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Deconstructed Character Archetype / Live-Action Films

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Deconstructed Character Archetype in Live-Action Films.

The following have their own pages:

  • Barbie: Ken, and the other Kens to a lesser extent, do this with Satellite Character and Satellite Love Interest. Ken only exists to be with Barbie, and her lack of interest brings up a host of insecurities and resentments. Meanwhile, he and the rest of the Kens are all stuck on the beach, doing nothing but hanging around while the Barbies do everything else. Once Ken comes back from the real world with a misinterpreted view of the patriarchy, he teaches it to everyone else and they use it to take over Barbieland.
  • The Breakfast Club takes a very good look at what many of the "stock" characters of teen movies (especially those of The '80s) would be like if they existed in real life, and what their real motivations would be like. Most American teen movies since have used elements of this film's deconstruction wholesale for their own characterization, to the point where, in many cases, what had once been deconstruction is now the norm.
    • Andy, the Jerk Jock, only behaves that way in order to fit in with the rest of the team and to impress his father, who raised him on stories of how he acted like that back when he was in school. He wishes that, one day, he'd get injured so that he wouldn't have to wrestle again, and thus never have to worry about living up to Dad's expectations.
    • Claire, the Alpha Bitch, is a Stepford Smiler who feels that her life is empty, and that her parents only use her as a tool in their endless arguments. And she's hardly the "queen bee"—in fact, it's peer pressure that essentially molded her into the snobbish bitch that she is, and she feels miserably forced into it.
    • Brian, the Stereotypical Nerd, hates how his parents have destroyed his social life by pushing him so hard to succeed, and is so obsessed with his grades that he tried to kill himself (or worse) after getting an F in shop class. His attitude is also little better than that of the "popular" kids that he hates, as shown when he talks about how he took shop class because he thought it was an easy A that only "losers" like Bender took (as opposed to his advanced math classes).
    • Bender, the Delinquent, is like that not because he's a bad person per se, but as a result of his tough, working-class upbringing and his abusive father, both of which have taught him that violence is an acceptable solution to problems. His badass image is also easily disarmed by Andy, even though he's armed with a knife.
    • Allison, the Creepy Loner Girl, intentionally acts crazy and theatrically in order to get attention, something her parents don't give her. She doesn't bother to hide her blatant thefts and eccentricities, and her withdrawn persona is actually just a ploy to get people to give her more attention.
    • Mr. Vernon, the Dean Bitterman, is scared that these kids are the next generation. Carl the janitor points out that neither of them were any different when they were young.
  • The Frighteners provides us with FBI Agent Milton Damners, who is the local Agent Mulder and paranormal case specialist... and he's a deconstruction of Mulder because the mental scarring of all the cults he's been sent to investigate and the torture he suffered within them has driven him insane (and it's also implied that the Bureau tossed him at them in a Surprisingly Elite Cannon Fodder fashion because he annoyed them with his "spooky" crap — which only got worse the crazier he became). He is the one member of law enforcement to fully believe that there is something supernatural going on, but he is completely useless because he believes protagonist Frank Bannister is the killer and keeps trying to piss him off and eventually kill him. Bear in mind that the real Mulder was The Profiler and would have probably tried to play along with Frank's story that a local Serial Killer has come back from the dead to continue his spree if nothing else but trying a Bluffing the Murderer ploy.
  • Full Metal Jacket's Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, despite being perhaps the most famous Drill Sergeant Nasty in cinematic history, is actually the trope gone wrong. His non-stop insults and abuses wear down the psyche of Private Pyle, whose signs of mental instability go unnoticed by the sergeant. When Pyle finally snaps and waves around a rifle, Hartman continues to shout at him instead of calling on other officers to detain him. Pyle promptly shoots him before killing himself. Like with Watchmen, this backfired enough that every drill instructor in fiction since has had the same personality, teaching style, and even usually voice as GySgt Hartman.
  • Funny Games:
    • Georgie's rage against the killers and escape from the house seemingly establishes him as a potential Kid Hero, but the fact that he is an inexperienced child going up against two psychopathic adults means that he is unable to meaningfully fight back.
    • Paul is seemingly a Fair-Play Villain as he decides to give the Farbers a chance to win against Peter and him. However, Paul then demonstrates his Medium Awareness by speaking with the audience, acknowledging that his "fair play" is actually for the audience's sake as killing the Farbers immediately will result in a short movie. Essentially, Paul has to deliberately handicap himself with Contractual Genre Blindness just so the story can continue like a normal Psychological Thriller would. This is proven to be the case when Paul later pulls out his Story-Breaker Power to win as the film is nearly over at that point and Paul consequently feels no need to maintain the pretense of fairness.
  • The Godfather: Michael Corleone, the Villain Protagonist of the trilogy, deconstructs The Don:
    • Part II shows how incredibly ruthless one has to be to run a criminal organization, to the extent that it will make you paranoid over time and cost you your family, friends, partners, and loved ones. It's certainly a stressful, unglamorous life.
