You will never see an action movie, with a female lead, who takes down male protagonists in which the overall tone is not comedic nor incredulous.
You will also never see an action movie, with a serious tone, with a female protagonist where her physical disassembly of a male antagonist is believable.
If you want to see women destroying male antagonists, you will have to shift the genre to supernatural horror, animation, or psychological thriller. It’s not that a female character can’t stab a man in his face to death while he’s sleeping, or poison his tea every morning, it’s mostly that those films don’t tend to draw in the smushed leathery or velcro wallets of the 18-35 recruitment demographic. Those bastards definitely don’t want to watch a movie about a woman beating up a man, and have it be believable, unless it ends pornographically. That’s for later viewing.
The last and final reason why you’ll never get any action film post-1980’s James Cameron with an undeniably formidable female original character, is because
they don’t want you bitches getting any ideas.
In most fight scenes, where it’s time to have the girl take down a man, there’s the trope where she leaps onto the back of the man, and…I don’t know what she’s doing? Tries to gouge his eyes out? Or there’s going to be a significant budget put into training the actress to get into incredible shape and perform fight choreography that’s so gruelling and demanding, it earns her the respect of men who tune in. She’ll fight like a man, the girls will write fight like a girl, and she’ll still be fuckable and feminine, that’s the important part, it’s what sells the movie.
Stabbing a man with an ice pick in the aorta during intercourse, or slitting his throat during intercourse, while the blood is everflowing, and one of the smartest ways to murder a man on-screen–while his defenses are at their lowest, is what you’ll receive if you tune into a thriller film. It costs next to nothing to film pushing a man down a flight of stairs, or lacing his food with oleander, and I don’t know how much money was spent on the strangulation scene in Romeo Is Bleeding, maybe Lena Olin actually was choking Gary Oldman out in the back of that car with piano wire, but it couldn’t have been that much. Realistic violence where a woman physically overpowers a man comes from real physical strength on behalf of the woman and hubris on behalf of the man.
You will never get what you’re actually looking for, only in your dreams, possibly literature, in the drafts of defeated writers turned soundbath instructors, or maybe in painting or crude drawings. The closest you’ll get is the latter half of Death Proof. So you, like me, will have to settle. You’ll have to settle with the following:
mediocre “bad-girl” heroes with soft beach waves, heeled platform combat boots, and a dead mother/boyfriend/husband/child/pet/father figure to save or avenge. Sometimes she’ll “adopt” a child.
preachy, cheap, and rushed action films with the actresses doing what directors and producers think a woman would do if she were cornered. Oftentimes these feature post-adolescent women, and they’re usually infantilized in some way.
a female badass character who IS unstoppable. The filmmaker makes the male antagonist into her boyfriend because she’s never had an “equal” before.
only ONE capable female character assassins sexy bitch
she must be hot.
she’ll fight 15 guys on a staircase. but she must be hot.
you will never see the visceral impact of her violence in a tight shot, only a man slowly dangling out of fame.
you’re definitely going to see someone be sexually assaulted first in pornographic detail. And if it’s on HBO, it’ll be most of the show.
There’s some mercy for me in Ballerina. She doesn’t have platform boots, but she never puts her hair into a ponytail and there’s a slightly cheesy training scene where her instructor echoes all commentary men give to women regarding self-defense: You will always be weaker, go for the balls. She has a dead father to avenge. See concession #2. None of these things stopped me from seeing it several times. I’m past the point of believing that I’ll actually get the original psychopathic violent female protagonists I want. So I settle for what I can get, make up the rest in my mind, just like being in a mediocre relationship I’m about to end.
They nailed the set design for the Continental, the 1:1 kitchen knife fight she has with the cook in the restaurant is amazing, and her fight with John Wick felt like watching two siblings spar for the remote. The rest I can just make up in my mind. The stabbings are up close. There is no John Wick. Scenes open with suffocation and struggle as two women with a plastic bag subdue a man in bed, the female lead packs razorblades in her mouth, runs people over with her car, and so forth. No children, no family, no reasons at all.
I have other ideas, and I’m hoarding them, possibly forever, because in order to actually get them onto the screen, I’d have to become insane myself (the productive kind of insanity), and lethal, and I already have joint pain with high blood pressure, and stress headaches.
Sorry I didn’t talk that much about the popcorn this time, I was trying to watch my salt intake.
