Boring Action

Yesterday I was looking at reviews on youtube of the last Resident Evil movie that just came out. And while different reviewers had different degrees of leniency on the movie’s below average quality, everyone was unanimous in that the action in it was a ton, and boring.

So let’s talk about action- it’s supposed to be the most exciting part of a movie, a webcomic, a book. When it becomes boring out of all things, things don’t bode well for the story.
What makes it boring, though?

From the things the reviewers said, here’s a first short list:

- You don’t yet care enough for the characters involved in the action to worry about them
- If the action is introductory you don't get to understand what's happening enough to care
- The action is badly choreographed or ‘cut’ in a way that the audience can’t understand what is going on
- The action is too much too soon, and back to back

To me, all of these issues spell one thing:

The action is boring when it fails to engage the audience in the stakes of the story and/or confuses them or throws them out of the story.

The action is itself part of the storytelling process.

Just like in a musical, the songs are boring if they don’t forward the story in a meaningful and important way or don’t embellish it in some manner (such as learning about the characters, or some such thing), like so in an action movie or webcomic the action will be boring if it doesn’t do the same.

So what about you? How do you use action in your webcomics, if at all? Have you ever found people disengaged by action in a movie or a comic?