The action movie Quentin Tarantino accused of false advertising: “You’ve got to give me what I paid for”
Misleading marketing has been the scourge of the film industry for a long time, and it was a bugbear Quentin Tarantino had over three decades ago when he was left less than impressed after the movie he was sold wasn’t quite the one he got when he saw it on the big screen.
The current trend is for musicals to cut their trailers together in such a way that they aren’t presented as musicals at all, an issue that left a lot of people disappointed when they discovered Joker: Folie à Deux was a drastic departure from its predecessor, but the issue runs much further than comic book sequels.
Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling’s Drive was sued over its promotional materials painting it as something it wasn’t, but Tarantino’s major problem was indicative of what he called “an example of uptight American action movies” that refuse to paint their heroes in even the most subtle shades of grey.
The filmmaker is no stranger to antiheroes or turning figures who exist on the wrong side of the law into sympathetic, identifiable, and on the odd occasion undeniably cool cats the audience roots for, and he hates it when studios decide the best way to avoid any protagonist from being viewed in a negative light is to manipulate key scenes to their advantage.
Tarantino’s case in point was Phillip Noyce’s Patriot Games, the first outing for Harrison Ford as Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. The good guy thwarts a terrorist attack and kills one of the bad guys, who turns out to be the brother of Sean Bean’s primary antagonist, Sean Miller. In retaliation, he sets out to ruin Ryan’s life, forcing his wife and daughter into a car accident that leaves them seriously injured.
Not best pleased with a job half done, Miller and his team infiltrate Ryan’s house to end their feud once and for all by murdering the ex-CIA agent and his family. Tarantino was promised a story about unrepentant revenge, and he couldn’t hide his frustrations at Patriot Games for failing to deliver.
“It’s supposed to be a revenge movie,” he railed to Dennis Hopper. “And as far as I’m concerned, if you’re going to make a revenge movie, you’ve got to let the hero get revenge. There’s a purity in that. You can moralise after the fact all you want, but people paid seven dollars to see it. So you set it up, and the lead guy gets screwed over. And then, you want to see him kill the bad guys with his bare hands, if possible. They’ve got to pay for their sins.”
Ford’s Ryan doesn’t get revenge, with Tarantino furious at the cop-out that saw him accidentally kill Bean’s Miller instead of straight-up murdering him in retribution. “If you want to deal with morality after that, that’s fine,” he continued. “But you’ve got to give me what I paid for. If you’re going to invite me to a dance, you’ve got to let me dance.”
Patriot Games neither gave him what he paid for or let him dance at the dance he’d be invited to, which is why he felt to call the film out for its uptight sense of black-and-white moralising.
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