Of course, as we’ve coming to expect from the mighty Stath, it’s his third cinematic venture this year, with Parker providing the first and Hummingbird the second. Parker Production budget of $35m, worldwide gross of $46mīy the time you read this, Statham’s Homefront will have had its opening weekend in the US, and if there’s any justice in the world, won’t be deserving of a place on this list as it manages to tick all the right boxes for anyone in the mood for a tight, tense and action-filled fix.
Wahlberg’s excitable reaction, once they’ve finished scuffling, leads to his ‘together’ moment – it made me laugh in the trailer, made me laugh in the movie theater and has just made me laugh again thinking about it. It’s exciting to watch, particularly the use of a wing mirror in a fist fight, but the reason I love the scene so much is that it sets up one of the movie’s funniest scenes. With a kidnapped gangster (Edward James Olmos) bouncing around in the trunk, Wahlberg is pursued across a dusty desert landscape by Washington, leading to a game of truck driving chicken. Kormákur takes influences from old gangster movies, to westerns and combines them into a beautifully shot and crafted movie. To take from the review of 2 Guns I wrote a few months ago, director Baltasar Kormákur deserves credit for putting together a movie that manages to both stick to some classic genre conventions, while feeling utterly fresh and original. It’s been a mixed year for Wahlberg, though, as Broken City, which he also produced, really didn’t do well. Wahlberg plays his role as loveably idiotic, which is a shtick he now has down to a fine art and even stretched to the limit this year in Michael Bay’s divisive Pain & Gain, which caused some polar opinions here at Geek towers, though I would have included it on this list if its small budget hadn’t returned a sizeable profit. It’s quite possibly the most financially successful movie on this list, but still wasn’t as wildly successful as it deserved to be, only just covering its budget from the US take and then not making a great deal elsewhere, which is a great shame. 2 Guns Production budget of $61m, worldwide gross of $132m Just know that we’ll always mention the beloved Dredd any chance we get. I’d also like to add that, knowing the love that Dredd gets from our readers, I had an overwhelming desire to place it in the top ten, just because no such list existed last year. There’s never anything to be gained from instantly dismissing films, so if you have overlooked any of the below maybe you might be tempted to give them a look. In putting this list together, I’ve tried to draw attention to those movies that deserved to do far better than they did, weighing up negative backlash against the actual box office takings, then pitching those factors against the actual quality of the movie, especially in terms of its action content. This would be less of a problem if the films’ releases in other countries weren’t then affected by ‘bad’ US box office, which has led to a great summer blockbuster like White House Down being delayed and then slipped out when no one was looking. He’s absolutely right, and many of the movies mentioned above and below have barely, if at all, covered their budgets from their domestic take in America. So it’s a real deal, we say, ‘Will China allow this movie to be shown in its country, or how does it look if the bad guy’s this, that, or the other?’ As the world gets smaller and there are more participants in the movie business… I mean these movies are funded by India, China, Russia so one of their stipulations is ‘Uh-uh, we’re good guys.'” This movie’s going to make what it makes in America, but really this movie’s going to make its money around the world. I mean as an actor you’re talking now about what international numbers are, you’re not talking about domestic numbers.
“Hollywood is no longer an American event. Worldwide take is key too, which Aaron Eckhart summed up nicely when we spoke to him earlier in the year for another great slice of action, Olympus Has Fallen: