I don't publish a lotta input on the recent superhero craze because I've not seen a lot of them, so it wouldn't be entirely fair. But that in and of itself is probably pretty revealing; I don't watch a lot of these movies because they look fucking awful, and the scattered portions I have seen turned out to be fucking awful. Like worst I've ever seen, no kidding. Personal preference I guess, however strong it may be, but certainly one of the more subjective observations in my criteria is a lack of relatability; superpowers is one thing, but a flawless disposition dedicated to God and Country is simply beyond the boundaries of believable human nature. Sure, let Josh Brolin take over the world - what do I care, it's fake.
Well kids, 30 years ago when Ant Men and She Hulks were confined to the pages, our movie heroes took hostages, shot pimps, and raged against the machine. The 90s are still so fresh in our minds that it's easy to ridicule the fashions and foibles that come with any defined decade, but the confrontational and empowering themes of Cinema were like a 1970s redux: alienation, rebellion, and causal violence were the backbone of everything from Action to Comedy to Kids' movies. We actually got two legit Superhero Movies in '93: Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and Super Mario Bros. No superpowers in either case - a masked vigilante driven by childhood trauma and two plumbers from Brooklyn who reluctantly help bring down a reptilian imperialist regime. Or something. Point is, even the costumed crusaders were working outside the system and taking matters into their own bare hands.
There were characters "on the right side of the law" and circumstances forced them to get dirty. In Tombstone the Earp Brothers long for a life of peace after a career in law enforcement, only to find more violence and injustice until they're finally compelled to compromise even their own principles - their motivations driven by anger and vengeance. Most of the characters on this list aren't looking for trouble - it finds them. Not entirely true of Sergeant John Spartan in Demolition Man - a great movie that I always thought had a dumb title, but the title really is more than a generic Action Movie lyric to sell tickets. There's some afterthought exposition about how reckless he is in his pursuit of bad guys, which gets him into trouble and ultimately sets the premise in motion. But when he finds himself in an excessively polite society 36 years later, that ends up becoming the real antagonist of the picture and the thing that he must demolish.
On the opposite end of the long arm of the law are the people trying to save their own ass. In The Fugitive Dr. Richard Kimble has to do his own detective work to entirely reverse every single misstep of the American legal system. The brilliance of that movie is: we know he's right, we know he's innocent, and we're rooting for him, and at the same time we're rooting for Tommy Lee's Deputy Gerard - not to catch him, but to completely shrug off his responsibilities as a U.S. Marshall and accept the truth that of course he's innocent, he's Harrison Ford! We only want cops to step out of line when it's advantageous to our designated hero. In Judgment Night our leads are witnesses to a murder and not only do the police not help, they're nonexistent. Their battle against inner city crime has nothing to do with large scale social justice, it's just self preservation.
Sometimes survival can lead to a greater cause. Gerry Conlon is falsely accused and convicted of terrorism in In The Name of the Father, forcing him to withstand the perils of prison. In fighting for his life and his name, he's inspired to take up arms against the very corruption that diminished him. Based on a true story, sure, but it's still a very filmic evolution of events; this is how real people become superheroes. In Body Snatchers, Marti has to escape the prospect of becoming a pod person. She tries and fails to save her family from their zombie fate, which only leaves the option of escape - though she's left with a focused hatred against the alien infestation which will inevitably become "society" making this simultaneously the most literal and abstract antihero allegory of the year.
There's nothing more heroic or uplifting than when children rise above their oppressors to right a wrong or maybe educate their elders - like when Wednesday Addams burns down a summer camp full of bigoted elitists in Addams Family Values. In the two Barry Sonnenfeld Addams movies, all the morbid cracks about murder and torture and necrophilia and disfigurement were played off as one liners and sight gags, but this movie doubles down with a full blown throwdown between the pariahs and the pompous. It's implied that our heroes burn families alive, and us as an audience couldn't be more delighted. A far less drastic act of heroism is Jesse's freeing of Willy the Whale in the aptly titled Free Willy. To be fair, Willy's owners had planned to destroy the whale as part of some insurance scam, so Jesse's aid in his escape is truly an act of good on every level. Even still, in a court of law Jesse's facing breaking and entering, destruction of property, grand theft, and probably conspiracy to commit various environmental crimes. I don't say this to assign a buncha real life logistics to superficial Family Films - I don't do that and I fucking hate when other people do it. But these movies depicting children tearing down authority with bravery and the confidence in what they were doing was right was just as attractive as most villains in fiction - a feat rarely accomplished in Film (for me).
