6 Great Action Heroes (Who Should Be Convicted of Murder)
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There's a reason action movies don't zoom in on the awesome explosions close enough to see the dozens of innocent burn victims in the vicinity. Nobody wants to get dragged down by the plight of these nobodies. But still, some action heroes take the collateral damage (and lack of concern for it) to a level that blurs the line between hero and villain, and probably wouldn't have looked so good in a court of law. #6.
Neo from The Matrix
If you ask any Matrix fan about their favorite part of the film, their answer will invariably involve Keanu Reeves's breathtaking performance as Neo. From the inspiring "I know kung fu" speech to his tender and heartfelt "whoa" monologue, his brilliant and multifaceted portrayal made Neo a compelling symbol of humanity at its best, alive and vibrant in a world dominated by oppressive machines. Also, it was totally awesome when he killed all those guys in slow-motion. So What's the Problem?
Wachowski brothers fans have noted the deliberate parallels between the messianic Neo and the Biblical story of the moneychangers in the temple, in which Christ pulled out a Beretta and killed about 50 security guards. The thing is, it's explained early in the movie that there are bad guys who are entirely computer-generated (the "Agents") and then there are regular people who, when they get shot in the Matrix, die in real life. And those security guards were the latter. Yet, for some reason it's played so that Neo is totally free from any guilt over killing a bunch of people, instead of just generating a helicopter and grabbing Morpheus from the top floor. You know, like they wind up doing anyway.
Or, if that wasn't an option, instead of walking in with machine guns, show up with canisters of gas that would render everyone unconscious. Sure it wouldn't have looked nearly as awesome as the guns, but at least it wouldn't have felt as wasteful (of both human life and ammo). So at the end of the day the lesson is apparently that it doesn't matter how many civilians you kill as long as you make sure that you look as cool as possible while doing it. Of course, there's also the rationale that Neo was fighting for the greater good of freeing humanity from the Matrix. And thanks to the sacrifice he forced those security guards to make, their families could now be free to starve in a filthy underground city while being relentlessly pursued by killer robots. #5.
The Fantastic Four from Fantastic Four
They're superheroes, they're in a summer action movie, it's sort of assumed we in the audience are going to be on their side. It helps that Jessica Alba is on that side too. So What's the Problem? Literally every single problem in this entire movie can be traced directly to the Fantastic Four's general incompetence. Don't believe us? Just take the scene when the Thing, in a bold act of heroism, saves a man from being hit by a car by causing a massive car accident that almost certainly killed the driver, and killed him in a way that his widow will never be able to adequately explain.
It gets better. In order to distract the crowd that has gathered at the accident site, the Four decide to spark a huge explosion. Amazingly, this well thought-out plan turns out catastrophically and the resulting blast nearly kills everyone on the bridge.
There's probably a deleted scene in which Mr. Fantastic attempts to pull a kitten out of a tree and winds up causing a nuclear meltdown. You know, you never see Batman doing stuff like this, and he doesn't even have three superpowered teammates to pitch in. And at least when the Hulk damages property, he's doing it on purpose. When the Fantastic Four finally confront their nemesis Doctor Doom for the heroic cause of saving their own asses, the only reason they prevail is that these heroic underdogs outnumber the villain 4-1. The Fantastic Four do learn their lesson though, and in the sequel they basically step back and let the Silver Surfer save the world for them, probably saving countless innocent lives in the process, though not as many as they'd have saved if they'd just stayed home from the beginning.
#4.
Ellen Ripley from Alien Resurrection
By the time of Alien Resurrection's release, Ellen Ripley was already one of the most beloved characters in science fiction history, following an epic arc from an escape from the first vicious alien, to her fierce battle with an alien army and their queen, all the way to her final confrontation with a single alien puppy. So What's the Problem?
Of course, they manage to kill the main alien by blasting it into the vacuum of space (didn't see that coming did you?) which means that they basically blew up who knows how many people on the ground for no reason at all, other than maybe to justify a special effects budget.
Joss Whedon's script doesn't exactly help make Ripley more sympathetic. While excessively clever dialog might be tolerable coming from the teenagers on Buffy, glib one-liners probably aren't the best way to inform someone that they have been infected with a horrific parasite that will soon burrow its way out of their chest, killing them in the most agonizing way possible. |
So when Neo's mentor Morpheus gets captured by the bad guys, Neo responds by arming himself with an arsenal larger than that of most developing nations, slaughtering a cluster of security guards before they can even draw their guns, before dropping a bomb on the ground floor of the building just in case there were a few errant cockroaches that weren't killed in the earlier carnage.
In a revolutionary new direction for the alien series, in part four Ripley and her unruly crew of extras are trapped in outer space with a swarm of aliens. When confronted with the problem of how to destroy them, our heroes carefully consider their options and decide that the best course of action would be to crash the ship into earth. After all, if you have to die, you might as well take out as many innocent bystanders as possible. 
