How HBO’s Barry Subverted the Action Genre

Action directors like Tony Scott and John McTiernan are rarely included in the pantheon of great filmmakers, but action filmmaking is a whole separate skillset, and it’s a lot harder than it seems. It might just look like a lot of noise, but there’s a kind of poetry to the sequencing of the shots, the imagination of the set-pieces, and the succinctness of the visual storytelling that not a lot of directors can pull off. You can’t take a great action filmmaker like John Woo or Michael Mann or George Miller for granted.

Throughout the 2000s, the action genre became a game of one-upmanship with Tom Cruise and Vin Diesel competing to do bigger, crazier stunts in their movies. Michael Bay was the epitome of that style of action; he’s even its namesake: “Bayhem.” Bayhem is loud, explosive, hyperstylized, rapid-cutting action cinema that glorifies violence and makes it look cool (and, admittedly, it’s a lot of fun, even if it can feel like sensory overload).

But that’s not the only way to direct action. On the other end of the spectrum, a quieter, more stripped-back, minimalist, bare-bones approach can be just as effective in a totally different way. I’m talking about directors like S. Craig Zahler, the modern-day pulp virtuoso behind Brawl in Cell Block 99 and Dragged Across Concrete, and perhaps the most underrated action director working today, Bill Hader. Yes, that Bill Hader.

Hader made his name as one of the best cast members in Saturday Night Live’s history, but since he left SNL, he’s wasted no time showing off the rest of his talents. He does an impeccable Alan Alda impression, but he also has the twisted mind of a Coen brother. In his HBO series Barry, Hader has not only shown off impressive range in front of the camera, but also a Lynchian vision behind it.

Across the show’s four seasons, Hader did a lot of interesting things from the director’s chair. He came up with a lot of unforgettable shots, he made a lot of unnerving editing choices, and he pioneered a whole new way to direct action.

Bill Hader’s Action Scenes In HBO’s Barry Are The Opposite Of “Bayhem”

When Barry started airing on HBO, we were inundated with hitman stories. The John Wick franchise was hitting its stride, and all of its copycats were flooding our multiplexes and streaming services. But Barry couldn’t have been further from John Wick; it’s the anti-John Wick. Where John Wick is a stylish action extravaganza about a badass slaughtering dozens of people, Barry is a harrowing psychological study of the mental toll of taking so many human lives.

Barry upended the usual hitman formula, with an assassin character who desperately wants to get out of being an assassin to pursue a career as an actor. Hader and his writers used that quirky high-concept premise as a springboard to explore lofty ideas of identity and self-worth and whether people can really change. Visually and stylistically, it was a sobering deconstruction of the hitman thriller, showing how unglamorous the life of a contract killer would really be.

To reflect that, Hader came up with a brand-new style of action filmmaking, and it’s the polar opposite of Bayhem. Whereas Bay’s camera is constantly on the move, swooping around the action, Hader often shoots his action in plain, locked-off shots. Whereas Bay’s cinematography is lit and color-graded like a Skittles sugar-rush, Hader’s cinematography is very drab and unflashy. Hader’s action uses intense realism and injury detail to highlight the true horror and inhumanity of violence.

Barry Subverted The Entire Action Genre

Barry didn’t just subvert the hitman genre; it subverted the entire action genre as a whole. Action cinema subsists on the thrill of danger and bloodshed; it romanticizes life-threatening situations and glorifies the “good guys” doing harm to the “bad guys.” But Barry completely deromanticizes the violence of action cinema; it’s debilitatingly anxious in the face of danger, and it shines a harsh light on any bloodshed.

Whether it’s a hand-to-hand fight or a shootout or a motorcycle chase, the show always presents these action movie scenarios in the most realistic way possible, with people genuinely fearing for their lives and explosions doing real damage, which brings a disturbing edge to familiar action tropes. We’ve seen plenty of movies and TV shows where a grenade goes off in the midst of a firefight, but we’ve never seen the horrific aftermath where everyone’s confused and some people have lost their hearing and one guy is nudging his dead friend to wake up.

Zahler feels like a good comp, because his action scenes are so gnarly and gruesome and relentless that they border on horror. Barry’s gun battles and fights to the death feel so harrowingly real, buried in the mundanity of everyday life, that they’re more terrifying than exciting.

Barry’s Final Episode Brought Its Deconstruction Of Action Cinema Full Circle

Barry ended its run in 2023 with a fitting finale that tied up all the loose ends and concluded the story in a way that was both surprising and apt. That’s a tough balance to pull off — creating plot turns that are both completely unpredictable and also feel like they were meant to be — but Barry’s writers were always great at that. The final episode brought all the characters’ arcs full circle, but it also brought the show’s deconstruction of action cinema full circle. Following its biggest twist, Barry’s final episode jumps forward in time to show where Sally and John, the son she shares with Barry, would end up.

John doesn’t remember much about his dad, and his mother doesn’t want to tell him the horrible truth, but luckily for him, there’s a movie about his dad that apparently holds all the answers. The movie in question, The Mask Collector, is an absurd Hollywood-ization of the story, with all the nuance squeezed out. This in-universe Barry biopic is the kind of by-the-numbers action thriller that Barry itself sought to subvert. It relies on clichés, it glosses over all the complexity, and it turns violence into a spectacle. It brought the series back around to the biting Hollywood satire that defined its early episodes.