    • Part III further emphasizes this point, particularly from the perspective of someone from the classic American Mafia like Michael. He is fully aware that times have changed; the American Mafia is in constant decline and many businesses that the classic Mafia ran are now legal, so legalizing would be the best way to ascending to a higher level. Clearly, people like Michael are stuck in the past. It certainly doesn't help that the most powerful "criminal" figures are not strictly gangsters, but rather white-collar criminals operating (mostly) within the law.
  • Laurie Strode. Having been the Trope Codifier for the Final Girl in Halloween (1978), three of the four alternate continuities served up by the sequels — the one created by Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, that of Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween II, and that of Halloween (2018)note  — offer their own versions of how her life turned out. None of them are pretty.
    • In H20, she changed her name and moved to California to escape the trauma of the events of the first two films. It wasn't entirely successful, as Laurie is now an alcoholic plagued by post-traumatic stress disorder who needs psychiatric medication. Michael coming back and following her causes her to finally snap, such that, at the start of Halloween: Resurrection, she's been institutionalized.
    • Most of Zombie's Halloween II consists of Laurie's downward spiral of nightmares, panic attacks, alcohol abuse, and insanity, her final mental breakdown coming when she finds out that she's Michael Myers' long-lost sister. In the theatrical cut, she was thrown in an insane asylum with the implication that she's now as crazy as Michael and has turned into the female version of her brother, while in the director's cut, she committed Suicide by Cop.
    • In the 2018 film, Laurie became eternally paranoid of being killed in her own home after the traumatizing events she went through. This turned her into a Crazy Survivalist living in a fortress of a home filled with traps and security systems, surrounded by a tall fence, and boasting an arsenal of weapons that she has spent many years training with in preparation for a rematch with Michael. She had actually hoped that Michael would one day break out of the asylum, just so that she could kill him. Her declining mental health has destroyed every relationship she's ever had; she's been divorced twice, and her daughter Karen (who was taken away by social services at the age of twelve) can't stand her and wants nothing to do with her. Laurie also seems to think Michael has a long standing grudge towards her and would come right after her if he got out but it becomes evident that Michael thinks nothing about her any more then of his other victims he has targeted and wouldn't have even gone after her if outside forces had intentionally put her in his line of view.
      • Halloween Ends itself is a deconstruction Invincible Villain for Michael Myers. After the four year gap of 2018 and Halloween Kills, age and injuries have more then ever caught up with Michael. Michael struggles against his victims and needs help. At one point Cory is even able to overpower Michael and steal his mask. By the time of the climax Michael is almost unceremoniously defeated by having a fridge fall on him, stabbed in the chest and have his throat and wrist slashed. For that matter Michael almost weakly and pathetically tries to grab for his mask when Laurie takes it off his face. The movie very much plays into the idea of despite the image surrounding Michael, he is just a normal man who can still be killed like any other person. This deconstruction is further solidified when they drive Michael's dead body around town to parade that he is just human before they dump his body into the grinder.
    • Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers: Tina comes across as a deconstruction of the Final Girl by showing what happens when the wrong type of girl ends up in that role. During the sequence where she enters Rachel's house looking for Rachel, Tina wanders and has a clear confused expression on her face the whole time. When she later leaves with Samantha, she casts a knowing look back at the house as if to indicate she knows something is wrong. The trouble is, Tina doesn't have the emotional fortitude or willingness to recognize the situation she is in until it is far too late, and she ends up dying in a Heroic Sacrifice to save Jamie that later ends up being a Senseless Sacrifice when Jamie gets abducted. So Tina seems to be aware on some level that she was heading into the role of the Final Girl but ended up rejecting it because she wasn't strong enough to handle it.
  • Gran Torino is towards Clint Eastwood crime movies what Unforgiven (above) was for Eastwood's western movies. Like many of Eastwood's gruff Anti-Hero personas, Walt is a curmudgeonly, irreverent Grumpy Old Man. However this attitude is shown to have alienated him from his family, who can't bear to deal with him because of it and he has no connection with anyone until he slowly forms a bond with Thao. When Thao and his family are bothered by his gangbanging cousin and friends, Walt's attempts at intervening and stopping the gang (like you would expect of an Eastwood movie) only make the situation worse. In the end Walt stops Thao from killing the gang members because Walt who had killed people during the Korean war, knows how much of a toll that takes on a person to live with that. Like Unforgiven the movie makes a point of showing how their is nothing glamourous about murdering a person no matter how just you think it is and to make that choice will haunt you. Walt instead of the usual type of solution you see in a Eastwood movie where he kills the gang members in some major gun fight instead defeats the gang members by tricking them into shooting him in front of a bunch of witnesses thus getting them sent to prison for good. This also doubles as a Surprisingly Realistic Outcome since there is no way Walt who is dying of lung cancer and even still a 80 year old man, is just going to somehow take out a whole bunch of arm gangbangers by himself.
