Fairly major spoiler for The Other Guys below...
As anyone who's seen the trailers for the film knows, Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg play a couple of cops who live in the shadow of the NYPD's hero police officers, played by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson, whose characters are basically parodies of those found in every buddy cop movie. But they're not quite parody enough that you couldn't easily imagine them headlining their own movie.
About ten minutes into the film, some jewel thieves have just robbed a store, and Jackson and Johnson chase them up to the roof of a tall building. The thieves escape via zip line to the street below and then cut the line, with Jackson and Johnson still up there. The two of them exchange some standard buddy cop movie dialogue, grin at each other, and then jump off the roof after the thieves, falling through the air in slow motion with the Foo Fighters' "My Hero" playing in the background. Seconds later, they hit the sidewalk and are immediately killed.
It's maybe one of my favorite scenes in any movie ever.
During the slow motion fall, my thought process--and I'm guessing this was similar to a lot of people's--went something like this:
Where exactly are they trying to jump to? Are they trying to jump onto the thieves' getaway car? Or some other vehicle in order to go after them? But unless that vehicle is a truck carrying lots of pillows or something in the back, that still has to be a fatal drop from that high up, right? Say, they're getting awfully close to the ground and I don't see a truck. Or any pillows. Wait, they're not the main characters, are they? So they're totally expendable, and come to think of it, they weren't even in the trailer all that much, so--[splat]. Oh.
The real genius of the scene is that the film never explains why they jumped. The narrator makes a couple of half-hearted suggestions, such as the belief that since they'd cheated death so many times before, something would just come along to save them, etc. But that's about it. At the funeral, other cops try to figure out what they'd been thinking. One of them mutters, "There wasn't even an awning..." which may have gotten the biggest laugh of the whole film in the theater I was in.
Throughout the rest of the movie, I couldn't get that scene out of my head. Partly because it was funny, but I also realized that I found it oddly disturbing on some level. The film took the preconceptions and expectations of anyone who enjoys dumb action movies, and used them to completely sweep our legs out from underneath us. We're not used to seeing our action heroes die. Even...especially...when they ought to. If Jackson and Johnson had been the stars of the movie, is there any doubt whatsoever that there would have been a truck full of pillows driving by at that precise moment? Or in the very least, an awning?
I also think the fact that the characters were played by Sam Jackson and The Rock had a lot to do with it. The scene wouldn't have bugged me nearly as much if it had just been two random actors. Jackson's on-screen deaths in Deep Blue Sea and Revenge of the Sith (uh...spoilers!) didn't bother me, but you sure as hell don't want to see the prototypical bad-ass Samuel L. Jackson character to go out like that. Johnson, I'm a lot less attached to, but I still like most of his films. So that was also weird.
And all this made me realize if there were action heroes in real life--be they cops or secret agents or superheroes or whatever--this is exactly how most of them would die, too. They'd get a little too smug and a little too used to cheating death over and over, and one day do something really stupid, only to get themselves killed. You have to figure that at some point when they were falling, Jackson's and Johnson's characters realized their mistake and gave each other a horrified, "Oh, shit. We're about to die," look. That moment of realization somehow seems like it'd worse than the actual moment of impact.
This is one of those posts where I've gotten this far and then suddenly realize that it doesn't really have a point or an obvious conclusion. So I'll just end by saying that from now on, I only want to see Samuel L. Jackson die heroic deaths on-screen. Like, you know the end of The Running Man (the book, not the movie) where Ben Richards crashes the airplane into the network's headquarters (uh...spoiler!), grinning and giving Killian the finger right before impact? That's the only way I want to see Sam Jackson die in films from now on.
During the slow motion fall, my thought process--and I'm guessing this was similar to a lot of people's--went something like this:
Where exactly are they trying to jump to? Are they trying to jump onto the thieves' getaway car? Or some other vehicle in order to go after them? But unless that vehicle is a truck carrying lots of pillows or something in the back, that still has to be a fatal drop from that high up, right? Say, they're getting awfully close to the ground and I don't see a truck. Or any pillows. Wait, they're not the main characters, are they? So they're totally expendable, and come to think of it, they weren't even in the trailer all that much, so--[splat]. Oh.
The real genius of the scene is that the film never explains why they jumped. The narrator makes a couple of half-hearted suggestions, such as the belief that since they'd cheated death so many times before, something would just come along to save them, etc. But that's about it. At the funeral, other cops try to figure out what they'd been thinking. One of them mutters, "There wasn't even an awning..." which may have gotten the biggest laugh of the whole film in the theater I was in.
Throughout the rest of the movie, I couldn't get that scene out of my head. Partly because it was funny, but I also realized that I found it oddly disturbing on some level. The film took the preconceptions and expectations of anyone who enjoys dumb action movies, and used them to completely sweep our legs out from underneath us. We're not used to seeing our action heroes die. Even...especially...when they ought to. If Jackson and Johnson had been the stars of the movie, is there any doubt whatsoever that there would have been a truck full of pillows driving by at that precise moment? Or in the very least, an awning?
I also think the fact that the characters were played by Sam Jackson and The Rock had a lot to do with it. The scene wouldn't have bugged me nearly as much if it had just been two random actors. Jackson's on-screen deaths in Deep Blue Sea and Revenge of the Sith (uh...spoilers!) didn't bother me, but you sure as hell don't want to see the prototypical bad-ass Samuel L. Jackson character to go out like that. Johnson, I'm a lot less attached to, but I still like most of his films. So that was also weird.
And all this made me realize if there were action heroes in real life--be they cops or secret agents or superheroes or whatever--this is exactly how most of them would die, too. They'd get a little too smug and a little too used to cheating death over and over, and one day do something really stupid, only to get themselves killed. You have to figure that at some point when they were falling, Jackson's and Johnson's characters realized their mistake and gave each other a horrified, "Oh, shit. We're about to die," look. That moment of realization somehow seems like it'd worse than the actual moment of impact.
This is one of those posts where I've gotten this far and then suddenly realize that it doesn't really have a point or an obvious conclusion. So I'll just end by saying that from now on, I only want to see Samuel L. Jackson die heroic deaths on-screen. Like, you know the end of The Running Man (the book, not the movie) where Ben Richards crashes the airplane into the network's headquarters (uh...spoiler!), grinning and giving Killian the finger right before impact? That's the only way I want to see Sam Jackson die in films from now on.
0 comments:
Post a Comment