>Has anybody noticed in this type of movie that the bad
>guys are often ex-CIA/Special Ops gone mercenary,
>often after engaging in some sort of fictional but
>historically-based viciousness? I'm thinking of the
>CIA heroin smugglers in Lethal Weapon, the
>ex-"advisors" to the Latin military dictator in Die
>Hard II... There was another one that involved Air
>America...
It's an old theme that comes from the hard-boiled detective stories, as well as cowboy genre. It reinforces individualism in the u.s. the problem with institutions is not the logic of the institution itself, the problem is the 'bad apple'. at the same time, the main character in LW is actually not unlike the bad guy. both are rebelling against their respective institutions, bucking the system, the lone cowboy who always has to do things differently than the sargeant (or whoever) wants, cause otherwise it wouldn't get done in plodding bureaucracy. etc. etc. IOW, the bad guy rejects institutions the wrong way, the good guy rejects them the right way.
vanneman and cannon write about it at length in ... some book. :) I'll look it up if you'd like.
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