American film critics detest violent movies—unless there’s an antisocial message involved. TAC correspondent Mike D’Virgilio looks at critical reactions to violence in movies.

With Sunday’s worst ever viewed Academy Awards in the rear view mirror, it’s a good time to reflect on the violence-dredged movies that were at the top of Hollywood’s heap this year. Certainly the depressing, grim fare nominated for most of the awards did not encourage audiences to tune in.

Just as the Motion Picture Academy is clearly disengaged from the tastes and preferences of its audience, so are America’s mainstream media film critics.

In fact one of the most violent films nominated this year, No Country for Old Men, won all the marbles after receiving nearly universally laudatory reviews. S. T. Karnick, the proprietor of this fine web establishment, has an excellent review of this movie you can read below. He rightly points out that the film can be difficult for audience members to watch because of the “powerful violence."

I haven’t seen any of the nominees for Best Picture, but have heard plenty about them. An article in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal caught my attention with it’s title, “And the Oscar Goes to . . . Blood and Guts.” The article points out that most critics have no problem with the violence in the film, seeing it as “cinematic artistry,” as one critic put it.

The author, Jason Riley, doesn’t mind violence in movies per se, but he finds the startling realism and the objective of filmmakers to “disturb” audiences troubling. Violence in moves used to be more like “movie violence,” he says, something that propelled the story forward and pumped up the spectacle, rather than practically being an end in and of itself.

That is a good analysis of the difference between violence in films then and today—certainly sensationalism has taken over the cinema in the past half-century in all ways. 

I didn’t think much about this until it struck me some time after reading the piece that a few years ago critics were not so sanguine about movie violence. Well, one movie’s violence to be exact: The Passion of the Christ. I remember several critics railing against Mel Gibson’s use of violence as being “pornographic."

I saw that accusation on more than one occasion. Plenty of other critics found the violence offensive, but used other terms to convey their displeasure.

I find it interesting that when graphic violence is used to reflect on the Christian savior’s suffering it is unacceptable, but when it is used in the service of nihilism it is artistic and perfectly justified no matter how salacious. Of course the hypocrisy and double standards of the mainstream media are old news, but it is striking to see such an obvious example of this critical imbalance, especially considering the beating Gibson took from critics.