Movie: Con Air (Simon West, 1997)
One more reason for radical climate action! You can't make a movie like this when your house is burning down. Similarly to Titanic (released in the same year), Con Air is a testament to the excesses "kings of the world" can afford to indulge in. Do you wanna tie up a Corvette cabrio to the back of an airplane and fly it high up in the air? Go ahead, you are untouchable and unstoppable! Who cares if the Corvette gets destroyed (spectacularly!)? Another super car is right around the corner, and saving resources is for wussies. The climax in Las Vegas was scheduled to coincide with the actual destruction of a hotel, and you better believe everyone involved was more invested in maximising entertainment potential than in following circular demolition guidelines and material passports. They all did a fantastic job.
Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage) is an Army Ranger who had to go to jail after accidentally killing a guy harassing his pregnant wife. After years of thoughtful letters, he is now finally on parole and just a plane away from meeting his daughter. He even brings along a cute stuffed rabbit, so you know that when the rapists, serial killers, white supremacists, black nationalists, drug dealers, and all the other remorseless criminals hijack 'con air', Cameron will be the hero to save the day. Cage of course gets many moments putting him in the spotlight as a cool, laidback (Southern) badass, with particular highlights being his drawling command to "put the bunny back in the box" and his response when the bunny is not put back in the box. But you don't cast actors like John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi, Ving Rhames, and Danny Trejo as his adversaries for no reason. They all go more over the top than Cage, and also get many crowd-pleasing scenes where they get to be the top dog and express it victorioulsy and appealingly. The movie is basically designed for people to constantly be yelling 'Hell yeah' without caring at all whether the acts set up to elicit such a reaction are heroic or completely despicable.
By the time all the criminals start dancing around to Sweet Home Alabama, and this is presented as a karaoke session you'd wanna take part in, you'll have to accept that for Con Air distinctions between heroes and villains are solely relevant for entertainment purposes. Much of what, say, John Malkovich says and does here is completely unacceptable in polite society, but the film knows that it is ridiculously entertaining to watch Malkovich casually commit horrific violence and use colorfully degrading language, and it uses every tool at its disposal to ensure that the audience revels in it, uninhibited by any moral qualms. Some may call this nihilistic, and maybe it is, but I laughed very much when they threw Dave Chappele's dead body out of the plane and followed it falling down as it eventually splashes on the car of an ordinary older couple stuck in traffic in a mid-sized city. It's almost Looney Tunes, which is ultimately a more moral approach to depicting violence than whatever the Avengers films (and way too many other contemporary action blockbusters) were doing, developing convoluted backstories to justify way more death and destruction than Con Air can even dream of - it's how you get folks like Chris Evans to proudly photograph themselves signing actual bombs the US military will drop over some Middle East nation.
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