Craig Baxley

On an Unsung Legend's 3-Film Miracle Run

When you think of action in the 80s and early 90s, those halcyon days fronted by impossible-looking lunkheads and wild stunts, a few filmmakers likely come to mind: John McTiernan, James Cameron, John Woo, and maybe Renny Harlin. With work like The Terminator or Hard Boiled or Predator, their contributions are inarguable. There’s one name that should be counted amongst those greats, however. A name that has ties to McTiernan and fellow heavyweight Walter Hill. A name that gifted the world three action face-melters starring supposed “B-Listers” that rank alongside any of Arnie and Sly’s best. That name is Craig Baxley. 

Baxley didn’t make his directorial debut (1988’s Action Jackson) until well into action’s golden age, but by then, he was already well-established as the kind of steady hand you’d want on set. As a stuntman and coordinator, Baxley’s name appears all over 70s television staples like Dukes of Hazzard, M*A*S*H, and Police Story. From there, he graduated to the big screen, primarily working as a coordinator for Walter Hill. It isn’t until he hooks up with McTiernan on Predator that you begin to realize there’s something special happening with Craig Baxley. 

As a second unit director, Baxley helped deliver for whatmy money (and, according to current action legend Scott Adkins via the Action for Everyone podcast) might be the best pure action ever put to film. With relentless gun fights, wild explosions, and a fantastic fight between Arnold and the Predator, Predator looks and moves like a beast. It’s about as perfect a calling card as one could hope for if they wanted to make the jump to directing something of their own. 

Action Jackson is the first in a three-picture run where Baxley, fully formed and polished as hell, takes a guy primarily considered to be right below the A-list and hammers out something special. Starring Carl Weathers, Action Jackson moves like a typical cop thriller but Baxley quickly establishes himself as a primo proprietor of mayhem. Plot, such as it is, is thin. Weathers’ cop, the terrifically named Sgt. Jericho Jackson is dead set on taking down evil auto magnate Peter Dellaplane (Craig T. Nelson). No one’s really here for that, though, are they? It’s all about atmosphere and carnage, and that’s something Baxley gets down to his marrow. Jackson belts out screamers like “HOW YA LIKE YOUR RIBS???” before torching someone with a flamethrower. Weathers is in peak physical shape, and boy, does the camera love him. Vanity, maybe the most beautiful person in the world at the time, shows up if the screen wasn’t already melting. It’s a collection of gorgeous madness, full of personality and sexuality. It's the kind of stuff that feels depressingly distant in modern action. 

Amidst Weather’s glistening abs, killer jabs, and a mesmerizing early Sharon Stone performance, Baxley peppers in astonishing stunt work that you can’t believe he’s pulling off on a budget much lower than his contemporaries. Weathers throwing fools through windows and leaping onto cars would be exciting enough for most, but not for Baxley. Long before the Fast & Furious series was finding new ways to drive cars into and off of buildings, Baxley has Jackson drive his Pontiac Fiero into Dellaplane’s mansion, up the stairs, and into the bedroom. It’s a legitimate jaw-dropper of a sequence and a preview for the kind of stunts Baxley’s going to pull just a few years later. 

“Merry Christmas, mother fucker” is the opening line of Baxley’s Jackson follow-up Dark Angel (or I Come in Peace as it’s also known), and right away, you know you’re in for another joy. Perhaps the weakest of the Baxley trio but no less kinetic, Dark Angel follows Dolph Lundgren’s Det. Jack Caine as he investigates a gang of drug dealers. Paired with Special Agent Smith (funny man of the moment Brian Benben), Caine goes undercover into Houston’s underbelly. Unbeknownst to him, he’s just entered into a parallel cops and criminal chase of the intergalactic variety between two aliens. Talec, a criminal from another world, is racking up bodies while being pursued by a cop, Azeck, from his home world. It’s only inevitable that Dolph and Talec find themselves on a collision course. 

It’s all very silly and frightening similarities with Predator 2, also released in 1990, aside Dark Angel is my favorite kind of genre mashup. Taking a by-the-numbers cop thriller and tossing in aliens who kill using CDs so they can extract a chemical to use as a drug in their home world? Yeah. It’s wild stuff, but where Baxley works, his magic isn’t so much in the action (though it’s typically brilliant) but in how he manages to coalesce all the threads into something that makes sense. None of this should work, but like Action Jackson, it looks fantastic and has a real lived-in quality to how people speak to one another. His biggest feat, though? Letting Dolph be funny. 

