Introcide

Introcide n. The killing of assorted bad guys in the first ten to fifteen minutes of an action flick, just to establish the main character's fundamental deadliness.

I always feel kind of sorry for introcide victims. After all, they're villains too. They too must have dreams of world domination. They too must have finely honed personality disorders and suitably psychotic behavior tics. They too must have spent years of deprivation and / or depraved violence getting to the point where they're a real threat to society / mankind at large.

But do they get to show us any of this? No! Five minutes after the movie starts they've been scotched out, usually by as painful a means as possible, and before we've learnt the first thing about them. Just so the star of the film can prove his (or, occassionally, her) action hero chops. And if that wasn't bad enough, they don't even get to put up a proper fight, because the whole point of this opening scene is to show how uber-cool the hero is, and it wouldn't do if he had to actually break into a sweat to get rid of these bad guys.

[I made the mistake of watching Hancock over the weekend [1] - which, as it turns out, is one of the most interesting superhero films I've seen in a while for the first 45 minutes, after which it rapidly deteriorates into a kind of X-men meets City of Angels whose central revelations are that a) Married people are boring and b) Will Smith really is God's Gift to Mankind. Like we didn't know that already.]

[1] I know, I know. But this is what happens when you go to the theater to watch Sex and the City [2] and don't bother to notice that the show's at 10.25 pm not 10.25 am.

[2] Not that I particularly want to watch Sex and the City. It's just that I have such a stinging review of it all composed in my head, and I feel I should at least watch the film before I post it.