ARE you a male adult whose cinematic tastes never matured past being a thrilled 15-year-old watching an 18 certificate? These movies soothe your soul:
Commando
Arnold Schwarzenegger made a great many comfort food action movies, with endless cheesy, unrealistic violent sequences like a lovely warm blanket. This contains the classic line ‘Let off some steam’ as a man is impaled on a pipe emitting steam. Because subtlety is for subtitled films.
The Fast & Furious series
Deepening in dream-like ridiculousness as they go on, all these films star fast cars and men so hugely muscled they can hardly speak. The plots are increasingly complicated but that’s because they’re gibberish, not that they’re Glengarry Glen Ross or Chinatown.
Anything written by Alistair MacLean
Novelist MacLean spawned some highly entertaining WWII movies like Where Eagles Dare and The Guns of Navarone which are absolute twaddle classics. They’re the equivalent of having a long, hot bath with scented candles and a glass of champagne, but for blokes.
Rambo
John Rambo can take out all of his enemies with ease, be they macho small-town sheriffs, the Viet Cong or the entire Russian army. He doesn’t need language or emotions. You could probably do the same if you joined a gym.
Hard Target
The greatest and most nonsensical Jean-Claude Van Damme movie begins with rich businessmen hunting the homeless for sport and ends with a massive shootout in a carnival factory. Features a father figure who lives in the woods with only a shitload of guns, as all good dads should.
The Expendables
The cinematic equivalent of playing with all your Action Men in a sandpit, aged six, with roughly the same story. Worryingly for the future of the human race, these shite, predictable films treat men like they have an IQ of about 30 and it seems men largely agree.
