Bullet Train, Top Gun Maverick: Hollywood alpha male learns to mix old-school action with political correctness

Brad Pitt enters the screenplay of Bullet Train declaring he is “the new improved me”. Pitt’s character, an assassin codenamed Ladybug, mouths the line actually, before going over the top with old-school action reminiscent of the eighties and the nineties in the film, the latest made-for-gallery commercial product to roll out of Hollywood. Bullet Train is the sort of stunt fest that is seeing a stylish revival in Hollywood and Pitt is certainly not the first major star in recent months to engage in such choreographed retro action. Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans did it in The Gray Man, and then there were Kevin Hart and Woody Harrelson in The Man From Toronto among others. It was Tom Cruise who topped them all this year, returning in his iconic avatar of Captain Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell in Top Gun Maverick.

What’s notable about the old-school brand of machismo that top actors are attempting lately is a specific element of humour that buoys the image. While a lot of it is standard slapstick, you spot the odd self-deprecating wit on the part of the action hero. Ladybug’s assertion about being “the new-improved me” to his handler (Sandra Bullock, mostly heard on phone throughout the film) perhaps applies as much to the screen character as to the prototype of the Hollywood male star that Pitt represents. There are at least two deliberately cheeky scenes written into the screenplay of Bullet Train that underline “the new-improved me”. In the first, Ladybug, irritated by a female co-passenger on the train, yells, “Eat a bag of d*cks, lady”, and then immediately adds as apology: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m working on it”. In another scene, after brief lecture attempt on another female character, Ladybug is apologetic again, for “mansplaining” things.

A major role of such comical reinvention is obviously to ensure the larger-than-life action of the film, an otherwise formulaic package with just the hint of gore, doesn’t get too heavy. Importantly, as scenes designed to deliver cartoonish fun seem to declare Bullet Train isn’t a film to be taken seriously, you spot a faint attempt to satirise the element of misogyny that often trademarked machismo of yore, when such loud action ruled.

The trend of blending old-school action with new-age political correctness, and serving it with self-effacing humour, seems to have caught on after global success of Top Gun Maverick earlier this year. “Your kind is settled for extinction,” Ed Harris as Rear Admiral Chester ‘Hammer’ Cain tells Tom Cruise’s Maverick early on in the Top Gun reboot. The film has emerged Hollywood’s biggest hit in the first seven months of 2022 with a massive box-office haul of $1.32 billion worldwide. That outshines the new-age superhero swagger of Batman, Doctor Strange and Thor, as well as the dino might of Jurassic World Dominion.

Faced with a rapidly changing work milieu that will not automatically accord him supremacy anymore, the male Hollywood star — the lot that indubitably dictated box office and stardom till a while back — seems to have found a survival mantra in reinventing old-school action and thrills to suit new-age tastes. Hollywood’s new-improved alpha male knows he must go through this socio-cultural makeover for his vintage brand of machismo to survive on screen, and the best way to do so is by taking the joke on himself. In Top Gun Maverick, Cruise as Maverick is literally made to pay when he tries to flirt with Jennifer Connelly’s bar owner Penny, in a hilarious early scene that reverses a few clichés about the macho hero hitting on the pretty bar girl. Later, as their romance blossoms, Maverick, along with single mom Penny, tries carrying on with the affair as secretly as possible without letting her daughter find out, with amusing outcome.

Humour redeems the otherwise browbeaten action hero prototypes of Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans in The Gray Man, too, as they go about essaying protagonist and antagonist respectively in the film. The Man From Toronto actually spoofs the clichés of the old school action that fills the film’s runtime. In the film’s wafer-thin plot, Woody Harrelson’s ruthless hunk of an assassin — a conventionally foreboding stereotype — is reduced to a joke owing to an identity mix-up with a goofy screw-up (played by comedian Kevin Hart) who is mistaken to be the killer. Like most contemporary male-centric films of the genre, the predictable action comedy maintains a saleable quota of slapstick where the jokes are entirely on Hart and Harrelson. The approach somewhat redeems the otherwise mediocre entertainer, and also renders a necessary amount of appropriateness that serves to accommodate course correction as well as inclusivity.

It all makes for a strangely engrossing mix if done correctly, as the new-age, politically correct male protagonist with a reorganised sense of humour kicks some old-fashioned butt. The elaborately choreographed action sequences are after all a departure from the sleek stunt fare flaunting CGI overload that has been Hollywood’s staple since The Matrix redefined on-screen action upon release in 1999. CGI, of course, is being used to render the old-style stunts in films, too, but the impact created is usually more basic.

In Bullet Train, for instance, Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a hitman codenamed Tangerine gets thrown off the high-speed train as it leaves a station, chases the train down the platform, unbelievably leaps and manages to hang onto the rear end of the last car, then breaks the train’s supposedly unbreakable rear windshield with just a couple of blows to re-enter the compartment. If the spectacularly absurd action scene would put even the most outrageous among Bollywood’s larger-than-life heroes of the eighties to shame, there is a whole lot more of such antics happening all through the runtime.

Till not long ago, you’d mostly think Jason Statham, Vin Diesel or Sylvester Stallone when you thought of old-school action. Hollywood’s superstar of the times Dwayne Johnson does it regularly, too, when he isn’t looking for an image departure in primarily kiddie flicks as Jungle Cruise or Jumanji. These, though, are actors who have specifically carved stardom using the action image. Many more of their ilk are hopping onto the bandwagon now.

Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist, and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR.

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