It was 365 days ago today that I sat down at the computer I’m seated at now and typed up a piece called 2021, As Told By Action Movies. Within minutes of completing the article, I realized that I had doomed myself to at least returning to tell the same story again a year later. A one-time article linking key news events to stupid movies released around the same time is maybe a fun momentary distraction for a few readers, but a yearly return to such a dry well? That’s the kind of thing that might really bring some people in to see what the hell is going on. Is this shtick poignant in some way? Is it funny? No on both counts. But is it important? Also no.

Let’s be very clear about this: I am not an action movie guy. You know the action movie guy you have pictured in your head? That’s not me. I oppose violence, I’m squeamish about gore (spoiler for all the horror movies I won’t be reviewing in this list), I don’t care for sports, don’t drink beer, don’t have a car, never held a gun, dress somewhat formally, and my hair lacks the thinning quality you’d expect in a man with any testosterone reaching his late 30s. If I were to write about the type of media I typically consume, I would subject you all to my thoughts on Amazon’s The Rings of Power or maybe Joe Abercrombie’s recently-finished Age of Madness novel trilogy, both of which I enjoyed immensely. Unfortunately, those stories don’t feature a single rocket launcher or sports car being chased by a tank, and don’t produce the raw adrenaline I need coursing through my readers’ veins. So gear up, take your cigarette out of your mouth, flick it toward the conveniently-placed trail of gasoline behind you, and let’s walk in slow motion through another year of action movies.

JANUARY

A great action movie will often drop you right into the thick of it, with a flash forward sequence to an out-of-context tense situation or an immediate move by the enemy that steals a daughter or kills a dog and sets the whole plot in motion. But sometimes a clever filmmaker will subvert expectations and show us the calm before the storm, building character relationships with a simple day in the life. In the case of 2022, our expectations from January 6^th of 2021 were thankfully subverted by a somewhat slow news month to accompany our New Years hangovers.

The James Webb Telescope entered orbit. India’s first female pilot headed the IAF tableau for their Republic Day. And on January 7^th, The 355 entered the pantheon of female-fronted action movies with Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong’o, Penelope Cruz, Fan Bingbing, and Diane Kruger leading the ensemble cast. Like the month it was released, the movie was neither great nor terrible. It pitched right down the middle and did not over or under-deliver. In a slow movie month like January, that’s about as good as we can expect.

FEBRUARY

Action movies on Valentines month? Sure. Moonfall brought us the insane trailer with Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” underscoring the tagline “the moon is coming to us.” It delivered on its stupid premise, dropped some okay jokes, and was ultimately a forgettable punctuation to the start of February.

Speaking of forgettable, the Liam Neeson vehicle Blacklight came to theaters a week later, giving us a classic toothless government conspiracy thriller for the year.

Tom Holland’s Uncharted showed us that video game movies can still be bad in 2022, and that even our beloved British Spiderman himself can’t make another damn treasure hunt movie interesting.

All of this fluff is fine, but an action movie doesn’t really start until we’ve introduced the villain, right? After a somewhat-quiet two months, right at the end of February, we got the real-world news that Russia had invaded Ukraine. There’s the 2021-esque update we were waiting for.

MARCH

When it seemed things couldn’t get any darker, March 4^th’s The Batman swooped in with rain, eyeshadow, and Nirvana. A good momentary distraction, but The Batman was unfortunately not the hero we needed in 2022.

Perhaps Michelle Yeoh was, as Everything Everywhere All At Once seemed to jump from an indie arthouse flick to a cinematic blockbuster…all at once (sorry). Despite public fatigue with Marvel’s never-ending multiverse of heroes, everyone seemed fairly charmed by this quirky multiverse flick.

Sandra Bullock’s The Lost City had the misfortune of being released on the same day as the Dan Kwan/Scheinert breakout hit, and it did about as well as you might expect a Sandra Bullock action-adventure-semi-romantic-comedy to go during a time of global conflict and uncertainty. 

Jujutsu Kaisen 0 gets an honorable mention for the month, marking a resurgence of mainstream anime years after the late 90s/early 2000s boom. Welcome back, Japan.

APRIL

There is a lot of warfare and insurgency around the world this month, but Ketanji Brown Jackson is confirmed as Supreme Court Justice, and boy do we get a big drop of action movies to keep us distracted. 

Morbius is literally released on April Fools’ day, and nobody knows what to make of 2022’s take on what should definitely be an early 90s vampire movie.

Michael Bay pulls a Girl Who Cried Wolf on us and releases the surprisingly-decent Ambulance with Elza González and Jake Gyllenhaal, but the generic bank-heist-gone-wrong trailer with signature Bay lens flare fails to excite the crowd.

In case one soiled reputation wasn’t enough, the world gets another taste of J.K. Rowling with Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, and decides they’ve had quite enough. 

The Northman closes out the month with a weird gory mess in which Nicole Kidman’s character does in fact make out with her son, but fortunately we do get a bit of a palate-cleanser with comedic performances from Nicholas Cage, Pedro Pascal, and Neil Patrick Harris in the overly-self-referential Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

MAY

Sam Raimi takes a crack at making a Doctor Strange horror movie with The Multiverse of Madness, a proverbial cool sunglasses-flick from the notoriously anal Disney corporation, who very likely put unreasonable expectations on all theaters screening it.

