Russian Villains in Western Movies -- A facebook entry

John Brown

1 hr · Edited · 

Russophiles/Russophobes: If you're is interested in the topic of how the Western film industry depicts Russians (as we know, usually in a very negative light), I'd suggest the Liam Neeson film, Taken 3 (2015)http://www.foxmovies.com/movies/taken-3, produced by Twentieth-Century Fox and directed by the French-born Olivier Megaton. While I should have been engaged in a more serious activity, I saw it the other day on video and found the Russian villains so utterly despicable as to have certain crude charm and (how to put it) "soft power." The best scene by far is when Neeson (ex-government operative Bryan Mills) gets is a gun fight with russkii hoods in a liquor-selling LA store. Pure mayhem. And does the glass fly!

Taken 3

Liam Neeson returns as ex-government operative Bryan Mills, whose life is shattered when he’s falsely accused of a murder that hits close to home.

FOXMOVIES.COM

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  John Brown [response to a kind friend] Good point ... . Yes, the Russians in the film with their crazy tattoos and shaven heads (and one of the them -- their facially pockmarked supreme boss, a former Afghan special sluzh vet -- shooting at Mills with a submachine gun while he [the boss] is in his underpants after his sexy soap bath with two beautiful women is interrupted by Mills crashing into his top-floor headquarters in LA) -- actually seem more "human" that the Very Cold, Calcultating Really Bad American Guy who (evidently) stole Mills's wife (and then murdered her for 14 mill insurance) and is about to abduct Mills's daughter. smile emoticon And when one of 'em russkiis (about to shoot himself in the mouth after Mills beats him up in the liquor store) responds to Mills's Russian sentence (I paraphrase from memory), by saying "you can't even speak Russian" ... I thought: not such a bad, "anti-Russian" movie after 
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