The Best Movie Ever | Action Comedies

Everyone loves to laugh, and everyone loves a good car chase. Putting those two things together was such a good idea that they spawned one of the most popular subgenres around: the action comedy, where everyone gets punched in the face and everyone makes a silly joke about it.

Action comedies are everywhere these days, and this weekend we’re getting one of the most anticipated in years: Deadpool, about a wisecracking superpowered mercenary who is somehow completely aware that he’s in a movie. The film is very funny, but it’s hardly the best action comedy ever. Which begs the question… what is?

Also: SoundTreks Reviews the Fun, Weird, Ironic ‘Deadpool’ Soundtrack

We asked our panel of film critics – Crave’s William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold, and Collider’s Brian Formo – to consider every action comedy they’ve ever seen and pick one, just one movie that they would hold up as the best of the genre. As usual, some of their picks will surprise you, and as usual, they can’t agree on a damned thing.

Let us know your favorite action comedy and keep coming back every Wednesday for more highly-debatable installments of Crave’s The Best Movie Ever!

Brian Formo’s Pick: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

RM Films International

How often have you encountered a mass of a man like Arnold Schwarzenegger? Probably incredibly infrequent. Yet for nearly two decades he was the prototype of a male action star. Schwarzenegger ushered in a new era of thespian: a hulk of a human who could also use wit economically; his performance was akin to flexing, turning to a mirror and winking.

William Bibbiani’s Pick: Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

20th Century Fox

The problem with action comedies is usually the comedy part, since making a silly joke while ending a human life is a jerk thing to do. It can diffuse the tension or worse, fall completely flat. But some action movies are so inherently silly to begin with that adding humor makes perfect sense. There are a lot of great examples of this, but none as deliciously absurd and wonderfully funny as Big Trouble in Little China.

The film stars Kurt Russell as Jack Burton, a musclebound white dude with a penchant for snappy quips and self-absorbed bravado. Jack Burton is essentially every American action hero from the 1980s but with one notable exception: he’s not the hero, he’s the sidekick and nobody bothered to tell him.

So Big Trouble in Little China plops Jack in an age-old tale of Chinese mysticism and kung fu, imported directly from Asia into the heart of San Francisco. Jack gets swept up in the action but doesn’t have any idea what’s going on, so he spends most of the film cracking wise and being useless, while the suave and capable Wang Chi (Denis Dun), who would have been the sidekick in any other film of the era, does all the heavy lifting and martial arts fighting, and actually gets the girl.

But watching Jack buffoon his way through Big Trouble in Little China is one of cinema’s greatest pleasures. He leaps into the fray guns ablazing, then shoots into the air and gets knocked unconscious by debris. He gets lipstick smeared all over his face and nobody tells him about it before the big climactic action sequence. He’s a lovable goof who thinks he’s a badass, and he’s in a lovable, goofy movie that is 100%, in every way badass.

Witney Seibold’s Pick: Lethal Weapon (1987)

Warner Bros.

The definition of “action comedy” is broad and versatile. It can be applied to just about any comedy with a chase scene in it (which is a sizable percentage), or any action film with a joke in it. In modern Hollywood, that could describe about 90% of both action and comedy films. So the potential selection for the best is rather large. It’s also, lamentably, overwhelmingly mediocre. Occasionally, you have a standout genre mashup that works (the upcoming Deadpool is flimsy but very enjoyable), but a brief analysis reveals a string of Paul Blarts and Hot Pursuits that most of us would rather forget. 

The American version of the genre – at least as it has been codified – began in early 1980s with films like Beverly Hills Cop and 48 Hrs., so when selecting the best, it would behoove us to examine the genre’s grandfathers (I cannot delve into the vast swath of comedic kung-fu flicks from China and Hong Kong, as I am not well versed in enough of them). As such, I select Richard Donner’s 1987 film Lethal Weapon as the finest example – perhaps even the Platonic ideal – of action comedy. In it, Mel Gibson plays a loose cannon cop who is not so secretly suicidal at Christmastime. Danny Glover, a more straight-laced cop, is paired with him. This may sound like a familiar trope to modern audiences, but the mismatched-buddy-cop thing was new at one point, and in 1987 it was perfected. 

Screenwriter Shane Black is the master of the action comedy, and his screenplay for Lethal Weapon is snappy and witty and stuffed full of funny one-liners. The two main characters may have a streak of melancholy (at least in the first Lethal Weapon), but they’re also funny, appealing goofballs. They say genuinely witty things (“You want me to drive?” “You’re supposed to be suicidal. I’ll drive.” “Anyone who drives around this town is suicidal.”) as well as some cheesy jokes (“Let’s get the flock out of here!”). The premise and the characters of the standard action comedy may have originated a few years earlier, but they were perfected here. Every film since has been attempting to recapture this film’s glory. 

Previously on The Best Movie Ever:

Top Photo: Warner Bros. / RM Films International / 20th Century Fox