John Wick, Taken, The Equalizer. Too many to name. Saw a preview for The Amateur (2025) which is another one coming out soon. It seems like that’s the ONLY justification for killing they can come up with.
Like this is the logic here: “Okay we need an action movie with lots of henchmen to kill, what evil thing can that bad guy have done in the 1st act so our hero is justified in killing tons of henchmen?” So the bad guy does some overtly evil thing at the start of the movie (often unrealistically evil). Then killing people is the rest of the movie. Revenge happens. The end.
I enjoy action movies, but I keep seeing the same revenge-killing movies that feel like copies of each other.
Some of these are remakes because this genre goes back to the early days of movies. Thinking of movies like that one from Bruce Willis called Death Wish which is one of those Charles Bronson movies which is practically all that guy was known for in the 20th century.
How else would you do a story like this and get the audience to applaud for the main character?