What is the “Apolitical” Revenge Movie
In February of 2019, Liam Neeson was promoting the darkly comic revenge film Cold Pursuit when he told a now-infamous story of his response to a friend’s sexual assault. He described learning that the attacker was black, then proceeding to stalk the streets of Northern Ireland in the hopes of getting into a fight with a black man so he could “kill him” and channel his rage into a vicious catharsis. Neeson was attempting to link his actions, which in hindsight he called “horrible,” to his character’s lust for vengeance in the film, but the raw and shocking admission was met with a massive amount of outrage and controversy. It was rare to hear a massive celebrity openly admit a history of racism and violence, and it was especially jarring coming from a man who had spent the previous decade playing vengeful heroes in massive blockbusters. Cold Pursuit was marketed as an off-kilter and relatively lighthearted revenge story, which made Neeson’s comments feel like an out-of-place reminder of the underlying bigotry and instability that plays into revenge in the real world. Real “vigilantes” often have more in common with George Zimmerman than your standard Liam Neeson protagonist. Suddenly, art had been interrupted by life and a film that was supposed to be “fun” felt less appealing.
There was a time when vigilante movies were proud of their reactionary, nasty politics. In the '70s and '80s especially, these films featured “straight from the headlines” plot setups and leading men who were often gun-carrying conservatives themselves. There was no ignoring the social implications of the stories because the filmmakers shoved them in the audience’s face. As the years have progressed, different storytellers have attempted to update and deconstruct and recontextualize revenge movies, an evolution that has led us to the present day: the era of the “apolitical” revenge film. But what exactly does that mean, and how long can it last before the real world bursts the bubble of harmless escapism?
Keanu Reeves in John Wick
Earlier in the month, Netflix premiered the first trailer for its upcoming action-revenge film, Sweet Girl. Starring Jason Momoa, the movie will center around a grieving husband who seeks revenge against the pharma executives whose greedy business practices led to his wife’s death. At a glance, it looks like another generic but enjoyable attempt to bring Momoa’s outsized screen presence to a smaller-scale action movie than Aquaman, but the basic premise is politically charged in a way that is rare in the current action movie climate.
Based on the trailer alone, the movie takes the traditionally conservative plot of “rugged family-man fights to protect his family” and injects a healthy dose of anger towards corporate greed and unchecked capitalism. The grounded reason for Momoa’s vengeance might turn an otherwise boilerplate “they killed my wife” thriller into something that could potentially play after a Bernie Sanders speech (this is ignoring the trailer’s Guns N’ Roses needle drop). In truth, “drug prices being so high that everyday people needlessly die is a bad thing” might seem like nothing more than a nugget of common-sense populism, but it’s a noticeable departure in a subgenre that often falls back on right-wing “stand your ground” messaging.
The more I thought about the trailer, it began to strike me as odd that Sweet Girl would lead to this kind of analysis whereas so many other recent revenge films seem largely unconcerned with the current events. Vigilante stories have historically prompted discussions on gun control and race and a whole host of other hot-button issues. So why, during a politically explosive period in history and a new boom of action-revenge films, is this happening less and less?
The answer probably lies in the franchise most responsible for this revenge renaissance: John Wick. The immensely popular Keanu Reeves showcase series has been the gold standard for Hollywood action ever since the first film became a sleeper hit in 2014. With its irresistible “retired hitman seeks to avenge the murder of his puppy” logline, the movie brought Reeves back into the spotlight and updated the language of western action cinema more than any film since The Matrix (only the Paul Greengrass Bourne films are in competition).
Outside of its choreography and stunt work, John Wick also subtly modernized the age-old revenge subgenre with its premise. Instead of the tired “murdered wife” catalyst (which has fallen out of favor even more since the first Wick was released), the movie offers a different motivation: the killing of an innocent animal. While the film rightfully treats the poor puppy’s brutal death as an ultimate transgression and tragedy, there is paradoxically something more palatable about avenging a dog rather than a wife or girlfriend. Instead of setting up a stock love interest character only to have her killed at the end of the first act, the script’s use of the puppy avoids the built-in misogyny found in so many of John Wick’s predecessors. Furthermore, the villains being “sleazy, puppy-killing gangsters” takes us away from reality and into the realm of pure pulp.
