Guy Movie Formula: Keep It V-E-R-Y Simple

The good guy is surrounded. (We know he’s the good guy because his name is on the marquee.) A group of shadowy bad guys close in on him. (We know they’re bad guys because they have the gall to try to thwart our famous hero.)

Someone shoots. They all shoot. Muzzles flare. Bullets zing.

The bad guys spray automatic gunfire. Objects around the good guy pop, splinter, and smoke. The good guy runs, leaps, rolls. The good guy returns the barrage with three shots of his own. Blam! Blam! Blam!

Ugh! A bad guy goes down. Arrhh! Another dies. Oof! Another.

Two hundred nineteen shots from the bad guys, and the good guy hasn’t been so much as nicked.

Three shots by the hero: three kills.

So goes the easy economy of the guy movie, the scripts of which seem to be filled in by the screenwriter rather than written. It goes like this: Our hero, an average Joe Blow, gets his wife and/or children massacred/kidnapped/threatened by Yankee renegades/Nazis/Arab terrorists/Eurotrash gangsters/malevolent visitors from the future and vows vengeance. Betrayed by his friends/neighbors/fellow police/comrades-in-arms/evil twin, Blow must endure intense physical hardship in order to restore peace/freedom of expression/fair play/unimpeded commerce to the community.

Blow’s reward: the girl and/or a sequel.

“Guy movies?” NYU film professor Chris Straayer asks rhetorically. “I thought all movies were guy movies.”

Funny, sure, but that kind of lip will get your head blown off in a typical guy movie, of which there are many.

Sure, there are guy movies that are sports biographies, sophomoric comedies, war epics, spy thrillers, and Westerns. But the most popular guy movie of the moment remains the action-adventure.

Action-adventures differ in some superficial respects, but, as film critic Stanley Kauffman has written, your standard example “starts with the most finicky realism - of setting and detail and dialogue - and continues so for a while, then ends in a blaze of wildest fantasy.”

Perhaps it’s the familiar formula of the quest, passed down from the days of King Arthur’s knights errant, that makes these movies so popular. Perhaps it’s their fantasy fulfillment. Perhaps it’s the clear victor, the triumph of the good-deed doer, that appeals to so many men.

And, according to Straayer, women. It’s just that the names on the marquees of these testosterone-driven vehicles are always men.

“All women have to identify with men if they want to experience that vicarious rush of being a hero,” says Straayer, a woman who claims to enjoy some guy movies.

But not all. Pop in a tape of The Three Stooges at a baby shower and see how many yuks the boys evoke. For some guy entertainments, you might as well tack up a sign reading “NO GIRLS ALLOWED.”

“Women are seen as sources of rivalry,” says Toby Miller, Straayer’s colleague at the NYU Film Department. Both on screen and off, “if you’re able to get women away from the scene, men can be close.”

But not too close. Men can enjoy a football game together, and a pitcher of beer - they can even be partners against crime like Danny Glover and Mel Gibson in the “Lethal Weapon” movies - but any time the closeness is in danger of tilting toward intimacy, out come the wisecracks.

“Again and again, jokes seem to highlight the ways that the threats of miscegenation and homoeroticism tend to slide into each other,” Sharon Willis writes in “High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film,” referring to “Lethal Weapon” and its ilk. “But the joke structures end up … containing those threats.”

Whatever. According to Miller, the other major theme in guy movies - besides the quest - is “the problem of how to be a man with other men.”

War movies address both themes, Miller says, because “warfare allows intimacy without women or the risk of appearing homosexual.”

That “risk” of appearing gay is not an idle preoccupation of guy movies. That’s because most action heroes find it impossible to have satisfying relationships with women. John Rambo, Harry Callahan, John McClane - and, OK, Robocop - are simply incapable of a tender exchange of emotions.

“These guys are wounded to depths we can only imagine,” Miller says.

John Wayne, the prototypical guy-movie guy, never got the girl in four decades of moviemaking.

“Once you’ve sacrificed your innocence and your body and blown the (hell) out of every living creature,” Miller says, “it’s not entirely credible that you’d return to the bosom of your family.”

There are emotional problems, too, in a different kind of guy movie - the sophomoric comedy. The problems usually revolve around the fact that, even after seven years of college, the characters behave like gleeful pre-adolescents.

Which is exactly why otherwise responsible adult males rent “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” “Porky’s,” “Revenge of the Nerds,” “Police Academy,” “Caddyshack” and “Stripes” over and over again, reciting dialogue along with Bluto and Bill Murray while the women look on with horror.