The author seems ambivalent about the dwindling place of the villain in Hollywoodian cinema. I’m quite happy about it to be honest. Like it’s said in the article, the way villains were depicted was often quite xenophobic. On top of it it’s just such a lazy device especially when there’s just no backstory to justify the villain’s resentment. It makes the whole thing awfully predictable. I’d take a good old McGuffin over a villain any day.
Totally agreed. I’m Ukrainian and nothing gets me as heated watching any movie as Russian villains (almost always played by non-Russian-speaking actors). Hollywood looooves movie villains that reflect the government’s Big Bad Wolves and it’s just disgusting to me. Beyond the obvious facts that xenophobia is bad and using the film industry to stoke the fires of the US’s international feuds is bad, it just fucking hurts the way it feels like people put on costumes to approximate my dad’s appearance and voice because it’s the most basic shorthand for “evil” they can think of.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
And after that, Ridley’s Scott’s Napoleon promises to be a bloody battlefield epic in the vain of Braveheart and Gladiator, except this one examines its warlord not through his sworn enemies but via his explosive romance with Vanessa Kirby’s Empress Josephine.
Whereas four decades ago Rocky Balboa was sent out to fight Ivan Drago – a straightforward stand-in for dead-eyed Soviet power – these days his protege Adonis Creed finds himself in the ring with his old school friend, both men forced to confront their own repressed emotions in the process.
Part of it too is down to simple economics: with mid-budget films having been all but squeezed out of existence, and the threshold for box-office success now absurdly high, global takings have become pivotal to whether a movie sinks or swims.
So it’s yippee ki-yay not just for Gruber’s brand of erudite European mastermind, but also the unhinged Arab terrorist (True Lies, London Has Fallen), the icy Russian psychopath (Air Force One, GoldenEye) and the crazed Latino gangbanger (Falling Down, End of Watch).
Back in the day, it was standard practice for the bad guy to set out his stall with the theatrical murder of a civilian, before getting to the real sadism a bit later on: for Heath Ledger’s Joker this meant impaling a rival henchman with a pencil; Die Hard 2’s racketeer preferred to plough a jumbo jet full of passengers into the ground.
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