We made it through another year, and while few people are going to say 2021 was the best year of their lives, there is a general consensus that it was better than 2020. There’s a lot of articles and even a Netflix special exploring all the various negative aspects of 2021, if that’s your cup of tea, but if you’ll indulge me I’d like to focus on the positive. 2021 was a comeback year, marked by a democratic presidential inauguration (love them or hate them, you can’t deny it’s a comeback), the widespread release of a vaccine (huge comeback for science and the world at large), the return of the summer Olympics (world athletes were real comeback kings and queens here), and some billionaires going to space and, you guessed it, coming back.

The comeback that delighted me most this year was the return of cinema. Whether you braved returning to a theater or saw them from your home, 2021 was a great year for movies, and a huge contrast to the desolate media atmosphere of 2020. And for some reason, the movies that stood out most were perhaps the least socially-distant film genre, action flicks. If you ask me, action movies were the greatest comeback of 2021, returning so fast and so furiously that even my pseudo-intellectual ass was on the edge of every seat to immerse itself in a world of guns and melee combat. So sit back, grab a gun, fire it from a speeding motorcycle, crash through a window, and let’s review a fantastic year in action. Let’s start from the beginning.

MARCH

Yes, March. I hear your criticism, and I get it. March was not the beginning of 2021. There were some world events in January and February that we really don’t need to get into, but very little noise on the action movie front. Perhaps it was intended to match the bleak tone of the start of the year. Or perhaps it was because movie theaters were closed throughout a great deal of the country and a number of Hollywood actors, writers, and other essential employees were unable to work. Either way, there was a glimmer of hope, not from the hero we wanted, but from the hero we deserved: Zack Snyder. Yes, the first blockbuster release of 2021, and perhaps March’s biggest news story in my mind, was Zack Snyder’s Justice League.

Oh, to go back to March and re-experience that great anticipation, that sweet knowledge that Snyder was going to use ludicrous amounts of time and money to fulfill his promise and show us his true vision for the Justice League movie. And as certain as we were that he was really doing it, we were certain that it was going to suck. Boy were we excited to see the debacle. And yet, as I sat drunk in my living room watching the end credits roll over a painfully un-ironic cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, I reflected on the past 4 hours of my life and found that it was altogether fine. Did the epic story of Batman, Superman, Aquaman, Flashman, Cyborgman, and Wonderwo-man fighting the monstrous Steppenwolf need to be 4 hours long? Obviously not. Was it the worst way I’ve spent 4 hours? Not even close.

Bob Odenkirk’s Nobody is worth mentioning as an action movie from a man known almost exclusively for comedy that nonetheless received almost unanimous great reviews that I would absolutely echo.

But if we’re talking about movies that really represented March of 2021, we have to talk about March 31st’s Godzilla Vs Kong. The most notable point I can make about this movie is the amount of homework involved in gaining the backstory for it. With the pandemic raging, I had some time to spare, so I watched Godzilla (2014), Kong: Skull Island (2017), and Godzilla: King of Monsters (2019). With 8 hours of monster-watching under my belt, I was more than ready to watch a giant CGI monkey fight a giant CGI lizard. The whole thing culminated in [SPOILER]_{the monkey and the lizard teaming up to fight a robot lizard}[/SPOILER], which seemed like an appropriately ridiculous ending, but after all of the homework this one couldn’t help but feel like a bit of a waste of my time. March was bleak, but it was over, and there’s no way I was the only person excited for…

APRIL

Hell yeah! April 2021! Just a little over our year anniversary of the Covid-19 lockdown, and it was time to get that vaccine we had waited so impatiently for. We shared our experiences of waiting at the vaccination site for a whole inconvenient 15 minutes and complained about our sore arms and mild fatigue the next day. Then we sat down with the family to watch Mortal Kombat, a movie that embraced its place as a stupid gorefest so enthusiastically that it was hard to be mad at. The plot felt like it was being written as the movie went along, and characters ignored any sort of tact or context in delivering video game lines such as “flawless victory,” but it was fun to watch Kung Lao cut a guy open with his hat. It killed some time while we waited for vaccines to take effect, anyway.

I additionally watched Guy Ritchie’s Wrath of Man, a paint-by-numbers Jason Statham shoot-em-up, but one with just enough cool factor to stand alongside the Ritchie catalog.

MAY AND JUNE

I’m already excited for spring of 2022, but it was nothing like my excitement for spring of 2021. A second vaccination shot, outdoor dining, sports, sunshine, a whole world to explore (at least the outdoor sections). Boy, this was so fun. So perhaps I missed some action flicks like The Legion with Mickey Rourke or The Misfits with Pierce Brosnan, but you can bet I found my way back inside to watch The Fast and the Furious: F9. Presumably named after the windows hotkey for rewinding, F9 rewinds to notably large and bald protagonist Dominic Toretto’s past to reveal that he lost a brother growing up after the brother hit someone with a pipe or something. Anyway his brother comes back and it turns out he’s John Cena. They chase after him with a truck filled with magnets, fling a sports car through several beautiful Edinburgh storefronts, and eventually drive a Pontiac Fiero into space. I’d throw a spoiler tag on that last bit, but who would possibly believe I’m telling the truth. This movie was completely over the top and campy in all the right ways and it’s exactly the kick into gear (pun absolutely intended) my fully-vaccinated body needed.

