On the question of whether action cinema can be an art form and what the strongest cases are.

The usual move in this argument is to cite a handful of exceptions — Kurosawa's action sequences, the Wachowskis' bullet-time, George Miller's practical choreography — and use them to establish that action cinema can achieve artistic status when done correctly.

I want to make a stronger case: that action cinema has its own formal grammar that is as complex and as worthy of serious attention as any other film mode.

The action sequence in a great action film is a form of spatial storytelling. Jackie Chan's fight scenes are built from the physical logic of a specific space: every object in the location becomes a tool or an obstacle, and the sequence is about the relationship between the body and the environment. This is a specific and sophisticated kind of filmmaking intelligence.

The Raid (2011) by Gareth Evans is the best argument for action cinema as formal art that I know of: a film constructed almost entirely of action sequences that are more precisely edited, more spatially coherent, and more formally inventive than anything in the Hollywood action tradition of the same period.