Oh, and about those villains. The icy, cruel Russians that Reeves mows down by the dozen are integral to the film’s apolitical appeal. Russians were the go-to Hollywood bad guys from the '60s through the '80s, and screenwriters have had a hard time letting go even decades after the Iron Curtain fell. In a sense, the Hollywood ideal of the Russian gangster is the perfect blend between threatening and non-offensive.
For a while, Italian gangsters were the stock baddies, but after John Gotti’s arrest and the crime film boom of the '90s, using La Cosa Nostra as antagonists feels antiquated and tame. In recent years, movies like Rambo: Last Blood and the Jennifer Garner-vehicle Peppermint (as well as shows like Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy) have shifted to featuring Mexican drug cartels, often focusing on extreme torture methods and devotion to Santa Muerte. But in a time when anti-Mexican racism has led to discrimination and the forced separation of families, turning Latinx characters into the embodiment of pure evil seems exploitative and reactionary. Therefore, Eastern European criminals became the logical choice for countless action blockbusters and b-movies. They’re portrayed as scarier than the average Mafiosi, with icy indifference towards human trafficking and foreign symbols tattooed on their flesh, but they’re also white and far enough removed from mainstream American headlines to feel comfortable for audiences (when was the last time you heard about actual Russian gangsters?).
Still, what truly turned the John Wick series into a sensation was its gonzo, stunt-heavy action, in which Reeves is able to defeat hordes of nameless henchmen with headshot precision. It begins to feel like watching someone who’s really good at a videogame play it for you. By the third entry in the series, any real plot or pathos that could be mined from Wick’s journey had given way to endless, desensitizing carnage so expertly crafted that it didn’t matter. That the series hinged on the existence of a fraternity of urbane assassins who use ancient coins and luxury hotels only added to the unreality of the premise, as if to say to audiences: “none of this, the body count included, could actually happen.” As the story progresses, it can be easy to forget what prompted all the excitement in the first place. After all, the people responsible for his puppy’s death were all disposed of long ago. And what was that puppy’s name, anyway? Do you remember what it looked like?
It wasn’t always like this. In the godfather of the modern revenge film, Death Wish, the main character’s wife is given more or less the same level of dimension as Wick’s dog, but her death and the resulting killing spree felt far more connected to the world in which we live than Wick or any of its imitators. In fact, the goal of the early Death Wish films and the other vigilante power fantasies of the '70s and '80s seemed to be, in one word, “grittiness.” As opposed to the neon-lit hallways and glass penthouses of John Wick, Death Wish trafficked mainly in the damp, ugly streets of New York. Bronson never actually tracks down the men who assaulted his wife and daughter, instead funneling his hatred into an almost indifferent vigilante mission, killing any low-income mugger or drug dealer who crosses his path. It brings to mind a young Liam Neeson wandering around and hoping to pick a fight in order to feel a false sense of “justice.”
Death Wish is an explicitly political movie. Bronson (his name is Paul Kersey in the film, but that isn’t too important) begins the film as a liberal architect who believes in reformation as opposed to retribution. But when his privileged bubble is popped, he quickly becomes a trigger-happy dispenser of death. The movie doesn’t shy away from this inherently reactionary view of the world; in fact, it chooses to wallow in the nastiness and play it almost completely straight. If there is a satire or progressive commentary hidden underneath the exploding red squibs and gun fetishism, the movie does a good job at concealing it. This is a power fantasy, through and through, designed to serve as a piece of catharsis for audiences frustrated with urban crime and counterculture “gone too far.”
Transpose this kind of artistic statement into a 21st-century context, and the effect is very different. One has to look no further than the 2018 Death Wish reboot starring Bruce Willis, which swapped New York for Fox News’s favorite symbol for black-on-black crime, Chicago. Directed by shock-horror specialist Eli Roth, the remake is just as politically risky and exploitative as the original, with Willis donning a hoodie and gunning down black drug dealers in broad daylight. The film features scripted media segments in which radio hosts discuss the morality of Willis’s vigilante justice, suggesting that the usually self-aware Roth was aware of the cultural minefield he was stepping into. But no amount of self-awareness can wash away the icky taste of watching an aging Hollywood star play this role when the tragic real-world consequences of vigilante justice have been made so public with the Trayvon Martin killing and seemingly countless police murders that continue to horrify and outrage. So even though the film itself has been seen as a commentary on American gun culture and violence, audiences and critics were not so kind, and it was deemed a failure.
