20 iconic action films with 'every man' protagonists

Some consider Batman the world’s best detective. Famously, he has those wonderful toys. Let us not forget, though, that Batman has no superpowers. Bruce Wayne is just a rich guy with a bunch of gadgets. Now, it might be a stretch to call the totally-shredded Christian Bale version of Batman “ordinary,” but we can go back to the 1960s comedic version of the Caped Crusader. Adam West’s Batman is definitely more of an ordinary guy. He just wears a cowl and stuff.

Part of what makes the Indiana Jones movies work — especially the first film, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” — is who Indiana Jones is. Yes, he’s an adventuring archeologist, but he’s also a college professor. Indy is afraid of snakes. He’ll shoot a guy to avoid a sword fight. Jones has guts and he has knowhow, but he’s not even John McClane, much less Captain America.

Back-to-back Harrison Ford movies! Based on a massively successful TV show, “The Fugitive” tells the story of a man wrongfully convicted of killing his wife ( not that Tommy Lee Jones cares). Ford plays Dr. Richard Kimble, who is able to escape custody thanks to a bus accident and sets out to prove his innocence and uncover the truth. The aforementioned Jones won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

Who are the human protagonists of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster “Jurassic Park?” You know, the ones having to deal with dinosaurs run amok on a remote island? Scientists, chaos theorists, and children with unusual hacking skills. Sure, they needed that T. Rex to save the day in the end, but they survived the ordeal, and the surviving adults have returned for a few of the sequels.

Will Smith has played not-so-ordinary men, be it “Independence Day” or “Hancock.” In “Enemy of the State,” though, he’s just a guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Smith plays a lawyer in Tony Scott’s techno-thriller that unknowingly comes into possession of incriminating evidence that an NSA bigwig wants to disappear. Naturally, at first Smith’s character has no clue what is happening, and in time he is able to start piecing it together thanks to a paranoid ex-NSA agent played by the late Gene Hackman.

The technology is far from ordinary in “Edge of Tomorrow,” but Tom Cruise’s William Cage very much is. Though he is a major in the army, he’s a public affairs officer with no experience in combat. Pressed into duty, Cage finds himself in a time loop that resets every time he dies. He’s able to figure things out each and every time he gets another run at it. Cage just, you know, needs to die a ton to make that happen.

Cruise is on the other end of the equation in “Collateral.” He’s the villain, and he is a man with a certain set of skills. Cruise’s Vincent is a ruthless, effective hitman. Jamie Foxx plays a taxi driver who thinks he’s in for a great night when Vincent offers him a lot of money to shepherd him around Los Angeles. Once Foxx’s Max finds out the truth, though, he’s got to figure out a way to stop Vincent, and to survive the night.

We thought about “The Terminator,” but Kyle Reese is a time-traveling soldier from the human resistance. Sarah Connor does deal the final blow to the Terminator, but she’s mostly along for the ride in this horror movie (which is a super good horror movie, to be fair). In “Terminator 2,” though, Sarah’s decidedly different. She’s still an ordinary person, but ever since her experience with the Terminator she’s been training, plotting, and scheming. That makes her ready to lead a resistance, even if she has to learn to trust a reprogrammed Terminator in the process.

In a way, Patrick Swayze’s Dalton is not “ordinary.” He’s a famous bouncer, for example. Also he has a weird philosophical Zen thing going on. The movie “Road House” is goofy, but it’s the right kind of mindless action movie. Ultimately, Dalton is just a bouncer, though, and he manages to fight corruption while also keeping a rowdy bar safe.

John Carpenter really threads a needle with the action-comedy “Big Trouble in Little China.” Kurt Russell comes bursting into the story all Kurt Russell-y i.e. looking and feeling like an action movie hero. Jack Burton is a truck driver with many a self-aggrandizing story to tell. As the action plays out, though, it becomes clear how much of Burton’s talk is ego and bluster. When he succeeds in helping the plight of his friends, it’s almost by accident, and it is others who shoulder the load of the quest. Of course, that’s not how old Jack Burton is going to tell it.

Robert De Niro’s Jack Walsh is a bounty hunter, but you could argue a cross-country trek to bring in a bail skipper that includes multiple gunfights and facing down a mob boss is still pretty extraordinary for him. What makes “Midnight Run” a fine addition to this list, outside of how good the movie is, comes from the aforementioned bail skipper. That would be Jonathan “The Duke” Mardukas. Played by Charles Grodin in the actor’s finest role, “The Duke” is a former mob accountant who is only really equipped to run his mouth. And yet, he finds himself right there alongside Jack, sometimes as an adversary, sometimes as an ally.