  • Big Bob Carter from The Hills Have Eyes (1977) deconstructs the type of hero popular in cinema at the time: a masculine, often conservative and masculine man who acts as a defender of middle class values, with this archetype having been popularized by actors such as John Wayne and Charles Bronson. Like many of these characters, Big Bob is a cop and family man, but his masculinity is shown to be harmful to his family, and he's quite intolerant of anyone who isn't a traditionally masculine man; he consistently refers to minorities with hateful slurs and speaks of them with disdain, treats the women in the family as incompetent and emotionally abuses them, and constantly bullies his hippie son-in-law for not being a traditional man. Tellingly, he's also the first to die, specifically because he insisted on venturing into the desert alone because he thought he could handle the danger.
  • In a Lonely Place deconstructs not only the typical Film Noir protagonists, but also the majority of roles played by Humphrey Bogart, and shows how awful being that kind of person would be: Dixon Steele, a character who in any other film in the genre would likely be a Knight in Shining Armor style hero, is instead portrayed as The Friend Nobody Likes with possible mental illness. Tellingly by the end of the movie Dixon despite being proved of his innocence has still destroyed his relationship Laurel because she can no longer deal with his aggressive violent behavior.
  • Pai Mei of Kill Bill deconstructs the old kung-fu master character we've all seen in martial arts movies a thousand times before. Rather than being a good-hearted old man teaching self-defence techniques to the righteous; he's a racist, sexist, miserable old bastard who teaches deadly techniques to whackjobs and prospective assassins. His training methods amounts to torture and after he takes his cruelty too far one day against Elle Driver (who is just as psychotic as he is), she poisons his dinner that evening and kills him.
  • Scooby-Doo begins with deconstructing everyone's archetype which leads to their break up.
    • Fred is a deconstruction of The Leader. In this position he is given all the credit for stopping the ghost, even though his part was no bigger than the rest of Mystery Inc.'s. This leads him to come off as a pompous Jerkass to his friends.
    • Velma is a deconstruction of Smart Girl. While her genius does help solve the mystery, she's given no credit whatsoever for her part. Also, she's more aware of the rest of the cast's flaws and delivers it through Brutal Honesty, none of which is appreciated.
    • Daphne deconstructs Damsel in Distress. Her constantly getting captured gets her viewed as The Load by the gang and she's really sensitive about people bringing up her frequent kidnappings. After the breakup, she takes self-defense classes so she can rescue herself if needed.
    • Shaggy and Scooby deconstruct Odd Friendship. Shaggy and Scooby both try their best to keep the gang together, but due to their lack of common ground with the gang, the attempt fails and they spend the next 2 years of their life unfulfilled.
  • Scream, as a satirical post-modern "meta" take on the Slasher Movie genre, has its fair share of this.
  • David of Shaun of the Dead deconstructs:
    • The Dogged Nice Guy. He always fancied Liz and never got over rejecting him for Shaun in high school, so he began dating Liz's friend Dianne to position himself as a Nice Guy ideal boyfriend and belittling Shaun even though Liz is happy with him (she just wishes he was a little more active). When the Zombie Apocalypse hits, he is nothing but a contrarian millstone and even refuses to come to Shaun's aid when he is attacked by a zombie (excusing it with "I didn't want to cramp your style"). It comes to a head when things really start going to hell for the group in the Winchester. Dianne call outs David by revealing she knew all along that he was just a manipulative predator trying to get close to Liz, which recontextualises his previous actions (essentially, let Shaun get killed by a zombie and then seduce the mourning Liz). Then, he loses his temper after Shaun punches him and tries to shoot Shaun, which everyone else treats as a Moral Event Horizon, dashing any remaining hope he had of getting with Liz. He is Devoured by the Horde not long after, and nobody feels bad for him.
    • The "jackass who has a point" normal to comedy and horror films (example of the latter: Harry Cooper). He is too much of a jerkass with not enough of a point, prioritizing insulting Shaun and his ideas just for the sake of being a contrarian and the aforementioned obsession with Liz that everyone can see or supplying different ideas and completely undermines himself. By the final act, the most precise and venomous use of labeling him "a twat" is Liz being upset about, among many things, partially agreeing with what David is saying (namely that Shaun's mom is a Zombie Infectee and they need to shoot her, a responsibility he immediately hoists on Shaun).
  • As part of Unforgiven's Genre Deconstruction of Westerns as a whole, William Munny is a deconstruction of Clint Eastwood's earlier Western character(s), namely those from the Dollars Trilogy. The film examines in detail the viciousness and amorality of the archetypical Western outlaw, and finds the elderly Munny filled with guilt and self-loathing at the monstrous things in his past. When Munny reverts back to his old ways in the climax, it is less of a triumphant audience cheering moment and instead treated as a horrific thing.
    • English Bob can be seen as a deconstruction arc type of the heroic gunslinger. At one point there is a story he told his writer about how he killed a gunslinger named Two-Gun Corcoran in a duel to protect the honor of a woman he was harassing, only for Little Bill to reveal to the writer that the real story was that Bob (who was actually very drunk when he did it) only challenge Two-Gun Corcoran to a duel because Corcoran had sex with a woman Bob had liked. When it came time for the duel, Bob only beat Two-Gun Corcoran through the sheer dumb luck of Corcoran accidently shooting his foot and then having the gun blew up in his hand. He could also be one for the Remittance Man: Bob acts like a badass English nobleman adventurer but his posh accent slips up a few times when he's surprised or angry, plus all his exploits are revealed to be fabricated or deeply immoral; he is probably not a real nobleman and he'd be an Upper-Class Twit if he were.
