A little less conversation, a little more action: Matt Damon in The Bourne Ultimatum
Could it be that the problem with action movies is that they're just too full of chat? That was the question posed by Cinematical this week, as the blog pondered whether the contemporary action flick was altogether too preoccupied with the niceties of dialogue - when what audiences actually want is "a real action movie. Thirty seconds of exposition followed by a great action scene ... with a huge budget [and] a good choreographer."
Thing is, not only do they have a point, I think they also raise a wider question here. Purely in the context of the wham-bam blockbuster (and the reception afforded the frenetic Bourne Ultimatum would seem to bear this out) it's certainly debatable whether people want small talk delaying the set-pieces - and even more so whether it's something the genre could ever do again in a halfway competent fashion. What zenith action movie scriptwriting reached was now almost 20 years ago, in the era of the Schwarzenegger zinger - now, when CGI can so easily deliver visions at which the gods would have fainted, why should a film-maker like Michael Bay even be called on to direct dialogue when he's clearly as bored by it as his actors are scared of it?
But Cinematical's post got me wondering how far you could extend the same logic through modern movies. Among English language film-makers there currently seems a not inconsiderable number of directors capable of conjuring up hypnotic and unforgettable images - and almost no-one writing decent dialogue. Screenwriting is, by all accounts, a deeply mechanical business - but still, I can't remember the last time I heard a little drop of magic in among the grinding cogs, a true "The cat's in the bag and the bag's in the river" or "I make you laugh? I'm here to fuckin' amuse you?" For the moment, it seems that in the west at least, our best men and women both in the mainstream (David Fincher, Michael Mann) and outside of it (David Lynch, Lynne Ramsay) are far more comfortable free from the burden of all that jibber-jabber.
And yes, film is a visual medium - but it still seems sad that dialogue has been allowed to reach a state of such clunky prosaicism. Don't get me wrong, I was as fond of Little Miss Sunshine as the next sentimental clod, but for that to be an Oscar winning script says nothing good about the competition. As to the why, well - predictably - I'd put a large chunk of the blame at the door of Quentin Tarantino, who did so much to revitalise cinema back in the early 90s, but in the process bastardised dialogue to the point where any random collection of vaguely esoteric cultural references was routinely hailed as great writing. Then before you can say Royale with cheese, you've got the likes of Kevin Smith, misshapen Igor to Tarantino's Frankenstein, basing a whole career on films full of endless, excess verbiage, not one self-satisfied adjective of which I can now recall just a few years later.
So we're left with what? Paul Thomas Anderson has a reliable ear for a great line; you could throw Vincent Gallo into the equation too. Otherwise though, and apologies if I'm entering the Ronald Bergan School of Self-Parody here, perhaps the solution is just to kill the sound completely. Maybe now's the time for the silents to make a comeback - either that or what the hell, let's reach for the Ouija and summon up the ghost of Clifford Odets...
