The Action Hero's Handbook

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:

 * Secure/Spyproof a Hotel Room
 * Secure and Read a Crime Scene
 * Take Fingerprints
 * Track a Fugitive
 * Interrogate A Suspect
 * Survive in Prison When You're Wrongly Incarcerated
 * Catch a Great White Shark
 * Tell When Someone Is Really Dead
 * Save Someone Who Has Flat-Lined
 * Drive a Bus at High Speed
 * Negotiate a Hostage Crisis
 * Take a Bullet
 * Save Someone from Being Hit by a Speeding Car
 * Save Someone Who's Hanging from a Cliff
 * Stop a Wedding
 * Dirty Dance
 * Make and Use a Love Potion
 * Pick Someone Up in a Bar
 * Turn Sexual Tension into Mad, Passionate Sex
 * Communicate with an Extraterrestrial
 * Contact the Dead
 * Fend Off a Ghost
 * Predict the Future
 * Perform the Jedi Mind Trick
 * Perform the Vulcan Nerve Pinch
 * Train for a World Championship Title Fight
 * Take a Hit with a Chair
 * Draw and Win a Gunfight
 * Be Ready for Anything
 * Win a Fight When You're Outnumbered
 * Disarm a Thug with a Gun
 * Evade a MiG
 * Fix Your Space Shuttle on Reentry
 * Make a Clean Getaway
 * Win a High-Speed Car Chase
 * Win a High-Speed Chase on Foot
 * Catch Someone in the Air When You Don't Have a Parachute
 * Crash Through a Window
 * Escape From Handcuffs
 * Navigate a Ventilation Shaft
 * Escape a Sinking Cruise Ship
 * Climb Down Mount Rushmore


 * 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.