the groundhog day project

Jericho "Action" Jackson is a Cowboy Cop (on TV Tropes ). Captain Armbruster is Da Chief . Except neither of them really are. See the thing is, however poorly Action Jackson is executed, it seems to be trying to be something more interesting than just another rulebreaking-cop movie. He's a loose cannon, but DAMMIT he's the best we have! That's the Cowboy Cop . Furthermore: Sure, our society may be built upon rules and procedures, but they usually make for bad television. Sometimes you have to bend the rules, rough up the suspects, moon your supervisors and shred the Constitution to get stuff done. Jackson very much used to be that. As the two officers in that too-long cold open play him up as a bogeyman for criminals: Kornblau: Yeah, some say he didn't even have a mother. That some researchers created him to be the first man to walk on the moon without a space suit.  Lack: Mm-hmm.  Kornblau: Others says his mother was molested by Bigfoot, and...

I was thinking about westerns today, you know, as one does. And, about war films, and cop films, and all those ex-soldiers killing far too many bad guys in the 80s, and there was a clear trend about (mostly) lone white men fighting all levels of evil, this specifically American (but surely understood in many another culture as well) fantasy about how much one man can do on his own (or with a small band of similar heroes). And, while recently we have drifted back into the same fantasy with the prevalence of superhero films, there is an interesting gap through the 90s--full of aging versions of too many of those 80s heroes and young heroes raging against fascist governments--that makes me want to do a serious study, a la Wright's Six Guns and Society or Nowell's Blood Money , but focused on the thesis that all these various types of action films are variations of one genre, not multiple. That westerns and those grungy cop dramas from the 70s, those big buff soldiers (some damage...