Action Cliches

• The classic action film features a small group of world-weary assassins or Green Berets or Navy Seals or mercenaries who assemble to pull off one last suicidal mission, after which they will retire. It helps if they are slightly over the hill. At least two of the men don't want to go on the assignment. Towards the end of the film, one of the men who stayed behind will materialise out of thin air to bail out his buddies. This man will most assuredly die.

• At some point in the film, the leader of the unit will tell his men: "This is my fight. You guys have no skin in this game. You're free to go." But the men will not go. Never, ever, ever. In the course of the classic action film, several large men possessing a preposterous level of upper body musculature will be betrayed, usually by somebody who does not possess an identical level of upper body musculature, but who employs lots of people who do.

• Ultimately, they will be stabbed in the back by bitter rivals back at headquarters, weasel-like politicians or somebody they used to work for in the CIA, which is sometimes referred to as "the firm". In the contemporary action film, the villains are either heavily accented Russians, Serbs, or unidentified, all-purpose eastern European sociopaths (Taken, Eastern Promises, Rob Cohen's xXx), or cigar-smoking thugs from south of the border, or untrustworthy Arabs, or villainous bureaucrats from Washington or London.

• The women in action films tend to be promiscuous femmes fatales or crusading journalists or medical support staff or hapless rebels or victims or miscast.

• A good action film will usually include some impromptu emergency surgery, a fall from a great height, a reasonable amount of torture and a lot of rappelling. Men in action films rappel down high-rises, mountains and into the holds of ships. An action film without rappelling is like a horror movie without disembowelment: when in doubt, rappel!

• The principals should have lots of scars, and each scar should come with a story. A psycho with an eye patch is good, especially if he's a one-eyed giant with a machete. The hero should have lost his soul in Sarajevo, Nicaragua, Darfur or back in Nam, and is now struggling to regain just one smidgen of dignity that will help remind him of a time he didn't want to wake up every day and puke his guts out, goddamn it. Nobody drives a car in action films: off-road vehicles only.

• No mules, no ponies, no biofuel vehicles. At some point in an action film, a woman will get punched in the face, an arrow or bullet will rocket through a villain's skull in slow motion, and a blade or piston or spear will rip through a man's chest from behind. If the film is in the martial arts genre, the hero should repeatedly run up the wall to kick somebody in the face, and ninjas should fly through the air on invisible wires and do aerial battle in the bamboo forest. One of the ninjas should turn out to be a woman. Even though ninjas descend from ceilings with great regularity in this genre, it always comes as a complete surprise to the numbskulls on the ground.