There are those characters in the movies that somehow make things worse, or are just horrible people somehow, and yet we forgive them somehow. They’re either great characters, crucial to the story, or there’s just something about them, but we keep forgiving them every time we watch the movie. Why this happens is a bit frustrating since in real life these types of people are still forgiven and looked up to by some, but are reviled by others since they don’t enrich life so much as they wreck it in one way or another. It’s very accurate to say that people decide to glorify some very strange characters when it comes to what they like about them, but there are those that are forgiven way too much for the kind of stuff they do, and it’s fair to state that there are some characters that should be locked away or at the very least shunned now and then simply because they tend to make situations worse before making them better. In other words, we tend to glorify movie characters that have a habit of creating the situations they find themselves in, especially if they find a way out of those situations again.
Here are a few movie characters that are forgiven way too much.
5. Army of Darkness-Ash
As heroic as the guy is, he ends up causing a lot of problems by being a bit soft in the head. People might point out that he’s smart enough to make gunpowder, a metal hand, a strange machine that chopped the Deadites to pieces, but forgetting a single word? Granted, it’s the small things that end up being easier to forget, but maybe repeating the word until it sticks would be a good idea, since then he could have gone home that much quicker and not risked bringing the evil back with him. In a lot of ways, Ash is kind of a macho dipstick that parades around like a person expecting thanks for endangering the people that depend on him.
4. The Big Lebowski-Walter Sobchak
Walter just kind of makes things worse. He’s not the type of friend you’d toss away without hesitation since he does come in handy in a fight. But the fact that he has to reference Vietnam so often and the idea that he’s always packing a gun are disturbing trends that make him appear less than stable. It can be said that Walter tries to help, but almost everything he does goes awry and in the end, he looks like an even crazier person than before. Trying to sort Walter out and make any sense of him is kind of difficult, so people just figure that this is who Walter is and do their best to accept him.
3. Caddyshack-Carl Spackler
The fact that Carl is a moron isn’t lost on a lot of people, but somehow he’s forgiven a lot of the things he’s done because of this and because, well, it’s a comedy. In the real world, Carl would be out of a job and likely locked up for his golf course escapades since not only does he flood the practice green at one point, he seeds the course with C4 explosives near the end and then hits the switch. Not only that, but he leaves the reverend on the course after the old man was struck by lightning, which is pretty shady, to begin with. Carl would be locked up for a while in the real world, which might make the world a little safer.
2. Clerks II-Randal Graves
Fans of Clerks likely gave this guy a pass way too many times since, despite the fact that he’s insanely insensitive and says things that should be getting him a beatdown, he somehow gets a pass since he’s a fan favorite and because it’s his defense mechanism when dealing with people. This is why excusing bad behavior that masks insecurities is such a dangerous precedent, as it allows people to get away with this kind of stuff as they know they’re going to be able to pass it off as their inability to cope with the real world. Some folks might have genuine issues, but the door is wide open for this kind of thing to be exploited.
1. The Fighter-Dick Eklund
This one is a little trickier since Dick Eklund is still around and is doing far better than he did as he was depicted in The Fighter. While Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg did a great job of bringing the story to life it wasn’t one hundred percent how it happened obviously. For the most part, it sounds as though the movie followed the lives of the people involved, but the fact that Dickie was forgiven so much kind of irritated the real Dick Eklund at times, as did the overall portrayal of his family.
It’s easy to forgive a character when they’re glorified in some way.
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