Then there are the actual bad guys - the protagonists who antagonized as their main story function but somehow managed to persevere as heroes within that story. Schindler's List is the most drastic yet the most soft example: a Nazi war profiteer looks bad on paper, but this is a story about a different time, when a person could redeem themselves through change and amends, thereby exonerating their flawed past. Talk about standing up to authority! But that's a cheat - Oskar Schindler is never presented as a villain. Not like, say, the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park - the movie and the park. This may be a bit abstract but this was a time when we didn't have any straightforward villains to root for (probably because the heroes were so blurry). All the 80s slashers were gone and we were between Batmen, so what can you do for posters and action figures and Fango covers and McDonald's cups? Alan Grant? Ellie Sattler? Ian Malcolm? I mean nowadays yeah because they've all become quotable cult heroes, but back then the T Rex, Raptors, et al. were the true antiheroes of Cinema -- kids didn't wanna free Willy, they wanted to run alongside a herd of Gallimimus (mostly because that was your safest bet).
Mostly I'm talking about the criminal population; the lawbreakin' leads that left us no choice but to cheer them on. And why not? In Carlito's Way, Carlito Brigante is desperately (though successfully) putting his life of crime behind him, and the real tension comes from "when's he gonna relapse?" because, somehow, that's what we wanna see; everyone around him is fucking up in various ways, and so we need him to become Michael Corleone, we need him to be Tony Montana, for the good of the movie. That's usually the arc of these good/bad guys: they eventually wanna hang it up, but the only way out is the way they came in. In the American La Femme Nikita remake Point of No Return, Maggie Hayward is forced into becoming an assassin for the U.S. government, and then predictably doesn't wanna anymore, so the entire third act is her using her crackerjack skills to free herself from the people who trained her. And we want that for her; she's a cold-blooded killer but we really just want her to get with Dermot Mulroney and be happy forever. That happy ending scenario doesn't sit as well in A Perfect World - escaped prisoner Butch Haynes takes an 8-year-old boy hostage on the run for a lighthearted road trip. Butch is a decent guy and he and the kid end up sharing a genuine bond free of any Stockholm Syndrome type stuff, but under the circumstances we really need to see the kid reunited with his mother, and so that's the ending we get. Butch brought excitement into this child's life for the first time, but that doesn't count as redemption in an imperfect world.
Intentions are a big part of this central character craze. By the end of True Romance, Clarence and Alabama are unwavering killers and professional drug dealers, but we never think of them that way, because as big and brutal as these acts are, it doesn't define them. Coincidentally, the layers in this movie (established by its screenwriter) indicate that these characters are fully aware of their Antihero status, because they've seen Taxi Driver, Badlands, The Getaway, etc. so they know that they themselves are worth rooting for. That's easily the most meta example of this subgenre in this or any other year, and while it's not played as parody or satire, there's still a lightheartedness to it; when they're not rooted in some tragic true story, the antihero is free to be as ridiculous or funny as they want because they're not bound by virtue. I'd say the most blatant characteristic of this type of lead is that they're human, and their fictional world mirrors the madness of the real world. In Amos & Andrew Amos Odell may be a career criminal and laughably dim but he's the only even-tempered and tolerant character in a cast of bigots, bad cops, and fundamentalists. It's played for laughs, but Amos is almost admirable for his forbearance (which admittedly comes from his ignorance). On this list I empathize most with this character.
And then there are those days, those overwhelming days, those Falling Down days when we all have a little "D-FENS" in us. The movie is never subtle -- on the contrary it's quite bold and obvious and straightforward and it's the audience that's the variable. There's no way to "interpret" or "misinterpret" this character: his actions and motivations are clearly illustrated on the screen and it's up to us to see him as a hero or a villain, an instigator or a victim, patriotic or prejudiced, and there's very little room for compromise. I view him this way, and if you view him differently you're wrong. Neo Nazis and violent gangsters aside, his true gripe is with humanity; the race he most despises is The Human Race, excluding no one from the warpath - everyone's guilty and everyone will be offended. Which leaves him asking the question that personifies his character as well as every other antihero: "I'm the bad guy? How'd that happen? I did everything they told me to."
- Paul
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