Axis of Idiocy

What is this? The Day Of The Action-Bozos? Last week a new Vin Diesel epic exploded upon the world like a pustule rudely lanced, followed this week by Death Race, more of the same dreck from Jason Statham. What's next? A Van Damme/Dolph Lundgren/Steven Seagal revival? My heart can't stand it.

Diesel and Statham are both marquee figures in two or more action-bozo franchises: The Transporter, Crank, In defense Of The King and Whatever Guy Ritchie Does in the case of The Jayce; with xXx, The Chronicles Of Riddick and The Fast And The Furious (yeah, he's back for the sequel to the threequel) comprising three tent poles of the Diesel empire. And each has at least two more franchise sequels currently in the pipeline.

Now, while I have some patience for Statham (Crank is some kind of undiagnosably demented masterpiece, and The Bank Job is nice, though it doesn't exactly stretch him), I see Diesel as the ideal movie star for the post-intelligent world foreseen in Mike Judge's Idiocracy - the perfect face to go with that American-Moronic dystopia. In that world, all movies will be like xXx or Babylon AD or The War; every star will make a movie opposite Jet Li; every movie hero will be an ermined pimp-daddy, a porn star, a catwalk fashion icon, an undefeated Ultimate Street Fighter and a noted Destroyer Of Supervillains. And all of them will adhere to Diesel's Code Of The Bouncer, which he once articulated thusly: "Shut your mouth, watch your back, and keep working 'til your ass falls off."

We become stupider and more bestial the longer we're forced to watch them. Likewise, the separate action-bozo oeuvres of Ice Cube, DMX, Milla Jovovich and all the second-rankers and second-raters. They come with their own directors, guys who specialize in this kind of undifferentiated action-emptiness, like Paul WS Anderson - whose back catalog is as calamitous as Alan Smithee's - and his Gallic doppelganger Mathieu Kassovitz (and I say this as a fan of La Haine who wonders what the hell happened). The result is a film landscape that calls to mind the arid, dispiriting wasteland that was the latter part of Charles Bronson's career - all cheap vengeance and bullshit frontier justice, the ceaseless adoration of brute strength and an allergy to any kind of intelligence or nuance.

Taking a cue from the grandaddy of the action-bozo genre, I say we take these stars and directors, add their aging forebears to function as a kind of officer class - the whole Van Damme-Seagal-Lundgren Axis Of Idiocy that feasted so long on Arnie's leavings - and intern them all on some prison island, like the sealed-off Manhattan in Escape From New York. Then we tool them up with chain guns and plasma cannons, set the cameras rolling, and let them have at it forever and a day, or down to the last action-bozo standing.

Let them pretend they're remaking The Dirty Dozen or Aliens or Resident Evil 43 until the end of time, and they'll never even notice the rest of us have disappeared.