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.
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.