And something always felt a little off about it. It's a great movie with a lot of great scenes, but there's a woke element that just doesn't make sense, and makes the rest of the movie harder to buy into. Making Emily Blunt's character a FBI Hostage Rescue Team leader more or less breaks her character arc.
The first scene of the movie shows her leading an FBI tactical team on a raid against a drug house where she is involved in a firefight and kills a guy. In wokeness, this would be done to set her up as a girlboss who is never wrong, is always tough as nails, never gets overwhelmed, etc. But the rest of the movie shows her as a meek and timid woman out of her depth, getting shown up by men constantly, getting overpowered and totally at the mercy of a stronger man multiple times, and has her have an emotional breakdown at the end where she can't wrap her head around the situations she was just in.
That version of her character is actually more true to life, and a woman would get her ass kicked by men every time, would have an emotional breakdown, and would be out of her depth in every one of those situations. But the movie still tried to portray her as some tactical badass for like the first 10 minutes. It would have made more sense to make her some FBI financial crimes office worker type who was brought on as an advisor because of the whole money tracking plot point.
The movie wants to set her up as a badass, but then spends the rest of the time undercutting it. Those two things just can't really exist in the same character. If she really was competent enough to climb the ladder of the SWAT pipe hitting community to be a part of FBI HRT as a leader, she just shouldn't be such a meek pushover and basket case the rest of the movie. Granted a small woman like her actually doing that is laughably unrealistic, but if you're going to write the character to be that, it just doesn't make sense to turn around and have her not be that for the other 95% of the film.
I suspect perhaps in an earlier draft of the film, her character maybe was written to be some office working investigative type who was painfully naive about life threatening situations, but someone probably put a stop to that because it wouldn't be empowering enough, so they changed her into being some SWAT team hardass...only to have none of that characterization actually count for the rest of the movie.
I think it works if you view it as, on this side of the border she's badass because she's protected by the system. On the other side of the border, with the cartels, it's every man for himself. She's not being constantly reinforced and motivated.
And it's been awhile but I'm sure there's a scene with Brolin telling her he used her to get approval for his operation and no one would question her, because of her record. So she has the veneer of a girlboss in normie world, but in the cartel world she's just a girl.
You are mostly right about this. An HRT agent, especially a team leader, would probably be inclined to just ride with Delta like the Texas Rangers in the border raid instead of backbiting them constantly. They would also be immersed in CQB bro culture and wouldn't act like such a fish out of water. On the other hand, there is plenty of room for all kinds of idiosyncrasies within those organizations. There are cliques and people get frozen out all the time. So it's implausible, but not quite impossible.
That's what I'm saying. While the movie is fictional, it is not fantastical. It is meant to be engaged with as if it is the real world. And in the real world, for one to have risen up to the point of being an HRT team leader, this automatically implies a backstory of years of training, experience, successful prior operations, and qualifications.
Now making a woman an HRT team leader is itself a laughable premise, but if you're gonna write that, it means there has to be a hell of a good reason for that to be the case if you want me to buy into the premise. And then the movie spends the rest of the runtime showing us there would not have been a good reason for it, and a woman of her emotional fragility would like never have made it into tactical operations at all.
For reference, in the real world, the FBI's HRT has about 150 tactical operators and 0 are women. So if you wanna sell me on the premise that in this fictionalized version of the real world, this one chick somehow was good enough to get in and get promoted to leadership, she sure as hell better act like it. And the movie does not do that.
The point of her character is the fact she is supposed to be someone who is capable and strong, but in the world of cartels and blackops she is facing something more dangerous and evil than she can handle and it breaks her.
It could have been a male character and it would play out nearly identical. I would venture part of the reason they made it an attractive girl is so the audience would feel her being in danger more acutely.
She definitely coal burned her nig coworker.
I mean I have the first 10 minutes here and she was the only one in the raid that almost got her head blown off by a shotgun.
To me it's more she has a good track record but she is REALLY out of her depth going against the cartels, which is why she's just an asset for the characters to be able to do this operation against the cartels.
