For one reason or another (maybe one reason in particular), Die Hard director John McTiernan hasn’t been around much these days. He made what is arguably one of the best action movies of all time, and though he’s had some reasonably big hits since then, people aren’t exactly screaming for the next John McTiernan feature. Thankfully for him, then, a recent interview he gave is definitely going to get him some attention from the people making today’s biggest action movies—though it probably won’t be the good kind.
The interview was with France’s Premiere (via Screen Rant), and though the full thing is more of a general chat about McTiernan’s thoughts on filmmaking, it does touch on his opinions of some recent blockbusters. For one thing, he really liked Argo, but he dismisses Mad Max: Fury Road as a “corporate product” (and even gives it a “pfff”). Continuing on that trend, he says he hates most movies “for political reasons” and adds that comic book adaptations “are films made by fascists” to convince children that they’ll “never be important enough.”
He believes the Captain America series is the worst offender of this, explaining that “the cult of American hyper-masculinity is one of the worst things that has happened in the world during the last 50 years” and that “hundreds of thousands of people died because of this stupid illusion.” Because of that, he doesn’t understand how anyone can “watch a movie called Captain America.”
Now, his assertion that the whole Toby Keith-style “America is the best and fuck y’all if you disagree” attitude is dangerous isn’t especially controversial outside of a Republican campaign rally (or a Toby Keith concert), but to pin that on the Captain America movies seems pretty dismissive. Plus, the whole Captain America origin story is that a regular guy becomes special, he’s not born special. Depending on how you look at it, that’s not all that different from John McClane being a regular guy in Die Hard. One of them has the Super-Soldier Serum, and the other has that trick where you make fists with your toes.