John Wick, Taken, The Equalizer. Too many to name. Saw a preview for The Amateur (2025) which is another one coming out soon. It seems like that’s the ONLY justification for killing they can come up with.

Like this is the logic here: “Okay we need an action movie with lots of henchmen to kill, what evil thing can that bad guy have done in the 1st act so our hero is justified in killing tons of henchmen?” So the bad guy does some overtly evil thing at the start of the movie (often unrealistically evil). Then killing people is the rest of the movie. Revenge happens. The end.

I enjoy action movies, but I keep seeing the same revenge-killing movies that feel like copies of each other.

  • supersquirrelEnglish
    249·
    1 day ago

    This is the only plot line that will get any oxygen from a fascist society that is losing its ability to tell stories about realistic villains because to make them realistic is to make them dangerously indistinguishable from real life CEOs, politicians and the ultrawealthy in general.

    What you are observing is the symptoms of a society on the verge of plunging into nihilism because the political center has agreed to take everything with substance off the table so as not to offend conservative snowflakes who mass murderers like the late Brian Thomson of United Healthcare hide behind while they condemn countless of us to death or lives of extreme suffering.

    A descent into authoritarianism only can happen after people have had their imaginations filled with villains who are even worse, which in practice always means reducing villains in storytelling to one dimensional agents of evil who desire to do evil because they are evil and ugly and that is just how it is.