Hillary Clinton’s marketing team seems to be trying to paint its opponent—a man who invented the nickname “Little Marco” and chose “You’re fired!” as his catchphrase—as an unlikable bully. In doing so, they got their crack team of video editors to splice together some of Donald Trump’s greatest hits from the campaign trail, along with quick clips of the most hateable bullies from the last several decades of cinema.
If this spot looks familiar to you, it might be because you saw it—or a montage very similar to it—playing at the Democratic National Convention. Or maybe you just had a tough childhood.
Partisan politics aside, this seems to be a pretty effective piece of persuasive filmmaking. It’s no wonder that Clinton’s team unleashed it in the final weeks of the campaign. If there’s any criticism to level at it, it’s that it seems to imply that William Zabka’s character Johnny Lawrence is the bad guy in The Karate Kid, when it’s pretty much accepted fact now that Ralph Macchio’s Daniel LaRusso is the true sociopathic villain of that movie.