Though come the turn of the millennium, these films would quickly look dated and part of a more innocent time for cinema before the rise of the internet, in its place would grow a far grittier approach to action filmmaking.

Just look at the Batman series during the 1990s, with Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever and Batman & Robin both showing off colourful, cartoony styles to service their eccentric plotlines.

Where, in the 1980s, a star-studded male lead would take the helm in a variety of bombastic scenarios, from Die Hard to The Terminator, the 1990s shifted from a focus on an individual star, pumping money instead into an outlandish central plot. Like all genre films, action cinema goes through a constant shift and cycle as tastes change and styles ebb and flow. However, one film would change what we think of the genre at large, the quite brilliant Matt Damon flick, The Bourne Identity. The genre has been so widely plagued by mediocrity that it can be easy to sweep all of the epic titles under its umbrella into the gutter. It’s often difficult to find a welcoming audience for rhetoric on the artistic merit of action movies.

The jason bourne movies