‘Norris faced a choice: cancel the scene or have an actual rat killed and placed inside his mouth…’
The boom of action cinema in the ’80s and ’90s is a phenomenon that will never be repeated. There was something about the big hair, big wallets, big cocaine era that lent itself to real-life American superheroes like Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Wilis and their European counterparts Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean Claude Van Damme. A book about those four would be sensational. Regrettably, perhaps, writer and Empire Magazine editor Nick de Semlyen widens his scope to include luminaries such as Steven Seagal, Chuck Norris and Dolph Lundgren.
The Last Action Heroes charts the rise and rise of the ’80s action heroes through a mixture of mythologising, hearsay and stone-cold facts. Many of the best stories in this collection (Stallone and Schwarzenegger arguing about who will enter a party first, JCVD’s fear of snakes) are the ones that definitely are verified such is the sheer size of the egos on display in this book. It’s often difficult to believe that the subjects of de Semlyen’s book are real people at all. Surely, Arnie is a cartoon? Steven Seagal must be a fictional character? But no, all these maniacs are beautifully real and the world of cinema, heck, the world in general, is a richer place because of them (despite the fact that many of them have now aligned themselves with despots and dictators).
The problem in trying to cover this period in such depth is that we don’t spend enough time with each action hero. This book could have been twice as long and still would probably only scratch the surface of the era. But I suppose if a book’s main criticism is that you want more of it then that’s pretty good – a vital document of the golden age of the action movies.