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f****n bullshit... V was opening the land of do as you please, the whole point is that people should be free to be themselves however they so choose, he was a gay activist, that's the position that V is coming from... so his point is that society, however it is incarnated is repressive cuz most people are homophobe dicks (unfortunately myself included). The resulting aftermath is a fair point, but the hope if like Laclau and Moufe is a radical direct decentralized democracy where people are engaged -- that was the point of the riot to get people engaged. Tha failure of democracy -- especially in the US is the failure of civic engagement. The government is corrupt that is V's point, but people, engaged in civic society will define a society that isn't f****n stupid. The greatest lie that we believes is religion... but the second one is that government is necessary to keeping us from doing horrible s**t to each other. think for a second... I'll wait... ... ... ... do you really hate other people so much that you want to kill them? and if you do, have you ever killed something? do you know what it feels like to be involved in the ending of another beings existence? The government enslaves you!!! we can do better ourselves, I am not a comunist, I like democracy, I just think that the people should actually be in charge of whats going on...
WAR SAVES NO ONE f**k THE USA!!!!
The fantastic 4 were not tring to distract anyone and didn't spark the explosion on purpose to do so.
"What cannot be explained is how V, when it comes time to convert a young girl to his way of thinking, kidnaps and tortures her to make his point. For the greater good, of course."
He took her fear. Made a warrior. One that could easily stare down a gun and simply say 'no' and pull a lever.
I can't agree with #4. Not cos I'm a douche or anything, it's just that it's factually incorrect. The very final scene shows that Ripley and Co have crash-landed in Paris, but a Paris which looks like its been ravaged by nuclear war way long before the Betty crashed. So there really wouldn't appear to be anyone left to kill.
Other than that, great article!
I'm a die-hard Bond fan and just to let you know # 3 is incorrect. If you've seen any Bond movie you should know that Bond's a OO-agent. i.e. He has a license to kill. In that manner he won't go to prison for killing innocents. Besides the Embassy which Bond stormed into, apparently the owner was supposedly a guy employed by the bad guys who was a man-on-the-inside. You really need to see the movie again.
callofduty:
I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one bothered by the complete wrongitude of the Casino Royale section.
Looks like Ripley's fixin'to get bizee with the Alien!!
You got the Casino Royale bits all wrong...
"Bond storms in, fires on a group of foreign soldiers"
He didn't fire on the soldiers at all.
"Kills the guy he was ordered to capture alive"
He was a bomb-maker (The terrorist and villain as you put it), if Bond left him alive, he would have no doubt blown countless things up, killing a heap of innocent people in the process.
"He then shoots one of the stray gas canisters that the embassy just happened to have lying around, sparking an explosion two feet away from some poor soldiers."
You might have noticed everyone survived that.
"While Bond rams into them, knocking one off of a tall girder, presumably to his death."
Go watch the scene again, that was the bomb-maker. Not Bond. The bomb-maker even shoots two people, unlike Bond who doesn't actually kill anyone in the scene. In fact, I can't recall Bond actually killing an innocent person in the whole movie.
Since you've got that all horribly wrong, I've got to assume that every other evaluation of each of those characters is incorrect too.
Shut the f**k up, JoeMama.
No one is "Ruining" these movies by writing a satirical and facetious article about them.
Quit being so damn melodramatic.
You forgot about the freeway scene on Bad Boys 2. They killed at least like 20-30 people there.
Ahem. Uh, asskicker? It has nothing to do with the article, and that's the point. It's called spam. Welcome to the internet.
check out my look at 6 awesome movies ruined by a douche named rick
furlover, what the f**k does that have to do with this articule?
The writer of this article needs to go watch that scene in Casino Royale again, because it is in fact the exact opposite of how he describes it. The terrorist that Bond is chasing is the one who causes the explosion, by kicking a dude in the face and knocking him off the girder.
they had to move the All Spark out of the military base (hoover dam) because the idiots put Megatron in the same base... and when Megatron started to defrost they had to move the All Spark so he couldn't get it. Plus they're robots... I'm sure even though they claim to be there to save the world, a few people getting killed by a soda machine really wasn't a big deal.
i f*****g love The Matrix movies and V For Vendetta.. xD
...and in the matrix, it doesn't really matter how much ammo Neo wastes because none of it really exists anyway. that's basically the matrix movies' excuse for everything: it's in the matrix, so it isn't real, so the impossible/crazy thing that just happened actually can happen/makes sense.
(madamadam, the woman in the red dress scene is a completely fake matrix that they control. they can't control the real matrix, so they can't really freeze agents.)
ripley did take a portion of the planet but is specified prior to the crash landing that it is an unihabitated section of the planet by the ships computer and Ripley and Call
The one about V was pretty s**t. Why the f**k was it number one when he killed a handful of people and Ripley took out a chunk of the f*****g planet? bravo Rick.
Naw, man. Watch the movie again. It's the parkour guy that's kicking people off of buildings. He even shoots a couple of construction workers. Bond's not even on the building yet when the guy gets kicked off.
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Wow, nothing on this site cranks up the nerd rage more than daring to question their favorite movie. I love most of these movies and I still find everything mentioned completely hilarious.