damon Wayans and Bruce Willis) for all its worth, while his Naval drama of four years later, Crimson Tide, layers the unspoken—but not unacknowledged—racial animus between its leads (Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington) underneath the main plot. But it’s Scott’s adaptation of Quentin Tarantino’s True Romance, which came out between the two, that contains the most startling example, by way of an infamous monologue about the racial origins of Sicilians as delivered by Dennis Hopper. Much has been written about Tarantino’s liberal use of racial invective throughout his filmography—far too much to go into here—but whatever opinion one holds, I think we can all agree that he’s probably the only major Hollywood filmmaker who would still be willing to include such a scene in a movie today.
The year 1992 saw the biggest upheaval in American race relations since the height of the Civil Rights movement following on the release of video footage showing several members of the L.A.P.D viciously beating Rodney King. Their acquittal, and the subsequent riots that tore through Los Angeles as a result, made fodder forin a number of Hollywood movies over the next several years, including Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down, an action-oriented spin on the unhinged white racist loner narrative as previously found in disturbing dramas like Joe and Taxi Driver. Falling Down is as complex and disturbing a movie as those, making no bones about its lead character’s virulent racism, but because Schumacher heightens the drama surrounding him, creating a number of legitimately thrilling action set-pieces, many of the film’s most ardent fans and detractors miss the point it’s actually making.
Falling Down serves as a perfect example of how much has changed in Hollywood’s willingness to actually address and acknowledge race. One need only compare it to 2019’s Joker, a film that explores many of the same ideas and traces almost the same arc, but which completely avoids acknowledging race, to the point where it literally whitewashes history: the inciting incident in Joker, in which the titular anti-hero guns down four young men on a subway train, is based on a real incident that took place in New York in the ‘80s. But whereas the real case involved a white man targeting and killing young black men, in Joker, the victims are changed to smug, white Wall Street bros. Say what you will about how much sympathy Falling Down shows for its white avenger, it never lets him off the hook in so egregious a manner.
(Last year’s cruelly entertaining Unhinged, which shares more than a little DNA with Falling Down and its cinematic forbearers, also avoids any mention of race, although it’s more understandable in its case since it’s a smaller, self-contained horror-thriller.)
Even more unthinkable these days than a major studio bankrolling Falling Down is the idea that they would ever allow something like Die Hard with a Vengeance to happen again. While the first two Die Hard movies certainly contain their share of ethnic stereotyping, neither of them actively engaged with racial politics. But the third one—based on an original script initially titled Simon Says, which was rewritten first as a Lethal Weapon sequel before being turned into a Die Hard movie—was produced in the aftermath of the L.A. riots, and for whatever reason, the filmmakers thought a heavy focus on racial enmity would be a good fit.
They weren’t wrong. For all that Die Hard also betrays a reactionary political viewpoint, as conveyed by having John McClane charge his new civilian partner Zeus (Samuel L. Jackson) as being racist against whites, the rest of the movie contradicts this point. Zeus is not only shown to be McClane’s equal in brain, brawn and bravery, but his distrust of white people—particularly the police (he explicitly mentions Rodney King)—is shown to be well founded, as he’s constantly being met with racism from white civilians, Eurotrash bad guys, and trigger-happy beat cops. It shouldn’t go unnoticed that at no point does Zeus ever accept McClane’s criticism of himself as a racist, nor does he ever have some big turnaround moment where he questions his own motives. Indeed, 26 years on, nothing about the character’s staunch adherence to black self-determinism reads as controversial or problematic (at least not from a progressivist point of view), while his contempt for the police has been proven entirely justified (even more so than it was at the time).
In talking about Die Hard with a Vengeance, you have to address the elephant in the room: the most infamous scene of the movie, which sees McClane forced to do the villain’s bidding by walking through Harlem while wearing sandwich board that reads: I HATE NIGGERS. (Just as infamous these days is the TV edit of the scene, which uses actual B-roll footage rather than, as most believe, a digital overlay—in which the sign is changed to I HATE EVERYBODY.) A quarter of a century on, the scene retains all of its shock value, and it’s impossible to imagine a studio allowing any major property—including and, given its last several iterations, especially Die Hard—to contain such a scene.
Action movies today—be they of the superhero, fantasy, sci-fi or more traditional variety—are by no means absent of racial politics. Many address larger systemic issues, albeit usually in a surface-level, wholly unconvincing manner (see: the political discourse that pops up around each new Marvel outing), while the drive for onscreen diversity has led to some of the most successful movies of all time (Black Panther and The Fast and the Furious franchise being prime examples) specifically because of how they reflect the larger socio-political culture and climate.
Yet, for all this, these movies show an almost complete lack of willingness to have individual characters actually recognize race. This is not to argue that high profile studio properties return to the openly reactionary politics of Con Air or the envelope-pushing content found in Die Hard with a Vengeance. Indeed, that so many movies now center around people of color without their race or ethnicity being the focus is a form of progress.
At the same time, the lack of racial acknowledgment within today’s blockbuster cinema further highlights their total adherence to corporate culture, wherein only the safest, broadest and blandest political discourse can be engaged. It’s one thing for a mega-budget tentpole to briefly acknowledge a subject like colonialism or gentrification or racial profiling, but god forbid any of the characters actually acknowledge one another’s race (in the interest of fairness, it should be acknowledged that the new Space Jam movie, of all things, does contain a surprisingly funny joke that does just that).
For all that Hollywood action movies have always served as power-trip fantasies for their audiences—and for as uncomfortable, reactionary or outright offensive as they could be—their willingness to openly engage in racial politics gave them a sense of verisimilitude that is entirely missing from most examples of today, which feel as phony as their CGI backdrops. Forget Hollywood whitewashing—depictions of race in today’s movies have been green-screened. 