    • Little Bill is a deconstruction of the typical town sheriff in a western story. He is trying to maintain peace in the town but his passive attitude towards Delilah's attack in the beginning is the whole reason the story kicks off and all the trouble that follows. He is also shown to be a vicious tyrant bully who abuses his authority.
    • The Schofield Kid is one for The Gunfighter Wannabe. He's just a jumped-up little hanger-on who throws around unimpressive Badass Boasts about how he's killed five men with the Schofield revolver he took his name from. He can't see or shoot for shit, and his kill count is a total lie. After killing Quick Mike, his first ever kill, he is driven to drink and cries, and leaves the film an emotionally traumatized shell of a young man. In early drafts of the script, he couldn't even live with being a murderer.
  • Many films have taken issue with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype
    • He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not: For the first half the protagonist appears to be a typically sweet, hopelessly romantic manic pixie dream girl, only for the film to reveal that she is in fact a violent, insane Yandere whose innocent romantic spirit is symptomatic of her complete and utter detachment from reality.
    • Annie Hall: The title character is a cheerful Bohemian, who turns out to be a spoiled, unfocused, pseudo-intellectual, neurotic child in an adult's body; a horribly broken person. Which gives her something in common with Woody Allen's character, who is likewise horribly broken, just in somewhat different ways.
    • Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Joel is instantly drawn to the quirky, free-spirited Clementine, but she warns him that he shouldn't expect her to "save" him and she's "just a fucked-up girl looking for her own peace of mind". Their relationship ends up falling apart when Joel learns the hard way that MPDG-ness often also means high maintenance and Clementine grows bored with Joel's more grounded personality. Joel sums up Clementine and the film's deconstruction of it during his tape recording for Lacuna:
      Joel: I think if there's a truly seductive quality about Clementine, it's that her personality promises to take you out of the mundane. It's like, you secure yourself with this amazing, burning meteorite to carry you to another world, a world where things are exciting. But, what you quickly learn is that it's really an elaborate ruse.
    • The Sterile Cuckoo: Pookie fulfills all of the requirements of a MPDG, including breaking the lead character out of his shell, but towards the end of the film it's revealed that she is much more damaged and vulnerable than anyone has expected. She completely breaks out of the traditional mold at the ending, where she and her boyfriend break up, and she is literally Put on a Bus.
    • Ruby Sparks: The titular character starts out as a completely fictional Wish-Fulfillment love interest in Calvin's book. When she becomes real, their relationship doesn't go as ideally as it did in Calvin's book/imagination because she turns out to have her own opinions and life separate from Calvin's and his attempts to control/rewrite her into the Satellite Love Interest he wants are depicted as incredibly creepy and possessive.
    • Fight Club: Marla Singer could perhaps best be described as what happens when the Manic Pixie Dream Girl grows up. Marla is dirty, living in poverty, and clearly suffering some form of mental illness, and gets into a fairly unhealthy relationship with Tyler. Marla actually infuriates the narrator because she simply doesn't care about anything. After The Reveal, Tyler/The Narrator is really a Gender Flipped version of this to Marla.
    • (500) Days of Summer: Summer Finn is seen as an MPDG by the protagonist Tom, who puts her on a pedestal as his ideal girlfriend, but his image of her soon clashes with the fact that she's an actual human being. Specifically, she's not interested in anything serious, and she eventually leaves Tom for another man.
    • Sunset Boulevard: Norma Desmond takes a lot of the symptoms to their logical conclusion, with the twist that the protagonist isn't interested. From the start it's clear that she doesn't have both oars in the water as she's living in a decayed Big Fancy House, deluding herself that she'll make a comeback with a terrible, Glurge-filled screenplay of Salome. She quickly bonds with the narrator, agrees to his commission him (to her disadvantage) and quickly throws his life into chaos, leading him to Character Development. But not in a good way.
    • The Korean version of My Sassy Girl: The titular girl's "quirky traits" tend to have harmful consequences and she definitely has issues and motivations unrelated to Gyeon-Soo and he later finds out she has been using him as a substitute for her dead boyfriend. Instead, he is the one who recognizes she is damaged and gains a strong desire to fix her.
    • I Love You, Alice B. Toklas: Nancy is a hippie that teaches protagonist Harold Fine to enjoy life and having all types of humorous romantic situations (which culminate with him becoming a Runaway Groom). The deconstruction is that, now that Harold is around Nancy for longer than a few (dope-filled) hours at a time, he is able to clearly see that she is a very shallow person and the hippie lifestyle is nothing more than a stoner hand-to-mouth existence that tries to sound spiritual. In the end he chooses to abandon Nancy and refuses to go back to his old life, finding them both empty.
