I am really struggling to think of action movies from the last 15 years where the feminist agenda was so jarring that it ruined a movie that was centered on a male character. In Raiders of the Lost Ark (a film that's been referenced in this thread as being an example of a "good" Hollywood film) there is a sequence where a female character beats a large man in a drinking contest. Is this the ugly feminist agenda rearing its head and showing an improbable outcome? It's a shorthand for establishing her character as strong/tough. It's not asserting that all women can outdrink men--it's setting up expectations about her character.
You’re right that I should give examples, but my mind was half-bogged down in office mayhem at the time of writing. My bad. I agree with @
mudwater’s point about
Birds of Prey: it would have been a better film if it hadn’t banged on about strong women so much. I’m not talking about bad plotting or bad filming here: I mean the sheer amount of screen time girl power gets almost makes it a character in its own right.*
The scene from Indiana Jones that you mention did not jar with me. Marion is an avid drinker and participates in that contest regularly, why shouldn’t she be prepared and have tolerance?
It's hard to discuss this without naming specific films. What is a film from the last 10 years that injects "feminism" that is plot-irrelevant?
Some examples. In
Thor (sequels included), there is nothing wrong with Jane being a smart successful scientist. Even the fact she is clearly more intelligent than Thor plays well. But the part where she gets Thor’s hammer is, in my view, unnecessary, irrelevant and bizarre. Superheroes have attributes (like ancient Gods - the Thor-related section of the Marvel universe comes from Scandinavian mythology, specifically, sources like Snorri’s Prose Edda and Poetic Edda). Giving Jane Foster, who is not even super-human, Thor’s hammer is, in my view, not a logical plotting decision to say the least. That coming from someone who is no Marvel fan. I realise the female Thor thing hasn’t yet officially happened, but still.
Spy (2015) was all about providing a vehicle for an ‘unconventional’ female character. I know it’s not a film to be taken seriously anyway, but it’s just beyond the kind of suspension of disbelief one can reasonably hope for. The character had spent years behind a desk, yet she miraculously surpasses men within days of starting work as a field agent.
Wonder Woman (2017) - Gal Gadot is great, but the Amazon set up seemed artificial. Let’s look at it this way: how many films about men living in a colony without women are there? I don’t think prison films count, as that’s enforced celibacy, rather than one that the characters imposed on themselves. Why do they
have to live without men? It’s too extreme and draws attention to itself. The historical Amazons, while unlikely to have amputated their breasts as a widespread practice, did in fact intermarry with neighbouring tribes.
Atomic Blonde (2017) - I love Charlize Theron and it’s not a bad film, but why does she have to be
the best MI6 agent? Why can’t she just be a good one? It is also a strange idea that there can be a ‘best agent’ in any secret service organization. The Bond franchise distinguished between 0s, showing how the 00 agents were the top tier and the 0s were second best. It’s the superlatives. Why does a woman have to be the best? This is what I have in mind as the feminist message ‘jarring’.
A poster earlier said that in these films a "woman has always been hurt by a man in the past". I'm saying, yeah, that's how a lot of action films work! Women are hurt by men! The difference is that with a female lead she is often avenging her own crime as opposed to a male lead avenging a crime that was done to a woman he loved. Women being hurt by men is not a new idea in film--the newer idea is what if we actually followed the woman who was hurt instead of the man who was upset about it?
I agree with you here, and that’s why I brought up
Kill Bill. But films also work by exploring connections between people and how what happens to one person affects another. We can follow a woman who was hurt, no problem, but then it’s a one-sided film, whereas in
Quantum of Solace, for example, it’s not so much that we explore how Vesper’s death affected Bond, but how his self-esteem was affected by the realisation she had never loved him and was working to save her Albanian boyfriend all the time.
The Destroyer (2018) is a fine film that shows a woman avenging her love interest’s death, thus flipping the above formula. But also, women are less likely to react violently to the death of a loved one than men (unless they are SAS), it’s to do with hormones, societal expectations, and a number of other factors. I think a director has to be working triple-hard to ‘sell’ the idea that a woman would really do something violent in response to a crisis, as there are objective reasons why that’s uncommon (even brain chemistry and testosterone vs oxytocin). Not impossible, but uncommon. Hence when it’s done it seems more forced and jars more than it could have.
In any case, I do not mean to be antagonistic. You are quite right that one can choose what to watch and not to watch and that everything has a right to exist.