As the New York Times reports and such recent action/adventure releases as the mega-hit “Air Force One” confirm, Hollywood has wearied of experimenting with alternative screen villains and has reverted to the same old maniacal Russians we used to hiss and boo back when there was still a Cold War.
This utter lack of imagination, while to be expected, is of course deplorable and appalling. I suppose it’s attributable to movie moguls reading too much Tom Clancy, who is not a professional warrior, after all, but a retired insurance salesman.
The substitute villains the moguls did try were predictable failures. The mindless drug lord villains they trotted out made moviegoers think they were watching reruns of “Miami Vice,” a show whose new episodes always seemed like reruns anyway.
Using Irish Republican Army types perforce failed despite their churlish bloodymindedness because their cause is popular with a lot of Americans and it was easy to confuse them with good guys–especially when Brad Pitt was playing one.
Hollywood’s Arab terrorists were maniacal, all right, but tended to come across as clowns, as with the maniacal Arab terrorists in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “True Lies” (not to speak of the real life Arab terrorist clowns who tried to blow up the World Trade Center).
As for aliens from outer space, as in Sigourney Weaver’s “Alien XVIII,” they’ve become about as menacing as the bugs in Raid commercials. In the last one, Sigourney looked more menacing than the alien.
Even Nazis seem to have lost some of their villainous cachet. Good grief, the hero of “The English Patient” was a Nazi.
Surely Hollywood can do better. May I suggest the following:
Members of Congress: There they were, making a big hoorah over passage of their big bipartisan compromise plan to balance the budget. But what does their budget balancing plan do? It cuts taxes and increases spending. It’s really a secret plan to unbalance the budget! What a neat evil conspiratorial plot!
The President: In “Air Force One,” they used Harrison Ford to make a hero of the president. But with all that powerful stuff at his disposal, wouldn’t a president make an even neater villain? Bill Clinton was part of the above-mentioned secret evil conspiracy to unbalance the budget, but he unfortunately comes across as about as villainous as Goofy.
Albanians: In the wonderfully wacky movie “Tune in Tomorrow,” Peter Falk played a radio soap opera scriptwriter whose plots and characters were forever railing against evil, monstrous, terrible Albanians. Eventually, Albanians began coming after Falk, compelling him to switch to Norwegians or something. If he hadn’t switched, and they kept coming after him, you’d have a sequel with perfect villains. They could even shoot it in Albania. There’s a wonderful city there that’s actually called Puke.
Lawyers: For unfathomable reasons, Hollywood has been using lawyers as heroes, as in all those endless John Grisham movies, which begin to seem like the same case, given continuances. This egregious miscasting strikes me as much the same as making heroes of Mafia gangsters in all those Robert De Niro/Al Pacino/Andy Garcia movies.
Wouldn’t lawyers make much better villains? Consider the lawyers bringing suit against Walt Disney because some children were allegedly “traumatized” seeing some Disney World characters remove their costumes.
Consider the lawyers bringing action against Iran-contra arms dealer turned radio talk show host Oliver North because he’s been using some ring announcer’s trademark cry, “Let’s get ready to rrrrrumble!”
Talk Show Hosts: Oliver North, Gordon Liddy, Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, Howard Stern? Come on! Give them all AK-47s and even James Bond would be nervous.
Smokers: Everyone else is treating them as villains; why shouldn’t Hollywood? I’d personally like to author the script of a film in which Arnold Schwarzenegger mows down hordes of yuppie junior executives swarming the city streets in suspenders and bow ties, smoking cigars.
Arnold Schwarzenegger: He smokes cigars.
Scientologists: Many actors — Tom Cruise, John Travolta, etc. — are Scientologists and think themselves no more villainous than Mormons or Rosicrucians (a Rosicrucian was a villain in Humphrey Bogart’s “Beat the Devil,” but that was long ago). Many governments, such as Germany’s, view Scientologists as dangerous and want to ban them. You could get Cruise and Travolta to make a movie about Scientology vs. the Germans, and then leave it up to the audience to decide which are the heroes and which the villains. If you made it a typical Hollywood movie, everybody and everything would get blown up in the end and it wouldn’t matter who was the villain.
The Swiss: After all those centuries of neutrality, I think it’s their turn.
