Most action movies use this trope pretty blatantly, especially those where the main character (who is an unparalleled bad-ass) doesn't want to get involved yet is forced to open can after can of whup-ass because the bad guy:
- gets him incarcerated on trumped-up charges
- is about to steal the main love-interest's family farm
- kills the protagonist's brother/sister/mother/father/favorite uncle
- is selling drugs and prostituting young girls in the old neighborhood
...and so on. Since action movies rely on sympathetic (if sometimes flawed) sidekicks and one-dimensional bad guys, the hero is always cheered by the common folk and relentlessly goaded by the bad guys. Many of the films include a scene or two where the hero gets to help out a needy local, because being a major-league ass-kicker doesn't mean you don't also have a soft side! In the more completely off-the-wall films, the main good guy will also save and adopt an adorable puppy. (That last one? Not a joke, I believe Steven Seagal threw that one into one of his movies, and he's as good an example of the trope as you'll find.)
- gets him incarcerated on trumped-up charges
- is about to steal the main love-interest's family farm
- kills the protagonist's brother/sister/mother/father/favorite uncle
- is selling drugs and prostituting young girls in the old neighborhood
...and so on. Since action movies rely on sympathetic (if sometimes flawed) sidekicks and one-dimensional bad guys, the hero is always cheered by the common folk and relentlessly goaded by the bad guys. Many of the films include a scene or two where the hero gets to help out a needy local, because being a major-league ass-kicker doesn't mean you don't also have a soft side! In the more completely off-the-wall films, the main good guy will also save and adopt an adorable puppy. (That last one? Not a joke, I believe Steven Seagal threw that one into one of his movies, and he's as good an example of the trope as you'll find.)
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
