Movies are all about people’s fantasies. In a guy flick, that fantasy is lived out by men who embody the characteristics we wish we had. Bad-asses, smart-asses, and dumb-asses—they all inhabit the ideal male world. A world where we’re dangerous, mysterious, hard-edged, and without a care for life’s trivialities.
So go see Runaway Bride by yourself, ladies. We have no need for Richard “look how tight my ass is” Gere making googly-eyes at Julia Roberts. We’re staying home, drinking cheap beer, and watching men be men. The following is a list of essential guy flicks. Some are movies no man can flip past TNT without stopping on, but they’re all movies every guy should see.
National Lampoon's Animal House
“My advice to you is to start drinking...heavily.”
“Better listen to him, Flounder. He’s pre-med.”
This is what every guy pretends his college days were like, regardless if he was in a fraternity or not. The key to Animal House is that every guy knows an Otter, a Boon, a Flounder, and a Bluto Blutarsky. The difference is that in real life, Bluto is just a raging alcoholic whose friends think he’s funny.
The Big Red One
“It’s just one of your balls, Smitty. You can live without it. That’s why they gave you two.”
Lee Marvin could kick the living crap out of Tom Hanks. Saving Private Ryan may tell us how scary it really was on the battlefield, but The Big Red One is how we like to remember it. Lee Marvin is the tough-as-nails sergeant who leads his young troops across Africa and forces them to become men whether they like it or not. Based on Samuel Fuller’s real war experiences, the movie doesn’t glorify or lament war; it just presents it as something men did when the time came, whether they liked it or not.
Enter the Dragon
“My style, you can call the art of fighting without fighting.”
Tony Manero didn’t have a poster of Bruce Lee on his wall in Saturday Night Fever for nothing. Bruce Lee was the fighting bad-ass every guy wishes he could be. The end sequence where Lee and two other guys manage to defeat several hundred foes coming at them at once is delightfully absurd.
The Outlaw Josey Wales
“You a bounty hunter?”
“A man has to do something to earn a living these days.”
“Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’, boy.”
Of course, the entire Eastwood oeuvre demands attention from any guy-flick completist, especially Sergio Leone’s ’60s spaghetti Westerns. But I vote for Josey Wales because the character combines the calculated cool of The Man With No Name with a background befitting Eastwood’s best protagonists. The character’s wife has died either by natural causes or murder, and dammit, someone’s going to pay. It’s sort of like a cinematic Willie Nelson album. Clint’s characters are every guy’s romantic notion of being a hard-ass with a haunted past no one knows.
The Road Warrior
“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll drive that tanker.”
In a post-apocalyptic wasteland where cars dominate and gasoline is treated like money, only Mad Max can protect a small community with an oil refinery from a mad mutant biker gang. A loner with the requisite murdered wife on his conscience, Max of course wears leather in the chilly Australian outback desert. The ending is a demolition derby fulfilling every man’s automotive wet dreams.
The Last Detail
“I am the motherfucking shore patrol, motherfucker! Give this man a beer.”
“I don’t want a beer.”
“You’re gonna have a fuckin’ beer!”
Jack Nicholson and Otis Young are gutter-mouthed Navy sailors who take stockade-bound Randy Quaid on a journey to manhood fraught with alcohol, barroom brawls, and prostitutes. Every guy wishes his coming of age were as nasty and fun as this.
First Blood
“You don’t seem to accept who you’re dealing with. A man who is an expert—with guns, with knives, with his bare hands. A man who’s trained to ignore pain. To live off the land and eat things that would make a billygoat puke.”
Vietnam vet John J. Rambo gets harassed by small-town authorities, so in return he burns their town to the ground. What every guy thinks about after a meeting with his boss.
The Godfather
“Leave the gun. Take the cannolis.”
Francis Ford Coppola’s gangster epic is the male bible. Every phrase uttered in the movie consists of words we wished we actually lived by. The themes of loyalty and a code of honor at any price are as antiquated and as dear to the male heart as possible. And the Corleone brothers are representative of every group of male siblings you’ve ever seen: the smart one, the hotheaded one, the dull-witted one, and the meek one.
Fletch
“Isn’t there a children’s book about an elephant named Babar?”
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t have any.”
“Children?”
“No, elephant books.”
Probably the most oft-quoted guy flick of all time, in which jackass supreme Chevy Chase uses obscure false identities like Ted Nugent and John Cock...tos...tone to get to the bottom of a drug smuggling operation. Fletch represents every man’s desire to be a quick-witted smart-ass who doesn’t have to go home and think for a few hours before he comes up with a snappy comeback. He also lives every man’s fantasy: to charm women not by being jaw-droppingly handsome, but by being a goofy bullshit artist.
The Wild Bunch
“I’d like to make one good score and back off.”
“Back off to what?!”
A movie that epitomizes the ultimate guy flick, directed by Sam Peckinpah, a true man’s man. The group of lifers at the center of the film start off with a brutal bank robbery, proceed to go on the lam, drink tequila morning, noon, and night, sleep with Mexican whores, and end the movie avenging their friend’s death by dying in a shoot-out so bloody the MPAA almost gave the film an X rating. And for the guy flick crown clincher: Even Ernest Borgnine gets laid.
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