Thanks for that, Jim

The Action Movie Star Character Name Believability Index

Action Movie Star Name Believability Index JCVD

Many things that seemed perfectly normal at the time in the action films of the 80's and 90's seem quite strange now. Watch a few classics featuring the muscular action stars from back in the day and your jaw will drop at regular intervals.

The treatment of women, awkward deployment of all types of slurs and gratuitous haircuts are all quite shocking by today's standards. However, the thing most likely to shatter your suspension of disbelief is that the imposing man with the thick Austrian accent is named Gordon Brewer, or that Belgian kickboxer is called Kurt Sloane.

There's probably a dissertation to be written on the reasons for Americanising the names of men who sound about as American as publicly funded healthcare. Is is it some kind of cultural colonisation? Is it because western audiences are a bit racist? Who knows?

The three stars of the era that I feel this applies to the most are the afore-mentioned Arnie, the muscles from Brussels Jean Claude Van Damme and the hulking Swedish chemical engineer Dolph Lundgren. Stallone mostly got cartoonish Italian American names (although Lincoln Hawk in Over The Top is a real standout) and although Jackie Chan was dubbed as Kevin in the Police Story films, I don't think that really counts.

For reasons that I can't quite explain, or even remember, I thought it would be interesting to discover which of these three action stars had the overall least believable character names, boiled down to a simple percentage, which I've named The Action Movie Star Character Name Believability Index.

It works like this:

  1. I got a list of all of the screen credits for each actor off wikipedia.
  2. I removed anything where they appeared as themselves or didn't have a clear character name (although it was tempting to leave 'Gay Karate Man' from JCVD's appearance in Monaco Forever in there).
  3. Each name was assigned a believability score from 1-10, with 1 being completely unbelievable and 10 being entirely credible. Where the character had multiple names or the actor was playing multiple characters, the score was averaged out
  4. The scores were averaged and expressed as an overall percentage (there is the full spreadsheet here if you want to check it out).

NOTE: I left the character Terminator in Arnie's list as it does seem vaguely credible that if he walked up and told you that was his name, you'd believe him.

The results of the first instance of The Action Movie Star Character Name Believability Index are:

JCVD is helped by repeatedly playing the Universal Soldier character Luc Deveraux and by having a regular smattering of gallic sounding names in amongst the Darren McCords and Ben Archers. The fact that JCVD is a pleasantly ridiculous screen presence also helps him carry off really mad names like Gibson Rickenbacker and Storm Rothschild.

Lundgren's average probably isn't helped by the insane amount of films he has appeared in - 82 of which qualified for this analysis - where he is mostly lumbered with names like Clint Grey and Jack Caine . But he did play the very Swedish sounding Gunner Jensen a bunch of times in the Expendables which, despite the non-traditional spelling, ups his score. He also makes a passable Russian, so Ivan Drago seems reasonable.

Schwarzenegger is easily the least believable, especially when you have gems like Howard Langston and Harry Tasker in there. The one time they tried to explain his accent away by nicknaming him 'Dutch' in Predator, it was immediately undermined by the revelation that this character's real name was actually Alan. He did play a few Russians early on, but you have to wait until 2013's Escape Plan where he played Emil Rottmayer, alter ego of Victor X. Mannheim for a solid 10/10 believable name.