Luckily, Tom Cruise comes in to save the world in Top Gun: Maverick, which somehow turns out to be universally beloved and kind of convinces us that our old Scientologist couch-jumping Cruise is the world’s last movie star. Unfortunately, it comes just days after the third-deadliest school shooting in US history.

JUNE

At this point, 2022 really seems poised to take 2021’s spot as worst year yet, but it can’t really get any worse than it already has, right? Welcome to June, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Sure we also get a reunion of San Neil, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic World: Dominion, but the movie is overly obsessed with locusts instead of dinosaurs for some reason and it’s just not the serotonin boost we need.

JULY

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is assassinated two days before the country’s parliamentary elections. Boy this year sucks. Are there at least some good movies out?

Actually, yes. Thor: Love and Thunder delivers on one of the most-watched trailers of all time, and Ryan Gosling’s The Gray Man marks a star-studded renaissance for Netflix, with just enough pizazz and character to break free of its wildly cliché plot.

AUGUST

Please let it be good news. Please let it be good news. Let’s see…the FBI searched Mar-A-Lago and found over 100 classified documents. You know what? We’ll take it.

This is also the month I got way too excited for Bullet Train, a Brad Pitt public transit vehicle that did not live up to its ultra-cool trailer but was still a lot of fun. 

Prey answered the question of what would happen if The Predator decided to attack a Native American tribe (more-or-less the same thing that happened when it attacked Schwarzenegger and Weathers), and also gave our Bear Grylls survivalist-type friends a movie to enjoy.

I assume Idris Elba’s Beast did as well, but it was nice outside and we got our first decent news in a long time and I can’t watch every single action movie that comes out, although lord knows I tried.

SEPTEMBER

I took a trip to London this month, but that’s not really news, is it? But it turns out world news followed me, because within days of my arrival, Liz Truss was appointed prime minister and Queen Elizabeth II passed away. Meanwhile, the world was watching a film called The Woman King, a real-world African story that may or may not have had any impact on the fictional events of the upcoming Black Panther film.

OCTOBER

Let’s pause and take a tally of 2022 thus far. We’ve lost 2 prime ministers, a queen, and a historical Supreme Court decision. And Ukraine…well, Ukraine is actually holding their own and appear to be making Putin quite nervous. This is typically the point in the film where a villain’s terrible backup plan comes into play, or perhaps a new villain comes into play. Enter Elon Musk, who purchases Twitter and immediately announces intentions to lay off thousands of employees.

To make things even worse, the hierarchy of power in the DC universe is forever changed by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Yes, that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. From Moana. The one people think should be president. He plays a badass bad-Superman character called Black Adam. Also, there’s an Ant-Man, a Doctor Strange, and a Falcon. This movie is so teed up to win it’s kind of remarkable that DC found a way to screw it up. Oh well. Maybe next time.

NOVEMBER

This month hits us right away with the midterm elections, and the news looks grim: voter suppression is high, and seems fairly unchecked. Will the US fall to rigged elections and fascism? Not this year.

As this news is coming in, Marvel brings us Wakanda Forever, a strange tribute to Chadwick Boseman that involves a man with winged heels and a lot of water grenades. Truth told, I can’t remember a whole lot else.

I do remember the first fifteen minutes of R.I.P.D 2: Rise of the Damned, which was released four days later, but I wish I didn’t. When I say that this movie immediately grievously insulted my intelligence, understand that I am saying this from the perspective of someone who watched nearly every blockbuster action movie of the past two years and had no real issues with the majority of them. I feel bad that I couldn’t watch the full movie to give it a completely fair and balanced review, but I’m quite certain I’d feel worse if I had watched the whole thing.

DECEMBER

What do we get for the holidays in a year like 2022? Russia returns WNBA star Brittney Griner in a prisoner swap.

We also get Violent Night, a David Harbour and John Leguizamo campy Christmas-movie-gone-wrong that I actually don’t regret seeing twice. We’re all familiar with the wink-at-the-camera Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter-style serious-action-that-we-all-know-isn’t serious genre, and Harbour’s sincere put-upon acting style proves to be kind of perfect for it.

We’re also given Avatar: The Way of Water, a movie with such a sincere passionate fanbase that I don’t want to say anything bad about it, but boy am I perplexed by how many people loved this 3-and-half-hour long Playstation cutscene of a film.

I ended the 2021 action movie article asking if 2022 would follow in 2021’s fantastic action movie footsteps, and now 365 days later I’m prepared to ditch any illusion of non-bias and say that no, it really didn’t. We did maintain a heart-pounding news cycle, though, and we’ve now got quite a few throughlines and villains lined up for our 2023 sequel. If I know my trilogy structure, the third film is generally where we see the heroes push through and finally triumph, and I can’t say this would be a bad year to see all that happen. Lock, load, put your foot on that pedal, and punch it. We’re in for a long night.

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