As part of the Transylvania International Film Festival, where the director was invited, Oliver Stone gave his opinion on the action films of the moment. The least we can say is that his response is without language of wood.
The projects follow one another and look alike
“I saw John Wick 4 on the plane. A lot of noise for nothing. It's amazing how disgusting this movie is. I don't understand what people see there. Yes, I might have watched GI Joe as a kid, but now Keanu Reeves kills three hundred, four hundred people in this fucking movie. As a veteran, I can tell you that we don't believe any of these deaths. I know it's a movie, but this looks more like a video game. The project has lost touch with reality. Maybe the public likes video games, but I'm bored. How many car crashes can we do? How many stunts can we do? What's the difference with Fast & Furious? The projects follow one another and resemble each other. Whether it's a Marvel super-human or just a human being like John Wick, there's no difference. We can't believe it”.
A scene and a stunt are not the same thing
This opinion may seem quite clear-cut and paradoxical on the part of the director of Born Killers (filming photo below, Oliver Stone is surrounded by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis) and the screenwriter of Scarface, but in all the films of Stone, there is a subtext, a story, characters, a signature, a reflection, an identity, in short cinema. It's the difference between a scene and a stunt, between digital escalation in the service of violence and a realistic approach to violence to better denounce it.
What's left at the end?
All the films the director mentions are alike because they truncate reality to such an extent that they lose all credibility and notion of realism, they popularize - literally and figuratively - violence in all its forms. In the end, only the amount of deaths or car crashes matters. If you take away all the action scenes from the Oliver Stone movies, there's a purpose, a story, and characters. If you do the same projection with the franchises quoted by Oliver Stone, the hero of one walks his dog, the other fixes his car while drinking Corona. Source: ew.com
