Perhaps an unexpected pick for the inaugural class of the Action Movie Kills Hall of Fame, but it’s one that absolutely has to be made for three reasons:
1. Jet Li is marvelous. He showed up in 1998’s Lethal Weapon 4 as a hit man and it was obvious to everyone that he was going to be in our movie lives for a long, long time. He has this tiny moment during the movie where Riggs aims a gun’s laser beam at his chest and Li, with so much lordliness that you can somehow hear his body filling with disdain, brushes it away like you would a gnat. It’s fantastic, and exactly the kind of thing only a movie star with real weight can pull off.
2. Following Lethal Weapon 4, six of Li’s next nine movies were new era action movie classics. There was Romeo Must Die (we got the vertebrae kill scene that they delivered to us in x-ray vision, which was a truly great moment5), The One (secretly brilliant), Kiss of the Dragon (he gets in a fight while N.E.R.D.’s “Lapdance” plays, and this feels like a good spot to point out that nobody has ever married fight scenes in action movies to rap music better than Jet Li), Cradle 2 The Grave (he fights an entire octagon full of cage fighters6), Unleashed (he’s a human who’s actually a dog), and War (JET LI VS. JASON STATHAM).7 And…
3. Despite all of those things, no action movie star has ever been as underappreciated as Jet Li. (Second place on the Underappreciated Action Movie Stars list is Wesley Snipes.) (Third place is Jackie Chan.) (Fourth place is Michelle Rodriguez.) (Fifth place is Carl Weathers.) (I can do this for a long time, if you’d like.) (But the point is you have to go a long way down the list before you get to a white man action movie star who is underappreciated.)
Jet Li has always unofficially been a hall of famer. Now he’s officially one too.
In Death Hammer 3:… And Hammers for All, the follow-up to 2017’s surprisingly successful Death Hammer 2: Hammergeddon, we tag along with Detroit cop John Hardest as he takes down a corrupt senator named Tom Murphy and La Muerte, a shadow organization whose slimy tentacles reach all the way up to the most exclusive and powerful corners of the American government.
In the movie’s final scene, John Hardest tears through an office full of henchmen to finally get to Tom Murphy. Murphy begs for his life, screaming, “You can’t kill me. I’m a United States senator!” To which Hardest responds by smashing a hammer into Tom Murphy’s head with so much rage and fury that it explodes. Hardest stands over the body for a second, then says, “You’ve just been impeached.” Then he looks up, sees an American flag in the corner of the office, raises his right hand above his heart, then says, “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America. And to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty…” He pauses for a second, looking around at all the dead men at his feet. He allows himself a small moment of relief, and the hint of a smile sneaks across his face. “… and hammers for all.”
A few notes about this kill: (1) Harrison Ford’s bodyguard detail ought to be absolutely ashamed of themselves. (2) Harrison Ford being very handsome and cool while saying “Get off my plane” is at one end of the White Men Telling People To Get Off Things spectrum. On the other end of that spectrum is when the ugly guy who lives on the subway train in Ghost yells “Get off my train!” at Patrick Swayze. And somewhere in between those two is Clint Eastwood telling the Hmong gang members to get off his lawn in Gran Torino. (3) Air Force One is not the best Harrison Ford action movie, but it’s definitely the campiest Harrison Ford action movie, which means it’s my favorite Harrison Ford action movie. (4) Mostly all of the other entries here are listed by their character’s names. Not this one, though. Air Force One is just one of those movies where you call everyone by their real names. It’s like how nobody ever calls Liam Neeson’s character in Taken by his character name, they just call him Liam Neeson.
This scene is an incredible piece of art.8 It’s a straight-up free-for-all of murder and destruction that is brilliantly choreographed (it’s presented as one long shot) and expertly soundtracked (they used Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” a nod that’s double clever because the scene happens in a hate group’s church in Kentucky and Lynyrd Skynyrd has, since their earliest days and almost without exception, incorporated the Confederate flag into their branding9). Harry kills nearly forty people in less than four minutes, many of them in exciting and innovative ways. The specific kill from the killing spree that’s getting inducted into the Action Movie Kills Hall of Fame is the one where he electrocutes a guy in the face, stuffs a grenade in his pocket, breaks his spine with an elbow blow, breaks his neck by slamming him into a stanchion, then runs away as the grenade explodes. By my count, Harry kills him two, maybe three different times during their fight, and I think it’s important that the AMKHOF acknowledges that kind of stat.
(Incidentally: This scene is the finest killing spree scene that we have ever gotten in an action movie. It goes this one for first place, then the one in Kill Bill where Beatrix Kiddo fights The Crazy 88,10 then the nightclub scene in John Wick. Some other good ones that are, sadly, going to go unmentioned from here forward: the hallway shootout in Kick-Ass; the lobby shootout with Neo and Trinity in The Matrix; the restaurant shootout in A Better Tomorrow; the bar shootout in Desperado; and the catacombs shootout in John Wick: Chapter 2.)
To be clear: Alien, a wildly important film that came out in 1979, is a horror movie. It’s follow-up, however, Aliens, which came out in 1986 and leaned all the way into the Ripley vs. Xenomorph rivalry, is a full-on action movie.11 So much so, in fact, that it ends with Ripley, who by that point is absolutely fed the fuck up with the xenomorphs, stepping inside of a power loader exosuit,12 calling the queen xenomorph a bitch, and then fighting her in hand-to-hand combat13 before tossing her into the cold emptiness of outer space.
And listen, I have watched a lot of cool people do cool things in movies, but I can’t immediately think of three things cooler than walking into a room with a gigantic murdering alien and picking a fight with it by calling it a bitch. I mean, Ripley had just a few minutes before that watched the queen xenomorph literally rip someone in half. It happened several feet in front of her eyes and face. And still, it didn’t matter. Ripley survived two full movies of watching pretty much everyone she knew and liked (or loved) getting killed by xenomorphs and was still like, “You know what? Okay. Enough is enough. It’s time for me to put these robot hands on you.” AND THEN SHE FUCKING PUT THOSE ROBOT HANDS ON HER. Ellen Ripley is untouchable.