Fountain of Knowledge

After many weeks of letting that pesky 'real life' thing get in the way, I'm bringing back the weekly genre discussions. We've already been through a huge list, but there's always more to talk about. So I'm going through the list of writing.com genres and picking some of those that look like good fodder discussion material.

This week, Action & Adventure. To me, on the surface that's a pretty straight-forward concept. I love action movies. I will overlook plot for well choreographed fight scenes, pretty graphics, and other stunning visuals (think Speed, The Transporter, The Matrix, etc).

Problem is, stunning visuals don't translate the same to writing. So the direction I thought we'd take this is - is it possible to write great action & adventure? How do you achieve those aspects that make movies in this genre compelling? Or does it take something different to make the written versions stand on their own?

And do you have any favorite action/adventure authors? Who writes the genre well?