The Ranking
FOUR EMPIRE WRITERS TACKLE THE FILMOGRAPHY OF THE LEGENDARY ACTION PRODUCER
Chris: Joel Silver, then. The producer who bestrode the ’80s and ’90s action movie, in particular, like a colossus.
James: It was quite difficult for me to pick a favourite Joel Silver movie, because it’s a who’s who of my favourite films.
Chris: And Speed Racer.
James: The quality here is just extraordinary. One might say the bar has been raised so high, there is no bar.
Chris: Which is something he said in an interview about The Matrix Reloaded. “There is no bar.”
Nick: He doesn’t do many interviews, which is a real shame, as he’s a quote machine. I think Les Grossman from Tropic Thunder was inspired by Joel Silver, and maybe that big, blustery character in True Romance too. He once said, “I want this film so badly, I’d stab myself in the back to get it.”
Chris: He has a certain swagger, a certain bluster, and so do his films. They’re hymns to excess. He never met an explosion he didn’t like.
Helen: In some ways he’s quite a traditional movie producer. Most of his best films are built around a moviestar performance. He finds charismatic people, he finds big, bold, action-filled stories to tell with those people and makes them happen through sheer force of will.
Nick: The casting thing is really interesting. Bruce Willis in Die Hard is probably the most famous example, but Ricochet was Denzel
Washington’s first action film. Patrick Swayze in Road House was something totally different for him as well.
Chris: When I first started to fall in love with movies in the ’80s, he was one of the few producers whose name was a brand, like Bruckheimer &Simpson. That’s very rare these days, Feige apart. You knew what you were getting from a Joel Silver movie: some decent action scenes, a charismatic lead, and a few laughs.
Nick: The comedy is super-important. Although sometimes the comedy is not funny, like Fair Game.
Chris: Fair Game is fair game.
Nick: But it started with 48 Hrs., dropping Eddie Murphy into his first film.
James: How much of that was a comedy on paper? But there’s a solid backbone. It’s a proper action thriller but you can laugh.
Nick: It set the formula for buddy movies. You don’t have Lethal Weapon without 48 Hrs..
Chris: That’s part of his Walter Hill trilogy, which concluded with Brewster’s Millions in 1985, the same year he produced Weird Science and Commando.
James: That’s a hell of a double-hitter.
Helen: I know you guys are gonna talk a lot about Commando. I don’t have any affection for it. I know it has some of the great Arnie kiss-off lines, but apart from that I don’t care.
Nick: It’s not the best Arnie movie but I would venture it is the Arnie-est Arnie movie. Objectivel
