Anti-Heroes in Hollywood Movies

I don’t watch Bill Maher much but, to his credit, he has spoken out for many years against violence in movies – for which he takes heat from woke fans.  Maher links violence in movies to school shootings and cites these four stressors on the young culprits. 

• mental health
• easy access to guns
• smartphones for kids to watch more news
• violence in movies

Maher uses the current buzzwords when talking about uber-corporations that are so politically correct that they reinforce pronoun use and “don’t say gay”. But the corporations don’t call for an end to the depiction of violence in Hollywood movies.

We mustn’t  “platform bad things,” Maher says, but the formula of action movies is the anti-hero acting on a grudge. And the genre is everywhere.

• Keanu Reeves – John Wick
• Tom Cruise – Jack Reacher
• Ryan Reynolds – Six Underground
• Ryan Gosling – The Gray Man

The formula was refined after the success of the Jason Bourne series with Matt Damon and others.  The plot is always the same. An orphaned kid in trouble with the law is recruited by an agent of the USA government to join an elite force. After a time of service, though, he sees through the veils and becomes a threat to bosses, so he must be eliminated. With skills he learned from them, the anti-hero evades the ever-present cameras and secures the evidence of wrong-doing while killing paid assassins, and some innocents, along the way. When the smoke clears, our hero has saved a pre-teen girl, so he’s good.

I have several gripes with this refined action movie genre.

• The hero is never seriously hurt. Acting as John Wick in some scenes, Keanu Reeves doesn’t even get blood spatter on his business suit.

• The hero is super-rich and can afford all the munitions he expends. This element is so impossible.  When a person gets rich, after he has killed the roster of his personal enemies, the passion for vengeance fades and the hero starts to get fat, sending out a surrogate for the wet work. But no, our hero becomes an uber-avenger who takes on the next challenge, and the one after that.

• The trained assassins all know each other, having come up through similar channels of military or corporate security training. A loosely formed guild so they call each other by first name upon greeting. This is movie shorthand so intrusive backstories are not needed.

• The equipment always works. The command center that tracks the anti-hero for a street chase is integrated and never dumps when wifi is down. 

• The bad guy is always from the parent organization. This element is so formula that I know who much die before the end of the first reel. Here’s a flaw – if the equipment sees everything, then how does the bad guy hide his nefarious acts?  Duh.

This action movie genre is refined from older versions, but at least the anti-hero in those movies from decades past could bleed and get it wrong sometimes.  Mel Gibson played a suicidal cop, or a maimed road warrior, or a Scottish folk hero who was drawn and quartered.

Kevin Costner played bumbling fools and dropped his gun more than anybody.

Even Bruce Willis and John Malkovich, playing broad roles for laughs, were snookered by false information in the Red movies. But this new round of violent anti-heroes includes none of that broad humor, and precise little character humor.

I recently saw Ryan Gosling in The Gray Man that follows the action movie formula exactly. The organization is after him as a threat to the people who trained him, so they hire a group of even meaner bad guys to eliminate him, led by Chris Evans. And Gosling saves a pre-teen girl along the way, so he’s good.

The producers knew they had a winner with Gosling’s too-cool-to-sweat demeanor, and they used the don’t-betray-me eyes behind the still face in the frozen stills for the movie credits.

I never like Gosling in softer roles like La-la Land where his reserve feels passive, but in The Gray Man the same mannerisms read as restraint while even-badder-guys betrayed each other. And at least his character can be wounded.

Back to Bill Maher. One stressor he mentioned was smartphones for kids, so they can watch the news and takes sides on socially sanctioned issues. One real-life shooter – who can remember which event? – cited the end of Roe v Wade as his reason to shoot up the kids. Really? Hollywood movies banned smoking for heroes so kids don’t take up smoking, but movies (and now the news) have no impact on behavior?

The complexion of school shooters is changing.  The level and reasons for street violence in the USA are changing. Fewer mentally ill lonely teen boys, and more older, ethnic, and gender-confused shooters who spout some garbled rhetoric about being victims of capitalism.

Here’s a thought… the woke culture claims that new arrivals crossing our borders at the rate of half a million a month are only seeking the American Dream. The violence they bring with them is because of the cartels and the desperate need in the Latin countries under socialism. 

The workers crossing our borders are fed a steady diet of violent Hollywood movies, same as us. They have little education and no courses in civic duty. They are rootless and without families, in trouble with the law. Maybe street thugs excuse the violence as acting out the American Dream, more following Jack Reacher than Maverick Mitchell for how to get ahead in the USA.