Collateral Damage

I was watching Knight and Day, Tom Cruise's failed attempt to regain his standing at the top of the summer blockbuster hill, the other night and in between the wacky hi-jinks and intricately choreographed gun-play, a thought occurred to me. Even though Tom Cruise is our movie's hero (he's TOM CRUISE, could he be anything than our wise-cracking hero), the people he is killing, maiming, and generally laying waste to with a broad Tom Cruise smile on his face are actually good guys.  The plot of the movie hinges on a betrayal by Tom Cruise's CIA partner.  The always theatrically evil Peter Sarsgaard decides to go rogue and frame our good man Tom Cruise for his crime.  This sends Tom Cruise on the lamb as a gaggle of law enforcement and federal agents attempt to bring him to justice.  The problem is the evil conspiracy does not seem to extend beyond the always evil Sarsgaard.  So when Cruise takes out several agents, he is taking out good men just doing their job in defense of God and country.  Essentially, the subtext of this movie is that it is OK to be a mass murderer of our nation's law enforcers and espionage agents if you believe you have been treated unfairly by "the system".  Can't imagine that is what the film makers where going for but it is there none the less.  Not that this a completely novel element to the modern action movie.  James Bond commonly lays waste to random security guards and soldiers that just happen to have the bad luck of being assigned to work the night shift when Bond breaks in to steal the secret science project from the penthouse office of an evil mastermind.  A secret science project that no minimum wage security guard just trying to get a few bucks into his 401K would have any knowledge of.  They are just trying to see why the alarm is going off on the 16th floor and a man with a license to kill puts a bullet in their head.  Again, not much different from The Matrix that shed no tears for the mindless drones put out of their misery because they couldn't accept "the reality" that select few unplugged knew.  The heroes are not so heroic if thought of from another angle.

This whole diatribe does bring to mind one of my favorite scenes from Clerks (embedded below) where they discuss the morality of killing the contractors that were likely hard at work on the Death Star when the rebels blew it up for the second time.  I still argue that the Knight and Day federal agent isn't in the same category plumber on the Death Star or the roofer working for the mobster.  But it probably does work for the employees of the Rupert Murdock-analog in Tomorrow Never Dies and his Fox News-like organization.

This blog post is sponsored by Cybus Industries.