Classic Action , Its Violent, But Sometimes Its Nice To See The Bad Guy Get Exactly What He Deserves

What feminine pleasure, to relax in a dark theater, bottle of raspberry fizzy water in hand, and luxuriate in a real woman’s movie, redolent with meaningful dialogue like:

“Crawl out from under that rock where you’re hiding, and I’ll drive a truck up your - !”

Yes, I am referring to the latest installment in that classic women’s movie series, “Die Hard.”

Sure, I like traditional chick flicks, with their period costumes, dewy love scenes and British accents. But for some reason I also love a solid action movie, with good guys who surmount insurmountable odds and bad guys who get chopped to pieces in helicopter blades.

I discovered this quirk in my movie tastes at the first “Die Hard,” which left me with a pounding heart and a sense of glee at the sight of a man plunging to his death from the top of a high-rise office building.

By “Die Hard 2,” I was unable to contain myself. When Bruce Willis, lying ambushed and bloody on an airport floor, kicked on the switch to the moving sidewalk, which then brought the gun that had been out of his reach right to his hand, which he then used to blow out the bad guy’s brains, I yelled, “Yeah!”

My husband looked at me with a mixture of respect and alarm, but I had discovered the thrill of cinematic catharsis. By the time “Under Siege” came out, I was unflappable even by such sights as a bad guy getting impaled by a steel beam.

“Cool,” I murmured appreciatively.

It is perhaps an unusual taste; many women are repelled by the violence in action movies, according to Barbara Scharres, director of the Film Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

She considers that unfortunate.

“There’s such a wimpy, head-in-the-sand attitude, like, ‘Ooh, I don’t like movies where bad things happen and the people get shot up,”’ she said. “They can’t discern between gratuitous violence and violence that is part of the art.”

The attraction of a classic action movie, she said, lies in the appeal of a morally simple world in which problems have a simple, viscerally satisfying solution - and the hero feels free to act on the violent impulses that most of us suppress.

“There is no denying the fact that watching well-choreographed violence has a kind of cathartic effect,” she said. “There’s a kind of satisfaction, a clean finish to things, when you blow everything up.”

Satisfaction, and even pleasure. It feels good to see evil punished. It is the perfect antidote to reality.

In the real world, horrific things happen to innocent people, and we are helpless. An infant is killed, shaken and hurled down because she cried during the basketball championship finals. There is no hero to swoop in to protect her, or at least avenge her.

But wouldn’t it be nice if there were?

Sometimes, a girl just wants to spend a couple of hours in a place where sweaty heroes with attitude strain movie budgets and credulity performing impossible feats in order to fight evil; where evil is simply evil, and not something more complex and thus less amenable to revenge fantasies; where good always triumphs, and evil is always punished.

You can’t get that sort of thing in real life, which is where you want it most.