There’s something about an action flick. It’s simple. It’s a fun fight to the end. Viewers know that the good guy is going to struggle, but he’ll defeat the bad guys. 

Action movies weren’t made to be pretentious Oscar-worthy works of silver screen art. They’re not made to over-examine life like a flowery poem. They’re supposed to be a fun ride. That’s it. And maybe support the values of freedom. 

But action movies in this political climate smell like cheap Hollywood cologne. Even the good stuff reeks of wokeness.  

Hollywood wokeness saturated the majority of the movie industry in 2016. Things got so absurd that eight years later, even Snow White somehow got a tan. But something else happened along the way. Americans got so sick of being preached at that they don’t recognize subtle programming anymore. 

If a movie dials back the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), suddenly, people are desperate to praise it. Just so long as the script doesn’t blame climate change, sexism, transphobia, or racism for everything bad that happens, people are relieved. 

But the propaganda existed long before 2016. In the 1980s, family movies like Harry and the Henderson’s were spreading anti-gun propaganda, making hunters the bad guys and Bigfoot a giant soy boy vegan. It was absurd and silly, so parents didn’t say much about it.

The 90s cartoon The Iron Giant also has undertones of anti-gun propaganda.

After all, these are just movies, right? 

There’s no harm in teaching American children that hunting is bad, unless there’s a supply chain disruption during a drought and the only thing to eat is that squirrel in your backyard, right? 

And who cares about teaching future generations to honor their Second Amendment rights? They don’t need those. If a woman is being raped, she should just call the police and let them send the perpetrator on his way. And we can’t have those pesky American people packing enough ammo to protect themselves from a tyrannical government, our government would never turn on its people like nearly every governing body has done across countless countries all throughout history….

How about Terminator 2? That’s the action genre. Everybody seems to love that move and overlooks Sarah Conner’s monologue about how a robot is a better father than any man can be because robots won’t get drunk and abuse their children.

Demeaning fathers and their hard work in a movie with a badass chick who is literally raising a savior boy is a bit contradictory. We all know that fatherlessness doesn’t easily raise heroes. Neither do the women who bash men as they raise boys who will become men.

But the 90s were full of “girl power” and filled with content that led to the “everything a male does is toxic” society we’ve experienced in recent years. It was the precursor and we ate it up.

Everything we feed our brain matters. The books we read, the movies we watch, the music we listen to: all of it shapes how we think and act. That’s why advertising companies spend billions to shove their messaging down our throats. It’s also why corrupt politicians wish to fund non-government organizations that hold sway over American media.

In recent months, two Hollywood conservative-ish dudes promoted their “non-woke” movies, but both were not free of DEI or propaganda. They just dialed it back a bit. Maybe the California water is still in their systems, or they’ve been in the game so long they don’t know what a fun action flick is supposed to look like anymore, but both Flight Risk (Directed by Mel Gibson) and A Working Man (co-written by Sylvester Stallone), dropped the ball for conservative audiences seeking a fun woke-free flick. 

Flight Risk offered a cool premise. It has some fun scenes, but the female main character spent too much of the movie crying, which is never fun for action/suspense, and her objective was protecting a wimpy soy boy while fighting a crazed killer (Mark Wahlberg was terrifyingly good in this role). More woman power! Women can beat up dudes, even Mark Wahlberg, didn’t you know that? 

This can be overlooked with the idea that she may have had some intense training and lots of leverage, but the weirdest part of the movie was a forced love interest. The female main character is on the phone trying to figure out how to fly and survive this insane situation, and the man helping her is hitting on her… Instead of being annoyed, she’s flattered by this. How many women are searching for love when they’re trying to fly a plane? Add in the fact that the dude on the phone had an obvious Indian accent and it just felt like diversity points. It was weird and unnecessary and just didn’t fit anywhere. 

In A Working Man Jason Statham did what he does best. He kicked ass and put on a fun show. This was much better-conceived and played out pretty well. But it was still a DEI movie. 

There is nothing wrong with real organic diversity. America is a melting pot. It always has been and hopefully always will be. BUT, in the first scene, when Statham is talking about the job on the construction site, the crew is a joke. The camera strategically displayed women, especially the black woman worker, multiple times. Because we have to show how diverse construction sites are, who cares about reality or ability? 

Any viewer who has been on construction sites knows that most construction workers are white men and black dudes. The one female worker is usually in the office.

Why? 

Not because the industry is sexist, but because women don’t generally want to work in construction. It’s dirty, loud, and painful to be out there all day in 100-degree weather. 

In addition, the evil Russians were the bad guys again, like they have been in action movies for about 50 years now. It’s a trope, so that’s not an issue, except that as soon as the movie revealed that Russian mobsters were the villains, a giant mural with the word Ukraine showed up in the next scene. 

Like, really? Was that really necessary? No. It was politics vomiting all over what could have been a really great movie.

Then we get into more fun DEI stuff. Good writers get to know all the players, right? So why was an underground human trafficking ring run by Russian mobsters the most diverse element of all. Apparently, Russian mobsters love working with white trash biker gangs who are somehow run by a big black thug who has a Chinese girlfriend. So nice of them to think globally and cover most every demographic in their crime ring. 

But again, reality knows that bikers run with their own kind. Not Russians, and not thugs who have Chinese girlfriends.

Diversity works when it’s real. The Hispanic construction workers didn’t seem out of place in the movie because the company that Statham’s character worked for was owned by a Hispanic family, so that made sense. 

Overall, A Working Man was much more fun than Flight Risk, but it lacked that extra umph that comes from sincere writing. The movie industry needs to work on giving original writers a shot and sending DEI tools out the door. Natural organic diversity exists and is easily written into stories when writers really know what they’re doing, but lumping black dudes into a Russian mob ring is laughable. 

But so long as there’s not a bunch of trannies or ghey love scenes, people will say it’s not woke. Because everyone is so hungry for a fun movie devoid of politics. So, who knows what will be promoted as a “based” flick next?    

-American First Magazine Editor: Jessica Marie Baumgartner