    • Rantasmo has argued for May being a deconstruction of the archetype, in a manner not unlike (500) Days of Summer, albeit as a horror movie told from the Dream Girl's point of view. Adam and Polly are only attracted to May for her 'quirky' qualities that flatter their egos, but eventually, it stops being charming and May goes from quirky to just plain weird, causing them to leave her once they realize that they don't like some of the layers to her personality that come with her quirkiness... at which point, she goes from weird to outright terrifying. May's oddball nature is likewise a product of her inability to form real and lasting connections with others due to a lifetime of bullying, with the only 'person' she cares about being her doll Susie, itself a literally perfect, idealized image of femininity that she keeps in a glass box — ironically no different from how Adam and Polly fetishize her surface elements and ignore everything else about her. The film's trailer even starts out like it's for a Romantic Comedy, only to rapidly switch to horror halfway through.
  • Punch-Drunk Love deconstructs the typical Adam Sandler character. Sandler's character is, like always, antisocial, emotionally immature, and prone to uncontrollable fits of anger. Instead of that being a source of comedy, it leads to awkward, embarrassing situations, and the character leads a lonely, depressing life. Roger Ebert discussed this in his review of the film.
  • Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day is a deconstruction of the Action Mom trope. While very badass, it's out of necessity, as she's Properly Paranoid about robot assassins coming from the future to hunt her and her child. She is thus constantly training to keep herself in peak ability, as one mistake at the wrong time could cost her life. Additionally, her knowledge of her son John Connor as The Chosen One has deteriorated their relationship, as she's spent more time training him for his future military career than she has to caring for and comforting him. By the time they meet again in his pre-teens, he's uncertain whether she actually loves him or just wants him to live long enough to defeat the machines. Additionally, Sarah's attempts to warn of and ward off a robot apocalypse and overzealous preparation for the same have taken her to the logical conclusion: a padded cell in a mental hospital for the criminally insane.
  • The movie Heat is such a treatment of the Gentleman Thief stock character. Neil McCauley has the charm and all the connections, but he's painfully lonely, and won't get close to anyone for fear that the cops will be right around the corner. The one major job he's involved in goes terribly awry, and results in over half of his team being killed by the cops. MacCauley gets more violent as the film progresses, culminating in his revenge overriding his need to escape. He ends up proving his own adage right when he flees (and leaves his girlfriend) after he sees Vincent Hanna pursuing him, and winds up dead at the end of the film.
  • Inception is a deconstruction of the Determinator. The eponymous act involves placing a single, simple idea deep into an unwitting subject's subconscious - that they will never be rid of. This single idea will define them for the rest of their lives, and both the primary protagonist and antagonist demonstrate how it can backfire. Spectacularly.
  • The Social Network takes the Self-Made Man archetype that is idealized in American culture and puts it through the wringer. In a few short years, the main character goes from a nerdy nobody at Harvard who can't keep his girlfriend to the world's youngest billionaire with his creation, and gets everything that he could possibly want... but it's also heavily implied that a lot of people got ruined or otherwise screwed over in the process, that he possibly stole the idea for his website in order to get to that point, that his flawed personality traits are precisely what allowed him to rise to the top, and that, even with all his material wealth, he's no happier than he was before. And he still doesn't get his girlfriend back. This is hardly the first time that such themes have been explored - indeed, it's not even the first time that the film's screenwriter has done this.
  • The Hero (Cameron Vale) of the first Scanners movie deconstructs The Chosen One: he's the only "Scanner" with the power to stop Daryl Revok, he's an absolute psychic badass... and he is completely devoid of personality beyond his mission to stop Revok, which he has been raised to do by an (unknown to him) Evil Mentor.
  • Star Wars:
    • Anakin Skywalker's arc as The Chosen One in the prequel trilogy deconstructs Luke's arc in the original trilogy. Like Luke, Anakin is told at a young age that he has great powers, but eventually, he becomes extremely arrogant and distrusting of everybody around him, and he loses his friends and loved ones in his attempts to assert that power. Makes sense, since in-universe, Luke is in many ways Anakin done right. He even ultimately helps get Anakin back on track.
    • The idea of the Darth Vader Expy was deconstructed in The Force Awakens with someone who deliberately tried to be one: Kylo Ren. Ren only tries to copy Vader's superficial appearance and penchant for the Dark Side while lacking Vader's strength, maturity and discipline, which are largely responsible for making Vader such an admirable villain, he ultimately ends up as an inferior knockoff of the Dark Lord and feels insecure about it. For added irony while no clone, he is Anakin's grandson and Luke's nephew.
    • In The Last Jedi: DJ is a deconstruction of the Lovable Rogue archetype popularized within the series by Han Solo and Lando. DJ's a genuinely funny and charming guy, but ultimately he's a hardened criminal at heart and when the situation takes a turn for the worse, he has no qualms about selling out the heroes to the bad guys in order to save his own neck.
  • The Irish film My Name Is Emily deconstructs Cloud Cuckoo Lander. The titular character Emily Egan is one such girl. Except she's odd because her mother was tragically killed in a car crash, her father steadily broke under the strain and ended up in a mental hospital, and she's spent ages going in and out of different foster homes. Her quirkiness is off putting to everyone around her and is a mark of her utter detachment from reality.
