Pause in the action

“I think there’s a love of infamy and heroism that doesn’t play into the zeitgeist,” says director Rob Cohen, whose recent $135-million film “Stealth,” about a pack of naval aviators chasing a renegade high-tech airplane, just dive-bombed in the marketplace.

He’s hardly alone, as he points to other A-list directors whose films tanked this year: “You had Ridley Scott with ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, and Michael Bay [‘The Island’] gave you cloning. I don’t think this generation sources their heroes in this arena. Maybe they’ll source their heroes as two guys who crash weddings so they can have sex with vulnerable girls, or maybe an heiress who does soft-core porn. Action films are usually about the male hero, and if you live in a time when you don’t believe in heroes, it makes it difficult ... to make action films as they’ve been traditionally defined.”

Cohen, a Harvard grad and the director of such successful high-testosterone fare as “The Fast and the Furious” and “XXX,” knows he’s sounding a little defensive, but he’s hardly the only filmmaker trying to figure out how to navigate through a culture in transition, buffeted by the uncertainties of the battle against terrorism, the effects of globalization, and the opposing pulls of public salaciousness and equally public calls for morality.

How does a filmmaker build a better action hero when the president of the United States borrows a movie image from the ‘80s action hit “Top Gun” to celebrate his victory in Iraq, only to find the move derided as the insurgency in Iraq drags on. And then there are the sheer technical challenges facing those who want to create a better cinematic thrill ride now that many of the visceral, pulse-pounding effects that once belonged solely to the province of action films appear on TV and in video games.

In this year of the missing moviegoer, perhaps no genre has proven as perilous as the old stalwart of action, where the failures tend to be colossal, and the red ink runs in rivers.

This weekend’s top grosser was the action-packed “The Dukes of Hazzard,” which took in an estimated $30.6 million at the box office. But “Stealth,” which took in roughly $13.5 million in its debut weekend, is on track to become one of Sony’s biggest money losers of all time. “The Island” cost $125 million and took in $12 million its opening weekend. “Kingdom of Heaven” cost $130 million and grossed only $20 million its opening weekend. (The film has gone on to gross $210 million total, primarily from overseas business. Even that, however, may not be enough to cover the film’s production budget, let alone marketing.) Those films follow in the wake of other disappointments such as “XXX: State of the Union,” “Elektra,” “Assault on Precinct 13” and “Sahara.” In these cases, Hollywood insiders tend to blame the usual suspects -- bad scripts, bad marketing and the lack of bona-fide stars.

But many wonder how to entice a fickle public. “There is a shift going on, and it has to do with an extremely volatile and unpredictable audience, particularly the under-25s,” says “Island” producer Walter Parkes. “The great irony of the summer is the audiences we all court during the summer are the ones who have the most distractions. I happen to have a 13-year-old son. I see if there isn’t a good movie playing, he’s happy to rent a video game and have four friends over. A movie must have a strong appeal.”

“Some of the requirements of action movies have changed,” says Hutch Parker, president of 20th Century Fox, which released “Kingdom of Heaven” as well as some of the year’s few action-oriented successes: “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” “The Fantastic Four” and “Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith.” “In the ‘80s and ‘90s, we moved into big action spectacles, the $100-million real event film. A lot of those films of that period -- they tended to be characterized by big explosions. The bigger, the better. And the audience grew weary of ‘the bigger, the better’ as the mainstay. The thing that’s most important to the audience is a feeling of connection to the character, and feeling moved. I don’t think the audience is interested in spectacle for spectacle’s sake.”

Yet what kind of character can audiences relate to? Vanished are the days when Arnold and Sly and Bruce ruled the box office, when muscles meant might. Indeed, gone are cops, firemen and detectives, any of the staples of male masculinity that have characterized movies for decades.

Anything that smacks of rah-rah American patriotism has been removed and replaced by fantasy worlds, comic book universes and costume dramas of older, less confusing eras. Dollops of “The Matrix” or “Star Wars” or “Lord of the Rings” mysticism permeate the genre.

With a few exceptions, such as Russell Crowe, manly men have disappeared from the screen to be replaced either by platoons of outsider friends working together (the “X-Men,” “Lord of the Rings,” “Ocean’s Eleven”) or thin, lithe, beautiful and boyish creatures, usually alienated somewhat from their environs. In “Spider-Man,” “Batman” or even “Harry Potter,” the hero is an orphaned young man, traumatized by his past, with duty and greatness thrust upon him. His power is in his head, not his hands, and the audience feels empathy for him, not awe.

Producer Scott Stuber oversaw the successful “Bourne Identity” franchise when he was co-head of production at Universal. His says Bourne’s appeal was his vulnerability. “He’s a killer, but you can empathize with him. He’s human,” Stuber says of the hero played by Matt Damon. “Part of the fun of a movie is you’re able to place yourself in the story. ‘I want to be that person. I can be in that situation.’ People can relate to the guy who when he gets kicked it hurts. As opposed to the guy who can take 20 blows to the head and then turn around and beat someone up. You lose the identification.”

“Mr. & Mrs. Smith” is the only successful action movie based on an original idea this summer.

Producer Akiva Goldman (also the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of “A Beautiful Mind”) says that when he first pitched the concept with writer Simon Kinberg, they were turned down by every studio in town. When the script was written, they were repeatedly rejected again before being picked up by independent financier New Regency.

“Our motto was ‘marriage is hard, action is easy,’ ” says Goldman. “Almost as an organizing principal, the action is in the background. A chase on a random piece of highway shot in a suburb of Hollywood is not new. What’s new is the couple bickering.... Rather than actually make bigger and better action pieces, what we really tried to do [was] be as clever as we could about the relationship and let the action exist as part of the palette. It’s a romantic comedy dressed up as an action movie.” And it also stars Brangelina, which helps.

This weekend’s No. 1 movie, “The Dukes of Hazzard,” took a similar tack, dressing up Jessica Simpson’s hot pants with tons of car chases. Trying to strike the same action-comedy balance as “Lethal Weapon,” director Jay Chandrasekhar put the focus on action. “In this movie, the Gen. Lee was a superhero car. It flew and smashed into things and survived and survived. When we were setting out to do it, we’d think about all those stunts they used to put into Harrison Ford movies which you’d think were so gratuitous -- well we can get away with gratuitous car stuff.”

Almost no one in Hollywood believes that action is dead, though they’re all scurrying around trying to figure out its newest incarnation.

“Every decade requires you to be reflective of the time period, but I think the basic tenet of what an action hero is hasn’t changed,” says “Constantine” producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura. “Action movies depend on the audience believing that the hero is going to save us.”

“I’m not afraid of action pictures,” said Joel Silver, who produced much of the action opus, including “Die Hard,” “Lethal Weapon” and “The Matrix” trilogy. “But you have to make them in a way that the audience is intrigued.”

Next on his plate, Silver has “Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang,” a deconstructed detective story from Shane Black, the writer of “Lethal Weapon,” where the word play is as fast and furious as the gunshots, as well as “Wonder Woman” and “V is for Vendetta,” both of which feature female protagonists.

“When we finished the first ‘Matrix,’ we did a research screening. Carrie-Anne Moss rated higher than anybody in the picture. Trinity intrigued them more than Neo or anybody. That was because it was unusual, a hot-looking babe that kicked [butt],” says Silver. A campy version of such a gal filtered through into “Charlie’s Angels” and “Kill Bill.”

“The genre is not going to die,” adds Silver. “It’s a great genre. You just need to find ways to make it fresh.”