John Grisham novels aren’t known for being subtle or down to earth, but they are often entertaining legal potboilers. “The Pelican Brief” is such a story. Who could possibly take down a criminal conspiracy with enough power and green to assassinate two Supreme Court justices for financial reasons? Oh, you know, a newspaper reporter and a law school student. Hey, when those characters are played by Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts, it covers a lot of sins.

This classic ‘70s crime drama is focused on the “ordinariness” of it all with intent. Even the criminals who take over a car on a subway train and take the people inside hostage are depicted as far from remarkable. They aren’t Hans Grubers, and Walter Matthau’s Lieutenant Garber is no John McClane. Yes, he is a police officer, but he’s a transit cop. He’s also, you know, a Walter Matthau character. The whole thrust of the movie hinges on, “Can this guy, seemingly so unremarkable, stop these criminals?” It’s a very ‘70s thriller, to be sure.

On the one hand, Buffy Summers is “The Chosen One.” Prophecies kind of change the math on “ordinary” protagonists. On the other hand, the movie is much more focused than the TV show on the game laid out in the title. A girl named Buffy is tasked with being a vampire slayer. Kristy Swanson’s Buffy is a vapid Valley Girl, a vain cheerleader. She has no interest in fighting vampires, and she also has to train quite a bit to prove capable of doing it. Chosen one or not, Buffy is not special at first, and has to train to rise to that level.

It’s a classic conceit of adventure films, but “Romancing the Stone” does it as well as any. Joan is a romance novelist who writes about adventures but never goes on them. Then she is tasked to go to the Colombian jungle with a ransom, at which point chaos ensues. She finds the lone American around, a bird smuggler named Jack, and offers to pay him to get her out of the jungle. The two end up further entrenched in the intrigue, though. “Romancing the Stone” works on the chemistry of Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas as the leads. Naturally, as these stories go, they bicker and they despise one another, but in time there is attraction and then affection.

“’Die Hard’ on a bus” is the best of the “Die Hard” knockoffs. “Speed” is about a bus that couldn’t slow down. Jack Traven, played by Keanu Reeves, is an LAPD S.W.A.T. officer, so he’s far from ordinary. He can’t do it all by himself, though. That’s where Sandra Bullock’s Annie comes in. This was Bullock’s breakthrough role. She plays one of the bus passengers, and she ends up having to drive the speeding bus through the city and do a bunch of action-movie stuff.

Alfred Hitchcock was preoccupied with stories of mistaken identity — and not just in his movies. He had a lifelong fear of being mistaken for the wrong person, especially when it came to crime. “North by Northwest” is his most effective “wrong man” story. Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill is an ad executive, but due to a miscommunication at a hotel he is mistaken by a criminal cabal for CIA agent George Kaplan. Because said cabal is excellent at covering their tracks, Grant has to go it alone (well, mostly — Eva Marie Saint's real agent aids him) to prove his innocence and to unravel what’s going on in order to get his life back.

Now, few would call a stuntman “ordinary.” Or, you know, sane. If “The Fall Guy,” a fun action-comedy that unfortunately didn’t pop at the box office, had just been about Ryan Gosling’s Colt Seavers doing stunt work on a film, it wouldn’t belong here. The reason why it is here is because Colt is asked to unravel a mystery, and in doing so finds himself doing detective work while also having many unstaged fights. What works here is that Seavers’ professional skills are applicable to his plight, but only enough for him not to be totally in over his head. That’s a nice balance to find.

The comedy of “Tropic Thunder” comes, in part, from how unqualified the main characters are. Of course, another part of the comedy comes from non-P.C. jokes that don’t necessarily work for everybody. It is a mixed bag even if you don’t fully dismiss the jokes conceptually, to be fair. A director takes a bunch of prima donna actors into the jungle to film a Vietnam movie with authenticity. Then, said director dies, and then the actors find themselves in the midst of an actual fight for their lives.

Bob Odenkirk: Action star. Yeah, we didn’t see that happening once upon a time. Even when he made the move from comedy to drama playing Saul Goodman he wasn’t doing action stuff. Then, in “Nobody,” he gets to do the “John Wick” thing. To be fair: Odenkirk is playing a man who, many years earlier, did do a bit of what they call “wet work” for intelligence agencies. When “Nobody” begins, though, it’s been years since Odenkirk has done anything violent, and when we meet him he’s flinching about attacking a criminal who has broken into his family’s home. Plus, John Wick is played by action star Keanu Reeves. “Nobody” stars, we’ll say it one more time, Bob Odenkirk. The whole thing in the film is that he seems like an ordinary guy. A nobody, as it were.