  • Last Action Hero: Jack Slater is your typical 90s Action Hero. He's a nigh inverable, smart alik, witty, ripped, and badass cop... except he's sick of it. He tired of repeatedly surviving implausible, stressful scenarios while everyone around him dies, his son was murdered by his psycho arch-nemesis, his marriage is in shambles and he has a cashier at his drug store calling him at the police station so that his colleagues think he has a life and make everyone think his ex-wife still cares about him when she's already moved on without him, and he's depressed that his teenage daughter is obsessed with being an Action Girl and fears that she'll end up dying young and alone. He makes this very clear when he goes into the real world and blames the guy who gave him his face for everything wrong with his life.
  • The Last Seduction: Bridget is the Femme Fatale, running off with her husband's drug money before seducing another man to kill him for her. As the title implies, it takes the trope a lot further than other noir films, showing such a character would in fact need to be The Sociopath, and her mark an easily manipulable idiot.
  • High School Musical: Troy Bolton is the Big Man on Campus. The films show how much pressure everyone puts on him to be "the basketball guy" and the stress that results from it. Everyone berates him for having an interest in singing because that's not what guys like him are "supposed" to do. Part of his attraction to Gabriella is that she allows him to be who he is rather than what everyone expects him to be.
  • Stop-Loss deconstructs A Father to His Men by showing what happens when the man in question goes AWOL, and his troops have to fend for themselves because they're so used to depending on him. What's more is that it's shown the Father To His Men can still have problems of his own - such as PTSD and guilt over the numerous people he's killed.
  • Vertigo deconstructs The Lost Lenore. Scottie is so broken up over Madeleine's death that when he meets a woman who looks like her, he ends up forcing her to dress and do her hair like her. It's highlighted how disturbing such a thing is, and Judy begs Scottie to accept her as she is rather than his fantasy in a letter... but after thinking about it, she realizes Scottie is so obsessed about Madeliene that it's useless to tell him, and destroys the letter, letting Scottie invoke this trope and preparing a truly devastating Downer Ending.
  • Red Sparrow: The Femme Fatale and The Baroness are both deconstructed through the Sparrow training program: while other spy stories have showcased the woman that uses seduction as a weapon as one that is perfectly okay with being sexually open as long as she gets away with her mission objectives and is relentlessly dominating and "a natural", this film showcases that there's a whole lot of denigrating and even brutal sexual work involved in the training alone, never mind actually applying it on the field. The book version of the story actually has a Sparrow trainee committing suicide because she couldn't take the constant sexual assaults anymore.
    Dominika: [to Uncle Vanya] You sent me to whore school.
  • Mean Girls:
    • It deconstructs the Alpha Bitch with Regina George, emphasizing how one must be a Villain with Good Publicity and a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing in order to hold that role in an actual high school. She is utterly cruel, but she is also good at hiding her cruelty behind a glamorous, seemingly friendly image that has genuinely made her one of the most popular girls in school, such that Janis and Damian, the only characters who truly hate her and see her for what she is, are among the outcasts. In fact, as this video by The Take explains, her dominance of the school's social life is similar to how many real-life dictators exercise their power and fend off threats to their rule, and her downfall comes about through processes similar to those of dictators who are overthrown — complete with a direct comparison to Julius Caesar.
    • And while Regina becoming a Fallen Princess in the third act is treated as her rightful comeuppance, it comes at a terrible cost for the protagonist Cady, who had to start imitating all of Regina's worst qualities in order to knock her from her perch — a deconstruction of the hero who seeks to take down the mean popular kids. When the Title Drop comes, it's referring not to Regina and her friends, but to Cady.
  • In Kong: Skull Island, Packard is A Father to His Men and has moments where he does care for his men and takes each of their deaths personally, but right when his squad is about to sent home to their families, Packard (who has no life outside of combat) immediately accepts a highly dangerous mission without stopping to think about the men. From then on, especially after the first confrontation with Kong, Packard becomes obsessed with getting revenge on Kong, repeatedly and carelessly putting his men's lives at risk and leading to the deaths of many more. His search for Chapman becomes increasingly clear that it's not so much about Chapman's wellbeing but for the weapons at Chapman's crash site.
  • In the film version of Crazy Rich Asians, the socioeconomic differences between Astrid and Michael is what destroys their relationship. Astrid constantly tries to appease their rich family and continually downplays themselves to not embarrass/humiliate Michael. Meanwhile, he is constantly put down by her family and social circle for being a commoner and all that stress results in him cheating on Astrid.
  • The Rock: John Patrick Mason is a pretty cool James Bond Expy, isn't he? He's got everything! Played by Sean Connery? Check. Badass Deadpan Snarker? Check. Prone to one-night stands? Check. Skilled at escaping death through creative means? Check. Left embittered and cynical after being secretly held as a political prisoner for years because the consequences of international espionage finally caught up with him? Ch—wait, what? Sleeps around so much that he winds up with an illegitimate adult daughter who hates his guts? Uh...
