The Action Hero's Handbook

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

The Action Hero's Handbook is a "Faux To" Guide giving tongue-in-cheek tips on how to live it up like your favorite big screen movies. As such, it Hangs a Lampshade on most action movie tropes.

This book covers how to:


This book also has examples of the following tropes:
  • Billions of Buttons - the picture of the Space Shuttle's controls
  • Don't Try This At Home - parodied: "The skills taught within this book are for action heroes only"
  • Epigraph - at the beginning of each article, using a quote relevant to the topic at hand from a famous movie
  • "Glad to Be Alive" Sex - Mentioned in the Slap Slap Kiss chapter.
  • Handy Cuffs - In the "How to Escape from Handcuffs" chapter, it advises you to manipulate events so that your hands are cuffed in front of you so you can break out of them easier, either via fast talking or by making sure your hands aren't so tightly cuffed behind you that you can't wriggle them through your legs.
  • Incredibly Obvious Bug - Discussed in the Spyproofing chapter: it warns that most bugs won't be of this variety, and if you do find one, don't stop looking.
  • Soft Glass - You are warned in the Window chapter that in Real Life you have to be very careful, or you'll be sliced to ribbons.
  • Starfish Aliens - The "communicating with ETs" chapter assumes the worst case scenario, but still holds out hope that even the weirdest aliens would be able to understand certain basic concepts (like numbers, shapes, etc.).
  • Troperiffic - As you can see above, each of the chapter headings alone could correspond to one or more tropes.