MovieChat Forums > Visioneers Discussion > What I'm trying to figure out is...

What I'm trying to figure out is...


What does a action film commercial, where a man is torturing an old woman, have to do with anything other than to show the audience you can be shocking in the same way horror directors dig up the old torturing cat trope every so often. I guess how, we're losing our empathy as a society? I don't know, they could have found a way to express this without being so depraved, but I guess they weren't intelligent enough to figure that out.

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Well now that I've gotten over the initial shock of that scene, I feel I agree with the message. However there are ways of communicating it without being so crass. Maybe dark comedies are about shocking for shock's sake, I don't know. This seems like it's more intelligent then that.

To be honest I'm tired with the endless portrayal of violence and smut on TV, and I'll admit watching Law & Order SVU really isn't much better than watching an action film where a helpless old lady is tortured. Things are pretty bad, when the only media you can watch that isn't hateful is cartoons, and even then they sometimes slip a othering message to kids in there. My apologies should whoever wrote this film read my above message, although chances are unlikely they would.

I tend to overreact, but it comes from a place of feeling troubled by injustice. Yet that's what the scene in my view was trying to communicate, we worship those like Jack Bauer from 24 who do injustice in order to create justice, how is that better than the people from Guantanamo Bay? It's a pretty sick world we live in, considering most adult media is about negativity.

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He also shoots a young school girl sitting on a bench...totally unnecessary for this type of movie.

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Seriously? It's supposed to be funny. The whole Mack Luster segment was for laughs.

Unless I'm mistaken about which part you're referring to, (which I don't think I am) then you're seriously overreacting. Torturing an old lady and shooting a toddler? It's too ridiculous to be taken seriously. Hence, the humor. But if I have to explain it to you, the joke isn't funny anymore.

Talking about smut on TV (which is true) is for an entirely different subject. As stated before, that whole sequence was meant for laughs.

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It was obviously a parody of the kind of stupid cop shows and action movies we get fed where some rough justice cop takes on mythical hordes of baddies bent on destroying "our way of life". Usually in these shows the protagonist is violent and bends the rules, implicitly taking extreme measures on our behalf. In fact these shows represent a kind of revenge fantasy we have about those we fear.

The show in the film was just a parody of this. Showing that the guy running around saving us from the ch-aos is the real danger.

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I thought the parody was hilarious, but I also see the OP's point that the old woman being tortured was out of place. Not because it was an old woman being tortured. It was out of place because the "commercial" deliberately showed the old woman in a pitiful light.

Unlike the other spots of violence which were fast, casual & supposedly deserved, the old lady was shown begging & pleading, and not in a ridiculous comedic way either. It lingered long enough to sink in personally.

The question is why would the "commercial" show it? If we are to believe that Mack Luster is a hero, why would the film show the hero preying upon an old lady begging for mercy and show it that way? Very strange. It would've been more appropriate if the old lady had been just a quick casualty, the way the others were shown. The idea being: if you're being satirical, you shouldn't come across as too sentimental otherwise you lose the comedy.

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