John McTiernan, director of some amazing movies (Die Hard, Die Hard With a Vengeance, The Hunt for Red October, Predator), and former jailbird, has had a weird life. So it holds to reason that he may also have some weird opinions. This is particularly true when it comes to some of pop culture’s most beloved recent films.
McTiernan was interviewed by French outlet, Premiere, and came away with one of the craziest dismissals of the near-universally loved Mad Max: Fury Road you’ll ever read:
“Pffff … corporate product”
The only way to improve on that is if he had just grumbled “Mediocre!” He then goes on to rail on comic book movies in general:
“…these are films made by fascists”
And Captain America specifically:
“Captain America…The cult of American hyper-masculinity is one of the worst things that has happened in the world during the last fifty years. Hundreds of thousands of people died because of this stupid illusion. So how is it possible to watch a movie called Captain America?”
It’s possible the translation from French to English helped the poetry of this along a little, but the overall impression that McTiernan is a tiny bit grumpy is hard to shake. It’s one thing to be down on comic book movies, though I do wonder if he’s all that familiar with this iteration of Captain America, it’s another to throw out an absolute studio anomaly like Fury Road as corporate product. That seems hard to back up.
In any case, McTiernan is quite a character. He hopes to make a female-led action film in the future, and Fury Road opinions aside, I hope he gets to.
(via The Playlist)