Posts Tagged ‘super heroes’

What could "The Expendables" teach us, besides why you don't want to pick a fight with any of them?

Back at the beginning of Summer we gave a preview of three films that were to come out that have something in common. What these films share is a focus on a tight-knit group of ex-military soldiers who work towards a shared goal of some kind. With The Losers it was about getting revenge, with The A-Team it was about living up to one’s duties as a patriot, and with The Expendables it was about serving the human condition. As you may have noticed, the motivations of the groups got progressively nobler, from serving selfish incentives to fulfilling an intangible obligation to heroic morals; namely the moral that the strong have to protect the weak. The three movies, and by extension the three groups in these movies, may share a similar basic premise, and may interact within their respective contexts in a similar way, but their differing motivations distinguish them from each other more so than we may have anticipated. Likewise, they also shared more in common than we previously thought. What exactly, though, can we learn from comparing them further?

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This year's version of The A-Team may be part of a new team trend for on-screen heroes

This upcoming summer movie season there are three movies that will be about a group of well trained special ops-type fighters who don’t “play by the rules,” starting with this weekend’s The Losers. This film, inspired by the comic book series of the same name, deals with a group of individual CIA black ops operatives who band together to find and kill whoever betrayed them and left them for dead. The other two films similar to this are The A-Team and The Expendables. The former is, if you don’t know already, based off of the TV series of the same name that first aired in 1983 about four ex-military men who were framed for a crime they didn’t commit and go about trying to clear their names, and the latter deals with a group of mercenaries hired to overthrow the vicious dictator of the small South American country of Vilena.

Well what’s so interesting about the fact that these films are releasing within a couple months of each other? Everyone one knows that Hollywood is a copycat town, right? The answer is both yes and no. Yes, studios like to hang their hats on proven formulas and trends, but that some trends appear at all is often reflective of the cultural mood of our country. Over the past few years there has been a heavy influx of films dealing with individual heroes, many of them being of the “super” variety. But aside from Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and Iron Man, there were John McClain, Rambo, Indiana Jones, and James Bond. Obviously, none of these rogue stand-alone men did everything by themselves (Batman had Alfred, Iron Man had Pepper Pots, James Bond had MI6, etc.), but by and large they did all of the most difficult and dangerous things by themselves. Americans love heroes that are individualistic and autonomous. They’ve loved them like that for decades and will continue to love them for decades more. What seems so peculiar about The Losers, The A-Team, and The Expendables being released in one summer season, then, is that the team concept stands out so sharply from this crowd of actioners.

These three movies are hardly pioneering new ground, of course, as the X-Men trilogy made the point during the middle of the first super hero wave of the new century that working as a team for a common goal is the real and only way to make progress. However the three films in question seem to have their sights set a lot lower than achieving social understanding and ridding the world of prejudice. In the case of The Losers, for example, the goal is simply to get revenge on the group’s would-be assassinators. So, because the scope is miniscule and the benefits gained from the group’s success are specific to just them, the individualistic sense is still ever-present. And, the same might be said of The A-Team as well. Because the goal in The Expendables is to overthrow a dictatorship it can be argued that the benefits of the heroes victory would not be exclusive to just them but would also include the entire citizenship of Vilena. So, you could say the sense of individual empowerment would at least not be the same variety found in the other two films. However, it is interesting to point out that The Expendables are a group made up of mercenaries, who are a breed of people not known for their team mentalities.

What do you all make of this? Is the concept of working as a team against evil going to become the new wave in action movies, or is it just a phase? Do you expect to see these films come close to enjoying the type of success that Iron Man 2 will no doubt garner? Which type of hero do you emulate the most? Which do you enjoy watching the most? Voice your opinions and let it be known what you think a true hero really is.

We’ll revisit this topic once all three films have been released (which will be mid-August) and ask you these same questions again. Then we’ll compare your responses to try and come to some sort of conclusion. Till then, just enjoy the movies!

Short Take: Tons of action and laughs, as well as surprisingly introspective

Director: Matthew Vaughn (Stardust)

Screenwriters: Matthew Vaught and Jane Goldman (Stardust); based on comic books by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.

Cast: Aaron Johnson (The Illusionist), Chloe Moretz (500 Days of Summer), Nicolas Cage (The Bad Lieutenant), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Role Models), Mark Strong (Sherlock Holmes)

Length: 1h 57m

Synopsis: Dave Lizewsky (Johnson) was a painfully average teenage boy growing up in New York City. One day, however, he asked himself a very serious question: why hasn’t anyone actually tried to be a super hero? Although it’s not the most realistic or feasible endeavor to pursue – or safest for that matter – he convinces himself that he should nevertheless give the idea a serious try because standing up to crime is the right thing to do. Through his efforts Lizewsky discovers the serious drawbacks to his idea by getting beaten half to death, but after recouping he dusts himself off and, after some hard-fought success with dishing out justice, is rewarded with praise and admiration from the city’s populous. Unbeknownst to him, however, his fame and actions become a thorn in the side of one of the city’s biggest crime lords, Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong). But is this teen, self-named Kick-Ass, the real nuisance, or is it someone else? Read the rest of this entry »