Well that's part of the fundamental flaw. The movie both tells us she is a tactical badass, and shows us she is not, at the same time, and expects us to believe both. If they wanted to portray her in a tactical situation but also incompetent, make her some liaison or local police officer or someone you wouldn't expect to be a badass like that. Telling us right away she is a SWAT team leader for an elite FBI tactical team automatically obligates the character to be competent. It's like telling us a character is an elite Green Beret Special Forces type, and then showing they don't know how to start a fire in the wilderness. You then have to ask, how did they make it through SF training? How did they even get here to begin with if they're that incompetent? The screenwriter giving her character that quality indebts the writer to validate that quality, which they did not. That's the flaw. They both wrote her to be, and not to be, something while demanding that both be true and untrue at the same time. It breaks the character.
Sounds like she was given a DEI promotion into a position she isn't suitable for on the hostage roasting team.
I'd say it's more saying your a tactical genius against one enemy but a complete novice against another.
It's like how in a conventional fight, America can be supreme as just look at the Gulf war. But against an insurgency like in Vietnam they really struggled and it was only late into the war when it was too late they adapted with groups like MACV-SOC.
It's like Aliens, you had these badasses the space marines with big guns and bravado and...they get their asses kicked by xenomorphs because they used the wrong tactics against them.
One thing to keep in mind with Vietnam is that after Tet, the Viet Cong as an organization was dead, most of its members were killed. After Tet, almost all units encountered were regular NVA.
At the tactical and the strategic level, the Tet Offensive was an unmitigated disaster for the VC, and they never recovered.
Of course, this didn't stop Walter Cronkite from saying the war was lost, back stabbing commie that he was.
It wasn't JUST Cronkite, the draft bringing in UNWILLING soldiers combined with orders that simply wasted lives (wasted lives taking a hill, only to abandon it the next day then have to retake it the next week) meant moral was EXTREMELY low in the army. The Tet offensive, on every other level was a failure, broke the final straws as how could they trust their command saying they were 'winning' when with ALL their intelligence agencies they let it happen in the first place.
Not only did you have the infamous 'fragging' but near the end you had squads refuse orders to attack points and officers too scared of their own troops in case THEY get fragged to force them to or report it. Vietnam is a textbook example of when the homeland isn't threatened, only use soldiers that volunteer for it and have clear objectives.
Dawg this is as retarded as a movie or game putting a female in a SEAL unit.
Women don't fucking make it there in the first place and EVERYONE knows it. It's broken from the start because this frail, 5'3" broad doesn't belong there.
That opening scene where they light up the spics at the border checkpoint was cool, but ultimately it's a forgettable modern movie.
i never watched it the first time and have no desire to.
I dated an FBI analyst she was great at her job then she got the idea to be a field agent. Her coworkers said she did great in trials and the indoctrination camp they do where they ship out to the main training school for a few weeks. But in the field she struggled she said there was way to many unknowns and it was overwhelming. She ended up working special cases out of some military base last I heard.
It might just be a nod toward the idea that guns are the great equalizer. A timid, 110 lb soft girl can take down a hulking brute of a man with a gun at her side.
I think you might be reading too much into this.
She was essentially a patsy to give the "FBI seal of approval" It's a land of wolves and she is no wolf.
Remember that the FBI has the "HRT" that is their premiere SWAT type unit, and it also has regional SWAT teams that handle relatively routine regional high risk stuff. I don't think it is ever implied that she is on the HRT team, and she is certainly not dressed like it, the FBI uses a particularly OD colored uniform for their SWAT units, and not black.
One other thing about her: she is the villain.
Sidenote: Emily Blunt has completely ruined her face with plastic surgery. What compels these women to do this?
I've always thought the movie was mediocre at best. I only watched to because it was constantly being hyped and in no way did it live up to it. It was a very standard, by the numbers movie. Maybe it's because I'm older or I've just seen better movies. I've seen B movies that were better.