I watched Fast Five on a Sunday morning. The place was packed with a lot of people who desired not to pay full price for the experience, thus made their own in the movie theater. I enjoy attending movies in the morning or early afternoon. Typically, the crowd is less, people actually watch the film and don't talk. Or there are so many empty seats that it makes it a truly good theater experience for me.
Fast Five is about cars, destinations and a goal. That's about it. They have characters who don't really say a lot. When they do talk, it is all about the goal. They are in a location which has a few references to, but if they were in Moscow rather than Rio, it would be the same. Because the goal is all that matters. And the cars.
Does that make it a bad film or bad writing? Not necessarily because the goal is compelling. The goal has to have more than just to "steal money." It has to have "compounding revenge," if that is a term. Of course it is. I just made it up.
Compounding revenge is where everything builds until there are so many reasons to gain revenge that there is obviously no other avenue but to commit murder and kill the SOB in order to gain it. I don't have a problem with that. However, the antagonist must be so much of an evil bastard who has committed so many acts against the protagonist and his friends that there is no other solution.
In Fast Five, the drug lord antagonist owns the cops. He will not be arrested for any crime. Including murder, which he commits in his office without any suggestion of repercussion. The antagonist orders several of the protagonist's group killed. This includes a secondary antagonist called "Hobbs" (The Rock DSS Agent) who has his entire team ambushed, slaughtered by a drug lord antagonist's militia. The actions are so decisive by the drug lord that Hobbs transforms from a secondary antagonist into a secondary protagonist. Hobbs now seeks revenge for his slaughtered team.
Too many stories appear to have one main bad guy, who does some stuff. And then there is the protagonist, who fights back. That is a simple goal storyline.
A compounded revenge storyline takes that but leaves the antagonist but with one option to defeat him/her. Death. That is the only way that the sun comes out the next day, people run along the beach and there is a happy ever after.
The secondary protagonist has to find a way to keep their morality while not superseding the storyline of the main protagonist. Usually, if there is cold-blooded murder, it is committed by the secondary protagonist who doesn't think twice about committing the act. If the main protagonist kills the main antagonist, it must be where the antagonist is about to kill them (thus self-defense) or by accident (antagonist falls out of a place while protagonist attempts to help save their life).
That's the way that audiences receive good versus evil in character. If a protagonist attempts to be too evil and just killed them in cold-blood, people do not identify with the character. People like to believe that there is a separation between the good guy and the bad guy in terms of how they would deal with each other.
The characters do just enough to be sorta believable. Do I believe the physics work for what any of these characters do? No, but you have to suspend believability at a certain point when dealing with fiction. Otherwise, wouldn't it have been attempted before by a real person? That is why the goal supersedes anything else. The goal is all that matters because it insulates the character from being too important.
Writing is about patterns of human development. It is about whether a goal is so important that a person would risk life or limp for it. That's also why most movies or books that attempt to place a robot as the main character fail. Why? Because I cannot fully comprehend that a robot actually feels. In most cases, it is their programming which has told them "feelings." This type of programming could be erased, thus you would be with an uncaring robot which used to have emotions.
When humans have a goal as the storyline, it is because that goal is the end-all. One last job before we disappear forever. We have to do this, otherwise the world explodes. We have no other choice in the matter. All of the clichés which characters must showcase in order to prove that the goal is the most important thing there is. All of the characters stop everything else they are doing in order to function for the sole purpose of achieving the goal.
A film which is evidence of compounded revenge would have to be Death Wish. You have a man who has lost everything; wife (catatonic), daughter (raped, murdered) which leads him to the believe that his goal is to seek revenge on the criminal element. He is helped by way of a gun owner who packs a handgun in the main character's luggage as a surprise (this was a total different era where you could bring handguns on airports).
The main character attempts to achieve his goal, almost chickens out, and ends up killing a criminal who was going to kill him. This situation forces the main character to realize that he has the ability and the right to murder people who are bad, because it is "self-defense." This is necessary in order to keep the audience on his side during the entire film. One of the funnier parts of the film is how the public opinion polls are on the main character's side, considering his actions to be just, right. Same thing happens with the Dirty Harry films.
In real life, a cop walking around with a .44 magnum who shoots criminals would be arrested. There would be inquest hearings, public outrage. Anyone who wants to see police shooting common folk should go to Spokane (it's all the rage the last few years here). But in Dirty Harry, the antagonists are so bad, so cruel, that it is exactly necessary that Harry shoot each one of them. Apparently, handcuffs are something Harry carries with him (but he always has his gun loaded with six bullets). Harry encounters some of reality with the way the Scorpio killer in the first film attempts to manipulate the system.
But audiences enjoy fascism when it comes to dealing with bad guys. Screw trials that make get the bad guy off. It's a technicality in a trial that rules all evidence against Freddy Krueger to be null and void, thus he is released from custody, free to murder children. In order to stop this, a mob of citizens "take matters into their own hands" and set fire to his hideout, burning him to death in the process. What if Freddy Krueger was turned into a protagonist? Re-imagine "A Nightmare on Elm Street" as "The Elm Street Dreamer."
Freddy Krueger lives in an idealized home with a wife, child. Two cops manipulate the system in order to close a case of child murders. They seize what they term as "evidence" against Krueger, with a prosecutor who indicts Krueger for murder. The public is outraged, but the evidence is circumstantial at best. Krueger has to fight the media, people have taken his child from him and placed her in child protective services. His wife has left him.
Krueger has nothing, but is approached by a lawyer who says he can help get Krueger off. The lawyer goes to court with a lot of evidence, seeing that the cops have done several illegal things to gather evidence they have pinned on Kruger. There is a mistrial, Krueger is let free and several of the victims' parents swear revenge on Krueger. He is burned to death by a unruly mob. But then, somehow, he wakes up in teenager's dreams as the bogeyman.
He realizes he cannot seek revenge on the parents. But he can kill their children. He attacks them in a source of compounded revenge because each family involved has their own hypocrisy. Their own secrets to hide. Some of the kids are criminals. Others are doing things they shouldn't. Krueger has to be forced into service while searching for the real Elm Street killer. He finds out that one of the cops who tried to send him away for life was the real killer. In the end, he destroys the cop, but finds that his name will always be sullied. Compounded revenge comes with a price.
One of the best things to do for a writer is to "flip" a story written by another person. Imagine it changed in a different way. How would it have been if Randle McMurphy had been the evil patient in One Flew Over The Coo-Coo's Nest and Nurse Ratched had been the good nurse attempting to keep him from having the other patients. This helps create an alternative world which challenges the writer to make their stories universal by seeing the other side of how everything "might have been."
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