Thinking Men Movie Heroes Seem To Be Getting Smarter

The boys of summer are back in force, and we don’t mean that the baseball strike is history.

We’re talking about the early summer movie season, which is now in full swing. Traditionally, this has been the time of year for big boys with big guns and big muscles to hit blockbusters out of the box-office park.

They’re out there again this year, in the likes of “Die Hard With a Vengeance,” “Braveheart,” “Crimson Tide” and “Congo.” But along with all the brawn and blasts, this year’s crop of summer action movies is bringing a new element to the game: brains. For the most part, heroes are smarter, wittier and, in some cases, more sensitive than they used to be.

And 1995 also will go down as the summer when the granddaddy of all action movie actors, Clint Eastwood, played a sweet, poetic artist in “The Bridges of Madison County.” And when last year’s “Speed”-y new action star, Keanu Reeves, became the virtual human computer “Johnny Mnemonic” - even if the lovable airhead convinced few takers that he had a wet-wired cyberpsyche.

The message most of these movies put forth is that real men think things through. This is quite a change from most summer blockbusters of recent years, which overwhelmingly leaned toward mindless action. They were about Schwarzenegger or Stallone slaughtering indiscriminately, Eddie Murphy cracking heads and not-very-wise one-liners, and Mel Gibson turning into a hair-trigger lethal weapon. Even the professorial Indiana Jones dispensed with the intellectual faculties once the action got going.

This year, the movie heroes who aren’t actively trying to avoid violence are, at the very least, picking their brains along with fights. As a result, the ideals of movie manliness on display this summer cover a wider, more varied range than they have in many a June moon.

“I’ve never felt true masculinity is ever shown by kicking over tables and pushing in doors,” said Eastwood, who has done his share of both as Dirty Harry, violent cowboys and other taciturn men of action. But as “Bridges’ ” sexy sexagenarian Robert Kincaid, the actor relies almost entirely on a worldly gift of gab, easygoing humor and thoughtful consideration of his married lover’s (played by World’s Smartest Actress Meryl Streep) feelings and circumstances.

“This movie wasn’t meant to be a statement on masculinity,” Eastwood cautioned. “But it does show that a guy who really does have it doesn’t need to flaunt it; he doesn’t need to go around with a hammer in his hand and bragging about a 6,000 testosterone level.”

Eastwood’s is the most extreme example of an action hero displaying his smarter, sensitive side this summer. Yet he’s far from alone when it comes to cutting the testosterone with a little IQ.

The main male hero of “Congo,” Dylan Walsh’s Peter Elliot, is a gentle primatologist who has a tender relationship with a talking gorilla (Laura Linney’s ex-CIA agent, Karen Ross, is the jungle expedition’s weapons expert). Significantly, Elliot is among the few left standing at the end of the African adventure, while many of his more macho companions are not.

“Crimson Tide” hardly has any actual violence in it. The movie’s thrills come from the war of nerves Gene Hackman’s seasoned submarine commander fights with his mutinous, Ivy League-educated executive officer, played by Denzel Washington. Their moves and countermoves resemble a high-tech chess game. And unlike many summer actioners of recent vintage, the goal here is to avoid blowing the bad guys to smithereens unless absolutely necessary.

Defusing confrontation is also the reality-based point of Disney’s animated “Pocahontas.” Though he starts out as an insensitive soldier of fortune more than ready to kill some American Indians in the name of England’s king, Capt. John Smith soon comes around to the Indian princess’s philosophy of peaceful coexistence. Voiced by the aforementioned Mel Gibson, Smith becomes a paragon of multicultural enlightenment in no time flat.

Gibson plays more of a warrior in his self-directed “Braveheart.” Yet for all of the film’s Dark Ages savagery and rude Scots clansmen showing us what’s under their kilts, it insists on the proposition that brains are the ultimate weapon. Gibson’s rebel leader William Wallace defeats larger, better-equipped English forces via superior strategy and tactics - and clearly wins the heart of Sophie Marceau’s Princess with his unexpected fluency in Latin and her native French.

Then again, the latest “Die Hard” is essentially just a blast-happy, liveaction cartoon. But even in this one, the rough-and-tumble heroes (played by Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson) have to let up on cussing and fussing and bone-breaking acrobatics long enough to work out clues to their ingenious nemesis’ (Jeremy Irons) diabolical plot. It’s a shooting gallery of a movie in which even moving targets must take time out to stop and think.

And, coarse as it often is, the verbal humor in the latest “Die Hard” is both sharper and more plentiful than that in the series’ previous chapters. The presence of Jackson, who can handle a line like nobody’s business, is obviously one reason for this. But “Braveheart,” the Quentin Tarantino-polished “Crimson” and even “Mnemonic” - in which Reeves’ loony speech about preferring room service to heroism has clear satiric intent, if bonehead effect - all incorporate sharper, more complex comedy than the ironic one-liners action movies usually serve up.

Why this is happening is, like all film trends, somewhat coincidental; but there are a few obvious reasons, too. The huge success of Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” last fall proved that a large audience exists for intelligently presented violence. Part of it also has to do with the ever-rising costs of making action films - though “Crimson Tide” didn’t come cheap, it would have been much more expensive if it was ballistics-based rather than dialogue-centered.

Another factor is that, as we move into an increasingly technological world, the heroes of films like “Mnemonic,” “Congo” and even “Die Hard” must be smart enough to work the equipment required to get the job done. Then there’s the fact that the basic action movie formula has been played to death over the last decade. Like any overworked genre, something has to be done to keep things fresh, and smarter, funnier, less predictable heroes are a relatively easy (and inexpensive) way of adding extra dimensions to the show.

“I liked playing an essentially gentle guy in a movie where the woman was much more assertive,” said “Congo’s” Dylan Walsh. “If you switched them and put them into their cliche spots, immediately the movie becomes less interesting.”

There’s even a chance that more thoughtful protagonists could help deflect the current political criticism of Hollywood. Maybe sacrificing a few more moments of mindless mayhem for a bit of intelligent discourse is a positive baby step toward entertainment both Bob Dole and people who actually like movies can approve of.

Of course, the main interest for most of these movies still lies in their action, and no one is thinking of any of them as cerebral exercises. Summer blockbusters rise or fall on their appeal to the most reliable moviegoing demographic on Earth: young males who just got out of school.