They're too self serious and in many ways changed the direction of action films and every other movie wanted to be a Bourne-like.
Closest analog is going to be the Bond films but the reason the Daniel Craig films turned out like they are is because of Austin Powers of all things, even with Casino Royale coming out 4 years after the first of the Bourne films.
It definitely fell susceptible to that trend, but I remember just about every movie me and my mom would walk out of for a pretty long period we'd go "it wasn't bad, but I hate the shaky cam....I can't make out the action and it gives me a headache". Shaky cam was a plague on movies for way too long and I'm glad it's been abandoned at this point. As someone pointed out, John Wick helped a lot.
As for the grittiness, to me it's an acting style that we've never really gotten away from since I'd say the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I know I'll get crap for saying this, but I think the Lord of the Rings was a big milestone in changing the style of acting in movies and not for the better.
Acting now tries to "sell a realism" instead of trying to sell their character.
There's a great middle ground between absurdely expresssionistic acting like the silent film era, and attempts at gritty realism, and I feel that the perfect middle ground was between the 1960s - 1990s.
They dialed it down to an artform where you believed the reality because they expressed the character properly.
Indiana Jones isn't like any person you've ever met, and that's why you believe him, because it sells the reality comes about by seeing a very specific personality expressed on screen as good as possible.
If they tried to make Indiana Jones talk and act like "realism" you'd get something that feels less real. This is a difficult concept to convey because acting is so subjective, but a writer, director and actors attempt to sell "realism" doesn't feel as real as when a writer, director and actor each do their job to sell "wonder" and "movie magic".
Closest analog is going to be the Bond films but the reason the Daniel Craig films turned out like they are is because of Austin Powers of all things, even with Casino Royale coming out 4 years after the first of the Bourne films.
It definitely fell susceptible to that trend, but I remember just about every movie me and my mom would walk out of for a pretty long period we'd go "it wasn't bad, but I hate the shaky cam....I can't make out the action and it gives me a headache". Shaky cam was a plague on movies for way too long and I'm glad it's been abandoned at this point. As someone pointed out, John Wick helped a lot.
As for the grittiness, to me it's an acting style that we've never really gotten away from since I'd say the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I know I'll get crap for saying this, but I think the Lord of the Rings was a big milestone in changing the style of acting in movies and not for the better.
Acting now tries to "sell a realism" instead of trying to sell their character.
There's a great middle ground between absurdely expresssionistic acting like the silent film era, and attempts at gritty realism, and I feel that the perfect middle ground was between the 1960s - 1990s.
They dialed it down to an artform where you believed the reality because they expressed the character properly.
Indiana Jones isn't like any person you've ever met, and that's why you believe him, because it sells the reality comes about by seeing a very specific personality expressed on screen as good as possible.
If they tried to make Indiana Jones talk and act like "realism" you'd get something that feels less real. This is a difficult concept to convey because acting is so subjective, but a writer, director and actors attempt to sell "realism" doesn't feel as real as when a writer, director and actor each do their job to sell "wonder" and "movie magic".