Ah, I would argue that you can’t break that tension because then you’re dealing not only with efficacy issues—every super smart hero should be working on climate change or energy, not supersuits or portals to negative zones—but with law and order and vigilantism, and why we don’t support them in real life generally.…

It’s been a long time for me too, but that sounds eminently plausible. I had a class on film Westerns once, and the professor put on a clip reel of gunfights, and then asked where we thought all the bullets that missed went. Usually a scene reveals a thought about violence, at least from the filmmaker. I don’t know if…

Yeah, I get that—it was my read of the shooting the bad guy’s wife too, which I viscerally thrilled with—it’s just sort of the point I discovered this wasn’t a vigilante take I wasn’t going to enjoy that much any more. I don’t even quite think he needed to lead them out or anything, just a call to the cops or…

I would argue for Tony Scott and Denzel Washington’s Man on Fire being at least a proto-Taken.

Taken hit my limits earlier, since when he’s still looking for the best friend but finds her dead, every other vigilante movie would nod to at least trying to help all the other sex slaves, but he just wandered out. I think that’s also where he had the nonsensical idea to chase a car on foot?