  • The Shape of Water: Col. Strickland is a merciless dressing down of the protagonists seen in old school monster movies. He's a Standard '50s Father and devout Christian studying an anomalous creature. All of those qualities combine to create an amoral and downright sadistic bigot driven by a need for satisfaction his home life can't give him, and unable to recognize that the creature isn't the monster he believes it to be.
  • James Bond:
    • The Pierce Brosnan set of Bond films show a few reality checks on the franchise itself, namely the fact that 007 is openly described as "a relic of the Cold War" by the new M in GoldenEye. Later on, the Daniel Craig set films show what a cynical, lonely, paranoid, and broken man Bond is and has to be in order to do his job as a Professional Killer. In Skyfall and Spectre, they even start to question Bond's relevance in an era dominated by cyber-espionage. Spectre later reconstructs the Bond films, stating that yes, spies like 007 are still needed to do the reconnaissance that drones and technology can't do, particularly when such missions involve stateless entities and lone wolves now that the dragon that was the Soviet Union is defunct.
    • In Spectre, C/Max Denbigh deconstructs the Obstructive Bureaucrat trope, showing how the head of a government agency actively involved in shutting down MI6's operations and advocating for mass surveillance is later revealed to be on the titular Nebulous Evil Organization's payroll. Also, Bond and M's suspicions about the data feeds from the "Nine Eyes" surveillance project being used for darker purposes are proven correct, as C is using his position as a cover to give control of the program to SPECTRE, which would allow them to outwit their enemies.
    • Madeleine Swann, Bond's Girl of the Week in Spectre, returns in No Time to Die and shows what life for a "Bond girl" would be like after the adventure's over. Tying into the grittier portrait the Craig films paint of Bond as a secret agent, he comes to (wrongly) suspect that Madeleine is working for SPECTRE based on a mix of unfortunate circumstances and his own continued paranoia even in retirement, destroying their relationship. When they reunite five years later, Madeleine harbors a lot of ill will towards Bond for dumping her the way he did, especially since he's the father of her daughter Mathilde. It takes a lot for the two of them to trust each other again.
  • White Hunter, Black Heart deconstructs the Great White Hunter, especially when the character is an amateur rather than a professional hunter, and looks at the morality of hunting for a trophy rather than for food or for a living. Ultimately John Wilson has to decide if he can pull on the trigger on a magnificent beast for no more than a pair of tusks.
  • Falling Down deconstructs the Angry White Man and the Vigilante Man with its Villain Protagonist William Foster. The first two acts build up Foster into a figure for the audience to root for, even giving him the nickname of D-Fens, as he finally snaps in frustration with the annoyances of daily life and starts taking on everybody who represents the things that he (and the audience) sees as wrong with society. Some of them are clearly awful people, such as the gangbangers who try to steal his briefcase and later come back and try to murder him, the homeless Phony Veteran who tries to get his money with a made-up sob story, and the neo-Nazi owner of the military surplus store who thinks that Foster, as a fellow white man, agrees with him. Others, however, include people just doing their jobs that viewers might find merely annoying, like the Asian Store-Owner who won't give him change for a call unless he buys something, the construction workers holding up traffic on the freeway, the fast-food employees who stopped serving breakfast at 11:30, and the rich man who was playing golf. It's in the third act when the other shoe drops and it becomes clear that Foster isn't a righteous hero, but a very disturbed man with shades of a Spree Killer to him. His wife left him and filed for a restraining order due to Domestic Abuse, with the seemingly Happier Home Movie that he watches revealing that he always had an emotionally abusive dark side to him. His end goal is to travel to her house and kill his family. By the end, it's Sgt. Prendergast who's the real hero, a man who's encountered a lot of the same crap in life but who responded to such by building a happy (if imperfect) life for himself without letting it all get to him.
  • In Knives Out
    • Meg is Spoiled Sweet as she is very nice to Marta and Fran, as well as coming from serious money. But when it comes down to it, when Marta is revealed to be the sole inheritor of Harlan's will, Meg's "spoiled" side wins out and she wants to protect what is hers before Marta gets any of the money. That said, the film implied that her family pressured her into convincing Marta to give the money over to them.
    • The housekeeper Fran decides to become an Amateur Sleuth to discover who had killed Harlan, having enjoyed watching murder mysteries. She witnessed and discovered important evidence as to who the killer was, but instead of notifying and assisting the police who she knew were heavily involved in the case, she decided to confront and blackmail the suspect herself. In a dark, abandoned building straight out of a pulpy murder mystery. No points for guessing what happened to her.
  • Django Unchained: Calvin Candie deconstructs the Southern Gentleman to horrifying effect. He stylizes himself as one, making his fondness for French culture and literature clear to anyone and everyone, and is perfectly polite to white people. But his status as a Francophile is quite blatantly superficial (he can't even speak French and didn't even know his favorite author, Alexandre Dumas, was half-black), and every scene he's in is a reminder that he considers black people inferior, even going so far as to try to "scientifically" justify his racism, and casually having his black slaves fight and get torn apart by wild dogs because it amuses him.
