Back in the ’80s, men were men, especially in action movies. Women were there to be seen, not fought, and women certainly weren’t action stars.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson. They were action stars, men’s men, kicking ass and blowing shit up and not caring who didn’t like it.
But as we have grown as a society, women crept their way into our manliest of manly cinema, daring to do more than sit there all chesty and chained up while we rescued them. No, they took matters into their own hands.
Okay, Pam Grier did quite a bit of that in the 70s, and she did it with style. Sigourney Weaver starred in a little science fiction movie in 1979, but it was still slow going through the 80s, even as she fought off “Alien” and “Aliens.” We bought into Linda Hamilton in “T2”; after all, she did kill Arnold’s Terminator in the first film. But things got a little ridiculous when Bridget Fonda did it in the ’90s and called it “The Point of No Return.”
And boy, it was. Now we have “Underworlds” and “Tomb Raiders” and “Resident Evils,” starring women as asskickers, and doing it believably. Female action stars are all but the norm now. Scarlett Johansson becomes the latest this weekend with Luc Besson’s “Lucy” opens in theaters. And Besson is no stranger to badass females, having directed Milla Jovovich in “The Fifth Element,” and he seeks to create another iconic woman who owns the world.
Next month UFC fighter (even our fighters are chicks now!) Ronda Rousey joins the big boys in “The Expendables III,” following Gina Carano, who conducted a few beatdowns of her own in Stephen Soderbergh’s “Haywire.”
Hardcore fighting chicks are here. They aren’t just Charlie’s Angels any more. Now they belong to us all.
And I’d argue the world is better for it.
