"The bad guys are not typical; they are not just bad, they are interesting. They might be good or bad"
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Villains, in Jan de Bont's world, arent a moral category so much as an engine for momentum. Coming out of a career built on kinetic spectacle (Speed, Twister), he understands that an action movie only moves as fast as its antagonist. A purely "bad" bad guy is a speed bump: functional, forgettable, already solved. An interesting one is a weather system. You cant argue it into stopping; you can only react, improvise, escalate.
The sly move in his phrasing is the rejection of "typical". Thats not a plea for edgy amorality; its a practical note about attention. Audiences dont track virtue, they track unpredictability. When he says they "might be good or bad", hes pointing at what actually creates suspense: motives that arent reducible to a label. A villain with a coherent inner logic, even a sympathetic grievance, makes every choice feel like it could tilt either way. That uncertainty is the oxygen of set pieces. It also protects the hero from becoming a lecture. If the antagonist is a cardboard monster, the protagonist wins by default; if the antagonist is plausibly human, the protagonist has to earn the victory.
There's also a late-20th-century Hollywood subtext here: the post-Die Hard era when audiences wanted criminals with charisma, ideology, or pain, not faceless thugs. De Bont isnt endorsing them. Hes insisting that the "bad guy" is, above all, a character - and character is where spectacle becomes story.
The sly move in his phrasing is the rejection of "typical". Thats not a plea for edgy amorality; its a practical note about attention. Audiences dont track virtue, they track unpredictability. When he says they "might be good or bad", hes pointing at what actually creates suspense: motives that arent reducible to a label. A villain with a coherent inner logic, even a sympathetic grievance, makes every choice feel like it could tilt either way. That uncertainty is the oxygen of set pieces. It also protects the hero from becoming a lecture. If the antagonist is a cardboard monster, the protagonist wins by default; if the antagonist is plausibly human, the protagonist has to earn the victory.
There's also a late-20th-century Hollywood subtext here: the post-Die Hard era when audiences wanted criminals with charisma, ideology, or pain, not faceless thugs. De Bont isnt endorsing them. Hes insisting that the "bad guy" is, above all, a character - and character is where spectacle becomes story.
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| Topic | Movie |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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