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BOOKS

Action Hero Scouting Report by Shea Serrano

Longtime readers know that New York Times bestselling author Shea Serrano is a first-ballot Books & Biceps Hall of Famer.

We’ve recommended his books Movies (And Other Things), Basketball (And Other Things), his recent novella The Abduction and yet… it was all a warm-up… a prelude, if you will… to this, his new project, Action Hero Scouting Report, which breaks down and ranks 27 action heroes in kick ass categories like “Inciting Event”, “Determination”, “Skills Training” and my favorite “Wishnificance" (a made up word that makes sense when he explains it).

This is, without question, Shea’s most Books & Biceps book ever. And if I can paraphrase Christopher Walken explaining John Creasy in Man on Fire: “Serrano’s art is action movies… And with AHSR, he’s about to paint his masterpiece.”

Shea and I have crossed paths professionally a few times over the years so I e-mailed him to see if he’d be down for one of our behind-the-books Q&As and he said hell yes.

You’re gonna love this one.

Please enjoy the official Books & Biceps Q&A with Shea Serrano:

FINKEL: Let’s begin at the end. In the acknowledgements section of Action Hero Scouting Report, you wrote that you spent 4 months watching movies as research for this project. You’ve done a few Rewatchables podcasts on some of these, but which action hero’s movie had you gone the longest without watching that delivered the goods all these years later? Like you remembered it was awesome from 1997 but in 2023 it still kicks ass. And why?

Serrano: The one that stood out the most —the one that, as I was rewatching it, I caught myself saying “Goddamn, this is so fucking good” the most amount of times— was 1982’s First Blood. It’s such a smart, confident, tightly-packed movie. It’s easy to forget how compelling that first one was because the later Rambo movies were just so completely outrageous and over the top, but… man. It’s fucking excellent. The First Blood version of John Rambo is Sylvester Stallone’s greatest action movie creation.

Dudes our age watched so many of these movies for the first time when we were kids in HS or college. I’m hitting you with a dad question here… Which one of these action heroes, who we looked up to, did you watch and then realize, holy shit, I’m like 10 years older than this guy now? Like Bruce Willis was 33 in Die Hard. I watch it and think he’s an old man… and I’m a decade older. You? 

You know what’s funny? That never happened with me. And I suspect that's part of the reason I have such a good time rewatching these movies. I turn one of them on —like, for example, Desperado— and it’s like a time travel trick or something. I don’t feel like I’m a 42-year-old dad watching it. I feel like I’m 15 again, you know what I’m saying?

After reading AHSR I found myself making a comparison I’d never made before between action heroes. I’m talking about Cameron Poe (Con Air) and Rambo. And my revelation was: Cameron Poe is Rambo if Rambo had fallen in love with a beautiful woman and had a kid… And Rambo is Cameron Poe if Poe never fell in love and had a kid… They’re the same person, just one has something to live for and has seen good in the world and the other hasn’t. They’re the same guy just in different Rambo-verses, right? Or wrong?

Well, I think you’re a little bit right and a little bit wrong. The way you’re a little bit right is that, yes, for sure, you can draw a direct line from John Rambo to Cameron Poe. (I described Cameron Poe in the Action Hero Scouting Report as being “Rambo, but silly.”) It’s like Nic Cage took the Rambo character and washed away all of the trauma and nuance and replaced it with sass and a southern accent. (And, just to be clear, that is an absolute compliment to Cage.)

And that gets to how you’re a little bit wrong, which is the thing of you saying the variable that sent each of them off into the direction each of them headed as humans was a wife and kid. John Rambo with a wife and kid doesn’t become Cameron Poe because, to steal a term from the latest Spider-Man movie, John Rambo’s canon event was his experience in Vietnam. If you give him a wife and a kid, he’s just John Rambo with a wife and a kid, and the easiest way to prove that point is to look at Rambo: Last Blood, which pretty much gave him a version of a wife and a kid. He didn’t become fun and silly in the way that Cameron Poe was. He became even more of the broken antihero he was when we met him in 1982. (Also: Last Blood was horrible. If you’ve not seen it, don’t bother.)

