rule number 4. Shooting is not too good for my enemies.
rule number 6. I will not gloat over my enemies' predicament before killing them.
rule number 7. When I've captured my adversary and he says, "Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?" I'll say, "No." and shoot him. No, on second thought I'll shoot him then say "No."
rule number 16. I will never utter the sentence "But before I kill you, there's just one thing I want to know."
When I've captured my adversary and he says, "Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?" I'll say, "No." and shoot him. No, on second thought I'll shoot him then say "No."
Just rewatched the first Kingsman film and they did this pretty well. Samuel L Jackson straight up shooting Colin Firth in the face was a good subversion of the trope
Something Vimes had learned as a young guard drifted up from memory. If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you're going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat.
They'll watch you squirm. They'll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar.
So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.”
therefore, all (?) movie action heroes are evil people.
Pan's Labyrinth was the worst for this. Completely took me out of the movie when she spares the fascist captain/commander
It’s not even about ideology. It’s just stupid from a self preservation standpoint. Like ok. You have a bunch of adrenaline and maybe you don’t want to kill. But for god’s sake man just grab the fucking gun before you run away.
The enemy are cruel and unrepentant murderers and we must bring them down by any means because this is war but also it's bad to kill them and if they are killed it signals a dark turn for the character.
Also every movie and TV show needs to have a lengthy in depth torture scene because we forgot there are other ways to build tension and/or show that someone is a bad guy.
it wasn't like this before the intentional normalization of torture in the '00s
Additionally, I will not attempt to actually kill the enemy in any way. Instead I will either contrive some elaborate and ironic environmental kill, or allow my plucky sidekick who I left behind "for their own good" to take the shot
In this way, I, Hero Protagonist, keep my hands clean of icky violence (don't think about the 327 guards I shot dead making it to the villain)
This is why Commando is good (despite the whole rouge communist government hiring mercenaries bit, which is literally projection by Hollywood).