It was accompanied with a nice shot of The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, a mouthful of a movie with Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L Jackson that I thought was much better than it had any reason to be.

JULY

The summer Olympics finally happen in Tokyo, some billionaires fly into space, Chris Pratt fights some future aliens in The Tomorrow War, Scarlett Johansson endures a lot of fake Russian accents in Black Widow, Karen Gillan follows in her mom’s assassin footsteps in Gunpowder Milkshake, Bruce Willis helps Jaime King escape dirty cops in Out of Death, Nick Cage saves his truffle pig in Pig, and Henry Golding shows us the backstory of a character nobody asked for the backstory of in Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins. Some of these movies were really dumb and others were just a bit disappointing, but boy what an action-packed month! Snake Eyes actually gets my vote for martial arts movie of the year, which is as surprising for me as I imagine it is for you.

AUGUST

The weather gets hot and the movies get hotter! August bursts right out of the gates with James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, a campy gross-out adventure that is somehow held together by surprisingly sincere and driven performances by its all-star cast, even after Margot Robbie stabs her way into a giant eyeball.

Maggie Q and Michael Keaton square off in the surprisingly-good The Protege, the story of a young Vietnamese girl saved from assassination and raised by Samuel L Jackson.

Ryan Reynolds comes back to the big screen just two months after Hitman’s Bodyguard’s Wife to bring us Free Guy, a movie that I honestly believe to be my favorite movie of 2021. Without giving too much away, I think it needs to be said that this dumb what-if-Ryan-Reynolds-lived-in-a-Grand-Theft-Auto-game movie is not the dumb what-if-Ryan-Reynolds-lived-in-a-Grand-Theft-Auto-game movie that you think it’s going to be. I mean it is in the beginning, but the range of timely thought-provoking themes throughout the story arc are something I can’t say I saw coming.

SEPTEMBER

Marvel returns and apologizes for Black Widow with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, a movie falsely attributed with being the first big-budget martial arts movie in years. This has all of the child-of-an-assassin story beats that we’ve become very familiar with this year, but adds a wonderful dash of Chinese folklore and some signature Marvel jokeyness and all-in-all it’s a very palatable action stew of a film.

Then Gerard Butler comes out of nowhere and releases Copshop, a strangely fun and engaging film about a hired killer that wants to be sent to prison in order to be kept safe, but things get a little more shoot-y and on fire than expected.

OCTOBER

This spooky month announces the end of summer and Venom: Let There Be Carnage announces the end of our fun streak of summer action movies. Woody Harrelson puts on a good show of trying to infuse this movie with some charm, but it turns out Tom Hardy being covered in man-eating alien tar is just not a deep enough premise to cover two feature-length films.

Thankfully No Time To Die finally comes out, ending what felt like a two-year run of trailers for this Bond movie. Bond is old and kind of a bummer and Rami Malek borrows a terrible eastern European accent from the cast of Black Widow. Some people really liked this one, and I imagine their reviews will be more fun than mine. If you want a fun review from me, we can talk about Dune, a movie that a read a whole novel in preparation for before realizing I only had to read about half of it. Where the movie is guilty of stretching for time, it is also clearly guilty of being a labor of love, and the passion Villeneuve shows in bringing this book to life is very apparent. It also looks beautiful. Maybe a little high on the sci-fi weirdness dial, but still beautiful.

NOVEMBER

The weather’s getting cooler, and the holiday spiral that is Thanksgiving-to-New-Years is coming, leaving very little to do but wrap the year up. It is in this spirit that Marvel releases Eternals, featuring an ensemble cast of Barry Keoghan and some other people shooting yellow CGI from their hands, eyes, et cetera. This movie takes a decent shot at finding an emotional human core, but in a giant interconnected Marvel cinematic universe it’s hard to find a reason that it really matters.

Weeks later, McKenna Grace and Paul Rudd bring us the highly-anticipated Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which answers the question, “What if the Ghostbusters were kids?” It’s a touching homage to the original movie and the man who brought it to life (Harold Ramis), but not a particularly exciting or inspired one.

DECEMBER

How do we say goodbye to a year like 2021? Well, first we wait until right around the 25th for some reason, then we drop a bunch of inevitable action sequels one after another. Tom Holland slings webs at the year in Spider-Man: No Way Home, former Voldemort-turned-Liam-Neeson Ralph Fiennes gives a silly history reenactment in The King’s Man, and the cast of the Matrix has a 20-year reunion special called The Matrix Resurrections. All of these movies have some fun and redeeming moments, but I’d be lying if I said Spider-Man didn’t stand head and shoulders above the other two. Time after time, Jon Favreau finds ways to work under enormous pressure, and the Spider-Man movie tasked with pulling together a 14-year Marvel cinematic history with a 15-year arachnid hero history delivers on all fronts. It’s fun, it’s heartfelt, it appeals to the fans, it brings in new audiences, and it kinda tanks Eternals as it immediately jumps to the forefront of the Marvel lineup. An action-packed ending to an action-packed year, and what a comeback for some figures from superhero movie past. 

Was 2021 the best action movie year ever? Maybe. Will 2022 follow in its heart-pounding footsteps? With movies like The 355, Uncharted, and The Batman on the horizon, it certainly seems possible. Some would say we’re living in thrilling times. With our hearts pounding on the regular, it only makes sense for us to throw on some adrenaline-fueled entertainment. Whatever this year brings, it’ll be a hell of a ride.

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