I can’t finish this without a word about one of my personal favorites in your book, Denzel’s John Creasy in Man on Fire. He’s not the best fighter in this book. He’s not the biggest or the strongest or the fastest. He’s past his prime and out of shape… And yet, he has the coolest description of his talents by far (Creasy’s art is death) and I believe that with everything on the line, he’d take down every single action hero in the book if he had to. Like he’s the final boss. Like somehow some way he’d kill them all. Agree or who do you see taking Creasy out?

Nah. If we have to pick one hero out of all of the heroes in the Action Hero Scouting Report to survive in an ONLY ONE PERSON LIVES supreme battle, John Creasy’s definitely gonna die. (He would’ve died early on in the movie if he’d not received medical attention after he got shot up during Pita’s kidnapping.) The person who’s gonna walk away with breath still in their lungs is, I would guess, either Dutch from Predator (HE FOUGHT AND KILLED A NEARLY 8-FOOT TALL MUSCLE ALIEN WHO WAS IN POSSESSION OF SEVERAL HIGH TECH WEAPONS) or The Bride from Kill Bill (literally got shot in the head at close range and didn’t die).

(FINKEL NOTE: After Shea sent this answer I realized he was right because Creasy was too old and washed up… But it made me think of a better question: What about a 26-year-old, in his prime, jacked, fast and furious John Creasy? That man would be a problem in any battle to the death. I think he could hang with Dutch. Someone needs to work on a Man on Fire prequel is what I’m saying.)

Lastly, you’ve done all of your Halfway Books independently (The Abduction – which is great – this, Conference Room 5 Minutes, and others). I do the same with some of my projects as well. It’s the ultimate “shoot your shot” move. What about certain ideas do you decide to do yourself without a publisher or Amazon and go straight to readers with Gumroad?

I use HALFWAY BOOKS to publish all the passion project stuff I wanna do. That's really the only guideline I have for it. Like, for example, you mentioned The Abduction: I love that story a lot. Aliens abduct a guy and normally when that happens in the movies or whatever the guy they abduct is a wimp. In The Abduction, though, the guy the aliens abduct ends up being super fucking tough. They get him up on that ship and he just starts fucking wrecking shit, killing aliens and whatnot.

When I had that idea, pretty quickly I was like, “Yeah, that one has legs. I wanna do that.” But also, pretty quickly I was like, “I don’t think I want it to be more than, say, 30 pages, so it for sure isn’t an idea I’d take to a proper publisher.” So I put it out through HALFWAY BOOKS.

And yeah, it’s a risk to do it that way, given that I’m the one who has to front the costs for everything, like hiring an editor and a layout designer and a cover designer and a proofreader and so on. But also what that means is (a) I never have to worry about someone else putting their fingerprints on something in a way that I don’t want them to; and (b) if the project does really well, I get a bigger stake of the money that it earns. (With a traditional book, if it sells for $20 bucks, I might get about 15 percent of that, which is just $3. With the independent version, if it sells for $20 bucks, I get about 85 percent of that, which is $17.) Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. But it’s always fun.

Awesome. Thanks for your time, Shea!

Buy ACTION HERO SCOUTING REPORT here.

BICEPS

One of my favorite characters Serrano ranks in his book is Wesley Snipes’ underrated and awesome, Blade. If you remember anything about Blade: Trinity it’s likely that Snipes and co-stars Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel all got JACKED for the film.

After doing some internet sleuthing, I found a transcript from the DVD about the making of the movie that describes the workout the three of them went through six days a week, in addition to martial arts training for Reynolds and Biel (Snipes is a lifelong martial artist). Remember, this is likely embellished a bit, and the Internet could always be wrong, but if it’s close it’s a lot:

Start:

500 sit-ups (don’t know the sets, reps, but… that’s a shitload of sit-ups)

Full body heavy Olympic lift circuit:

3 sets of 12 for each: Bench, Squat, Deadlift, Military Press

1 hour martial arts training

NOTE: 500 sit-ups and then heavy, full-body lifts doesn’t seem right and isn’t recommended, BUT if you switch this up and do the sit-ups last, then, yeah, you could get in Blade-level shape pretty quickly.

Quick Flexes

I wrote this column for all of us who collected baseball cards as kids and thought we’d be millionaires by now. Nearly three-quarters of a MILLION views:

And I leave you with this pic of the Flex Factory and a motivational quote from Miracle if you’ve got leg day coming up this weekend:

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Thank you all for reading.

Have a great weekend! - Jon