Dolph Lundgren is a freak of nature. The most gorgeous of his contemporaries with the brain of a genius and a body cut from marble, he’s a dream. Dark Angel exists as a bit of an unsung turning point for him, though, because prior to it, he wasn’t really allowed to show his lighter side. Dropping one-liners (including maybe the finest send-off of all time) like it’s nothing and cracking that killer smile, Dolph is having the time of life as Caine. Baxley’s leads are often guys who probably weren’t marketable enough to lead a major production, but he always got the kind of performances out of them that probably should’ve changed that. We know Carl Weathers has charm for days, but in 1990, Dolph had only primarily been a broody heavy, give or take. He’s great at that, sure, but god bless Baxley for seeing more in him. Without Dark Angel perhaps we don’t get Dolph cracking jokes with Brandon Lee in Showdown in Little Tokyo or chewing scenery in Universal Soldier. 

Binding Baxley’s miracle run together is his centering of a hulking, gorgeous brute with a bit of soft, erudite side, living in the nicest apartment you’ve ever seen. No one embodies that better than Brian Bosworth as Joe Huff. And no film embodies the Craig Baxley ethos better than Stone Cold. Brian Bosworth was molded out of clay to play a Baxley lead. As Joe Huff, he lumbers through a burnt-out Mississippi, blonde mullet flowing and earring dangling. He’s a meathead work of art astride his chopper, boring a hole into your soul behind tiny sunglasses.

In Baxley’s Mississippi, white supremacist bikers rule the streets like a backwater Mad Max gang, and only Huff (undercover as John Stone) can stop them. Led by a cool-as-ice Lance Henriksen and a psychotic Bill Forsythe, the gang has been killing government agents. Their endgame is to storm the state capital building, spring one of their brothers on trial, and murder the DA and state Supreme Court justices. In 1991, Craig Baxley predicted the Capitol Riot. He may have just overshot how exciting something like that would actually look. 

After making $5 million look triple that in his previous films, Baxley was given big boy money ($25 mil) with a star-in-the-making to do anything his unhinged mind wanted, and boy did he. Stone Cold is a revelation and as gorgeous as any of its contemporaries. Mississippi feels like a post-apocalyptic wasteland where leather-clad freaks reign supreme, and beach pit fights between mutant musclemen are an everyday occurrence. The costuming is out of this world, the fashions falling into a nebulous void somewhere between 1987 and 2087. It’s a nightmare, and it’s stunning. 

It also features the single greatest stunt I’ve ever seen put to film. You can keep your Tom Cruise scaling the Burj Khalifa arguments because as impressive as that is, it’s got all the resources in the world to make it as safe as possible. That’s never to say Baxley wasn’t safe; the man plied his trade as a stuntman for decades. By 1991, he was as solid and safe as it got. Still, the climax of the film is punctuated by a motorcycle flying out of a capitol building window and exploding into a levitating helicopter in mid-air. It’s astonishing, and it feels like every stunt, explosion, gunfight, and car chase Baxley ever had a hand in was leading to it. Not only is it a perfect punctuation to the wild gamble that is Stone Cold, but it’s a fitting period to Baxley’s action triptych. 

“Gamble” is the key word there because, in hindsight, having Baxley’s foray into the majors be a vehicle for a legendary NFL bust’s attempt at stardom feels remarkably silly. The film bombed, Bosworth never hit it big, and Craig Baxley never got anywhere near that kind of budget again. “Heartbreak” feels a little dramatic but to lose a guy like that’s talents to middling TV movies and Stephen King adaptations no one remembers feels wrong. The gut punch hits harder because Stone Cold is great! Its reputation as a good “bad” movie is short-selling a bonafide ripper. Baxley squeezed every dime out of that budget, and it absolutely shows. And Bosworth more than holds his own as a leading man. Stone Cold’s biggest misfortune, to me anyway, is coming the same year as James Cameron redefined the very nature of action cinema. So we remember Terminator 2 as the juggernaut it is, and Stone Cold is forever destined to be the hidden gem waiting under a pile of rubble, ready to blow someone’s mind.

Craig Baxley never got his due as one of the premiere guys of action cinema’s golden age, but his legacy is alive and well. If you scroll the certain pockets of Twitter long enough, you’ll stumble into a community of people singing the praises of DTV superstars like Scott Adkins or Daniel Bernhardt or Michael Jai White. Martial artists who never quite got the break they deserved as leading men but are quietly pumping out some of the wildest, cleanest action you’ll ever see. Pop in something like Avengement or Ninja II or Skylines, and after you’re finished having your mind blown, you’ll realize that Baxley’s touch never left. It exists in filmmakers like Jesse V. Johnson, Isaac Florentine, and Liam O’Donnell. Guys making genuine magic out of peanuts and minting stars out of people who were told they’d never make it. I certainly wish we’d gotten ten more Baxley Meathead Masterpieces, but that we got three as great as they are at all is a miracle. That they’ve inspired a new golden age of action hiding in DTV, waiting to be discovered, is even better. The cycle continues, and perhaps that’s all it ever needs to do. 

-Brandon Streussnig