ACTION MOVIES, STOP TAKING AWAY OUR EVERYDAY HEROES
HOLLYWOOD, YOU HAVE a problem. I’m loath to admit it since I benefit from its existence, but with the casting of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as American icon Jack Burton in the forthcoming remake of John Carpenter’s cult masterpiece Big Trouble In Little China I can no longer stay quiet.
And before you say it: This isn’t about remakes. Those are a part of our reality now, so just get over it. Movie apocalypse death of originality soulless studio heads big budget bullshit blah blah blah. That battle is lost and everything old is new again, just like mustache wax and weekend pickling projects.
The reimagining of Jack Burton as The Rock is only the latest development in a much more insidious plot devised by Hollywood to brainwash us all. It is the problem of The Impossible Man. Average dudes looking for hope, you can shout “Dad Bod!” all you want, but once Chris Pratt whipped his Andy-the-everyman physique into certified hero-body shape, your argument blew away like a handful of creatine powder.
On one hand, I’m loving this trend with everything my reptile brain can muster. Knowing that I can go to the movies and select from a dessert table offering up the Tom Hardy, Henry Cavill, Channing Tatum, Joe Manganiello, and Chrises Pratt/Hemsworth/Evans is wonderful. Each of them in 2015 is a human specimen carved from stone and misted just enough to optimal sheen. They’re living monuments to anatomical design at its highest levels—but just as they lack diversity in skin tone, so too do they lack diversity in appeal. There’s only room for one type of hero at the Tinseltown Table, and making Jack Burton into a human mountain is perhaps the greatest act of hostility so far in this aesthetic Cold War.
And we’ve been chronicling your offenses, Hollywood. Over the course of the ’90s, Batman went from Michael Keaton to Val Kilmer to George Clooney—physically modest men all. But when Warner Bros. rebooted the Caped Crusader in 2005, Christian Bale transformed into a 220-pound beast. The next year, James Bond morphed from a hairy-chested, slim-suit-wearing secret agent with decades of prestige into a silky smooth, doorframe-filling wrecking ball named Daniel Craig. In 2013, DC and Warner decided that the Christopher Reeve school of Superman was far too dull, and slung Kal-El’s cape over Henry Cavill, whose torso looks like it was created in a lab. (No, seriously, have you seen his torso? Literally. Can’t. Even.) And just last month, Tom Hardy became the new embodiment of “Mad” Max Rockatansky, a role originally played by Mel Gibson, who seems downright willowy in comparison.
Even if you’re already the face of a franchise, you’re still a target of the Impossible Man insurgency. Only one actor has played Wolverine since the X franchise debuted in 2000, but the Hugh Jackman of 15 years ago was a considerably less huge, jacked man than the one we know today. Bruce Willis might still be John McClane, but his screen son and presumptuous heir to the franchise is manimal Jai Courtney—who is also reprising the role of Kyle Reese in Terminator: Genysisnext month. The original Reese? Michael Biehn, a man Jai Courtney is approximately 150% larger than. (And don’t try to give me the Mark Ruffalo defense. Yes, he’s a hot slice of your mom’s favorite dish, but he also transforms into the biggest creature in the universe when it’s time to throw down. It’s like Black Widow says: We need the other guy.)
If you want to be reductive about it, you could consider that all of this beefcake is just meager payback for the Impossible Woman thing Hollywood has been peddling for… well, ever. But just because someone coined the term “dadbod” doesn’t mean much. Think mombod’ll be coming into fashion any time soon? LOLNOPE. The modern male movie star might have to be pounding 10,000 calories and working out for 6 hours each day to keep up with the Super Joneses, but women in the industry have been conforming to other-worldly standards their entire careers just to be considered real, valid women with sex parts and sometimes brains.
But you know what? I’m going to be the bigger person. I’m not going to scream “It’s about damn time!” and go pop champagne at the midnight screening of Magic Mike XXL. No matter how much I want to see Chris Pratt soaking wet on the cover of Entertainment Weekly with his shirt clinging to his newly minted pectorals in all the right places, it’s a step backward—one more affirmation that Hollywood is stone deaf regarding its need to broaden its visual palette, rather narrow it even further.
When none of our heroes look like us, we don’t have any heroes to relate to. Pratt looks great. I bet he feels great too, being all fit and toned, and if I were permitted to do some in-person fact checking, I’m sure I could verify that his body is a wonderland. But in Jurassic World he plays THE JACK HANNA OF DINOSAURS. I don’t know Jack Hanna, but do you think he has washboard abs? Do you?
And that brings us back to Jack Burton. As a college football defensive tackle turned pro wrestler, The Rock is physically even less relatable in than Pratt, and the whole point of Jack Burton is his average guy appeal. Burton was a truck driver who avoided commitment his entire life (and reminded me way, way too much of my own dad). He was a reasonable man forced to deal with some very unreasonable things—but when his hand was forced, he was able to summon his American lone wolf spirit and shake the pillars of heaven.
I mean no offense to The Rock. I love The Rock! If I’m ever in a collapsing building and about to drown, there’s no one I’d rather see come to rescue me than the king of the silverbacks. And I know he’s not exempt from the same crushing standards imposed on everyone else. Remember the trim old days of Walking Tall in 2004? I do. And I haven’t forgotten that the original Walking Tall hero was played by Joe Don Baker in 1973, either. Baker was a strapping man in his own right, but by no means was he Warren-Sapp’s-backup-at-the-University-of-Miami strapping. But despite how big he was at the time, the physical expansion The Rock has undergone in the subsequent 11 years is staggering.
And that’s the whole problem of him playing Jack Burton—or of Chris Pratt playing someone who’s a mix of Sam Neill and Harrison Ford, or of Jean Valjean being a fucking wall of muscle. There’s nothing surprising about The Rock’s body shaking the pillars of anything; if the Rock punched me in the chest, my heart would explode like an egg. In Big Trouble, when Burton drinks the six demon bag magic potion and declares his feeling of invincibility on the way to battle, it actually means something, because he’s just some guy who landed in the wrong place at the wrong time. There’s no cavalry to call. Jack and friends have to take it upon themselves to face down the blackest of Chinese black magic. If one of them had The Rock in their Rolodex, don’t you think they would have called him for help immediately?! It takes what little suspense is left and boils everything down to foregone conclusions, because when you’re as big as The Rock, you don’t have to outwit anyone. Ever.
In the land of giants, I do see some mortal-sized men to give me hope, though. Keanu Reeves kicked all of the ass as John Wick last year, and we’ll get to see him in a sequel. Jason Statham rides the line of believability, but ultimately feels like a sustainable heir to the Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Segal martial-artists-with-a-purpose movies that thrived in the 1990s. Matt Damon is set to return as Jason Bourne, but Jeremy Renner was a suitably realistic placeholder for a minute. And no matter how you feel about him, Tom Cruise is still one hell of an action star.
For some characters, I totally get it. Thor is a god, and so is Chris Hemsworth. Check. The whole point of Captain America is that he was transformed into a super soldier. I accept. But don’t take my everyday heroes from me, my Jack Burtons and my John McClanes and my Snake Plisskens and my Paul Kerseys. Next thing you know Chris Pine will have to gain 57 pounds of muscle to keep the helm of the Starship Enterprise—and if that happens, so help me God, I will burn this place to the ground.
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