All of this doesn’t mean that gruff, elderly men taking vengeance have completely fallen out of favor—even after that 2019 interview, Liam Neeson’s second wind as a mid-budget action journeyman has continued. But for the Disney+ crowd, inundated with computer-generated landscapes and end-of-the-world stakes, hyperviolent and hypermasculine cinematic powertrips don’t have the same appeal when they’re based in the often depressing, always volatile modern world that we inhabit.
That isn’t to say that hyperviolent and hypermasculine cinematic powertrips have lost their appeal, however. They just need to be wrapped up in a comforting sheen of irony and comic-book excess in order to feel palatable. Take, for example, the latest film penned by John Wick scribe Derek Kolstad, the Bob Odenkirk vehicle Nobody, in which a mild-mannered family man calls on long-dormant combat skills to take on (you guessed it) Russian gangsters. There’s also Gunpowder Milkshake, a highly-stylized assassin action extravaganza starring Karen Gillan that also serves as a makeshift female Expendables (with Michelle Yeoh, Lena Headey, Angela Bassett and Carla Gugino co-starring).
Both of these films market themselves on their tongue-in-cheek sensibilities and high-stimulus bloodletting that calls to mind Looney Tunes and The Matrix more so than Death Wish or Rolling Thunder or Get Carter. This new wave of fun-focused revenge movies features fraternities of international assassins and secret societies and impossibly skilled killers who also love children (or pets). They don’t concern themselves with real-world sociopolitical issues because that would take away from the spectacle at hand. Audiences will perhaps always clamor for stories of warriors living by their own code and doling out extrajudicial violence—in film, it’s a tradition that harkens back to old adventure and western movies. The difference is that, now, Hollywood’s desire to project an image of social responsibility has made it so these stories have to feel distanced from our current social context, which means they are sometimes hidden in high-concept genre fare. Perhaps that’s why one of the best “westerns” of the past decade was Logan, a superhero send-off for Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine.
When a story is as heightened as the one in John Wick, the audience looks at the on-screen violence as nothing other than good, unproblematic fun. John Wick the character isn’t seen as an “anti-hero” the same way Death Wish’s Paul Kersey or his ilk are—since the villains and situations in John Wick could never be real, it’s easy to sit back and enjoy the guns and knives and neck-breaking kills.
The series has no sign of slowing down, with a fourth film and a prequel television show already underway. The character even found his way into the videogame Fortnite, where he serves as a playable character model. Fortnite is another piece of media that strategically distances itself from its own violence; its colorful environments and cartoon characters and funny dances all distract from the fact that it’s a game for kids that revolves around killing one another with shotguns and sniper rifles and other real-life weapons. Now, young players can inhabit the (cartoonified) skin of Wick and harmlessly gun down their friends as the assassin who heralded in a new golden age of revenge movies.
Is this less harmful than what came before?
It would be reasonable to assert that the uncomfortable, illicit thrills of Death Wish will never return. That shocking, sobering Neeson interview highlighted everything about a modern revenge story that could be harmful or politically noxious. Maybe revenge films will only grow bigger and more exciting and less realistic, smoothing out the rough edges of the vigilante archetype in the process. But Sweet Girl, a movie that seems to forgo Russian gangsters entirely in favor of pharmaceutical executives, suggests that there’s still room for action spectacle that actually pulls us closer to the anger and unrest and pain of life outside of the screen. And maybe, just maybe, upon seeing Jason Momoa use his hulking frame to pin an evil executive to the wall, some viewers will feel a cathartic pang of excitement in their stomachs. That kind of excitement, as uneasy as it may be, can never truly come from a piece of art that is “apolitical,” if ever such a thing did exist.