  • Hancock deconstructs the idea of a Corrupted Character Copy through the titular character. Hancock starts out as a pretty clear corruption of Superman, a lazy bum who drinks too much and causes needless collateral damage with his heroics. As he's taken in by a PR man who wants to help clean up his image, it's revealed Hancock has a pretty good Freudian Excuse for his behavior, having come to genuinely believe he's unworthy of affection. Getting over these issues and embracing his potential to be the Big Good is the point of the film and Hancock's own Character Development.
  • The House That Jack Built: Jack deconstructs the Diabolical Mastermind-type serial killer, a la Hannibal Lecter. Though he presents as Wicked Cultured and thinks of himself as an artist, Jack is otherwise a failure in every other endeavor, having been a failed architect who tried several times to build his own house. The pretentious Hannibal Lectures he tries to make are constantly and effectively shut down by Verge, who he either ignores or feebly refutes. He's also just not very efficient when it comes to killing, breaking down during his murders and leaving a ton of evidence behind. He only gets away with it because the police are incompetent or lazy, or simply through sheer dumb luck, like when it rains after he leaves a long blood trail from dragging one of his victims along a country road. This is very much Truth in Television for many real-life serial killers. He doesn't even have anything remotely resembling a sympathetic reason for why he carries out his murders; Verge at one point speculates it may be out of a childlike desire to be caught and punished, but a scene from Jack's childhood shows him cutting off a duckling's leg with a pair of pilers, showing that he was a bad seed right from the start, and he apparently kills people just because he can and he likes it.
  • Tucker & Dale vs. Evil: Chad dissects the "alpha male" hero of a horror movie. His "bravery" and desire to take on "the bad guys", who are really decent but scruffy-looking fellows, is in reality horrible arrogance and paranoia, and causes the somewhat troubling situation to become catastrophically bad for both the hillbillies and his friends. His refusal to disobey his instincts eventually turns him into the evil horror movie villain he claimed to oppose. Tucker and Dale are heroic simply because they are humble and polite enough to consider their actions, barring the occasional moment of thoughtlessness.
  • Vincent from Collateral is a deconstruction of the "heroic loner hitman" archetype, showing how terrifying, sociopathic, lonely, and thoroughly disconnected from the world someone has to be to kill people for a living. He's so detached from reality that it's implied that he's never had a meaningful conversation with anyone before Max came along, doesn't understand why Max is so unsettled by him, and lacks almost any sense of morality or a conscience. In the end, he ends up getting killed by Max after Vincent pushes him around one too many times.
  • The titular protagonist of Hanna is this for the Teen Superspy, showing how a teenage girl might possibly attract the attention of the CIA and what her life would actually be like as a result. Specifically, she's the daughter of a rogue operative living in a cabin in the woods in northern Finland, and her skills at such a young age are because he's been putting her through Training from Hell since she was a small child. As a result, when she meets the otherwise normal teenage girl Sophie, she desperately wants to abandon her former life and join Sophie's family. Also, she's a genetically-engineered Super-Soldier, which is the other reason why a fifteen-year-old girl is that badass.
  • The Book of Henry: Henry Carpenter deconstructs the "Child Prodigy" by being a Insufferable Genius, thinking that whatever solutions he can think of are the only solutions available, that said solutions are perfect, and ultimately still sticking to a childish vision of the world — one where Murder Is the Best Solution is actually applicable. Even if everything else comes out A-OK thanks to Glenn killing himself, had she followed Henry's plan to the letter and it had actually worked, Susan still would have had Glenn's death on her hands and there's no telling how well she would have been able to cope. He also deconstructs Too Good for This Sinful Earth by the sheer fact that Susan, led at least partially by grief, accepts Henry's crazy plan as gospel truth up until the last possible second.
  • Kid Detective (2020): The film offers a Deconstruction of the concept of a Kid Detective. For all his apparent brilliance as a child, Abe (an Expy of Encyclopedia Brown) was only that - a smart kid. Not only this greatly limited his ability to solve cases, but the principal actively set him up just to see if Abe was a real deal, or just a child acting on first assumption. Once he was sure Abe is just playing a smart-ass, he proceed with kidnapping Gracie, one of Abe's schoolmates. Then there is the fact Abe apparently never did anything in his life to train in detective work as an adult, running his agency solely on his childhood "experience" - this makes him an utterly terrible private dick, still acting as if he was a character in a teen crime novel and put to question if he's even licensed. In addition, the tactics he used as a teen are no longer useful now that he is an adult; lastly, the local police enforcement tolerated his antics when he was a teenager, but, as an adult, not so much.
  • Mystery Team is a Deconstructive Parody of the Kid Detective. The main characters solved minor mysteries around the neighborhood as kids, and even became locally famous after solving a few real mysteries. Now 18-year-olds on the verge of graduating high school, they're immature Man Children still stuck in their past as kid detectives; the skills they supposedly had in their childhood are barely Informed Ability in their late teenage lives, which shows just how out of touch with reality they are. In order to prove that they can be real detectives they take on a little girl's case to solve the double homicide of her parents.

Alternative Title(s): Film

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