The Bad-Ass Female Industrial Complex Reaches Peak Absurdity

The trailer for Apex has dropped, and with it arrives Hollywood’s most exhausted fantasy: the ageless, indestructible, bad-ass woman who can outrun youth, outfight men twice her size, and shrug off biology as if it were a mere inconvenience. The Netflix movie stars Charlize Theron, now 50, sprinting through the Australian wilderness and scaling cliffs like Tom Cruise in his prime. Gravity politely steps aside. Time looks the other way. And the audience, increasingly, rolls its eyes.

We’ve seen this script before. Far too many times. A morbidly obese Queen Latifah turned The Equalizer into a revenge farce where grown men queued up to be beaten senseless. Jennifer Lopez went full tactical mom in The Mother. Add Gunpowder Milkshake, Kate, Atomic Blonde, and the endless parade of streaming “assassin nuns,” “grieving moms,” and “traumatized lone wolves,” and the pattern stops being subtle and starts becoming industrial.

The problem isn’t strong women. They exist. The problem is Hollywood’s idea of empowerment, which increasingly means strapping a 120-pound actress into a tactical vest and enough firepower to stock a small militia. It means having her body-check men built like refrigerators, then daring the audience to object. Disbelief is dismissed as bigotry. Physics is optional. Muscle memory is imaginary. Men aren’t buying it. And most women aren’t either. Name one of these projects that became a lasting cultural hit rather than an unintentional parody stacked with defeated men in their prime.

What makes this so infuriating is how recently Hollywood understood the balance. The 1990s were the pinnacle of the modern action film. Not because they were perfect, but they were honest. Bruce Willis in Die Hard didn’t float through bullets. He bled. He limped. Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon was unhinged, reckless, and visibly breakable. These men won not because they were invincible, but because they paid a price. Pain mattered. Limits mattered. Most of all, a credible storyline mattered.

And crucially, women in those films mattered too—without being rewritten as interchangeable men. Think of Leon: The Professional. Natalie Portman wasn’t tossing grown men through windows. She was vulnerable, furious, and incredibly observant. Her power came from presence and consequence, not from pretending bone density was a social myth. Or take Desperado, where Salma Hayek didn’t need to out-brawl Antonio Banderas to steal the screen. She was dangerous in a different register—sensual, sharp, sexually magnetic, and narratively indispensable.

That was the old equilibrium. Men carried the physical fantasy. Women carried emotional gravity. When a woman picked up a gun, it meant something. It escalated the story. It wasn’t a default setting.

Somewhere in the last decade, Hollywood stopped trusting its own audience. It decided that strength must look identical across genders, and that any asymmetry was a moral failure. Subtlety was scrapped. Trade-offs were taboo. What replaced them was a strange, degenerate-like dogma: empowerment as imitation. If men once punched their way through problems, women must now punch harder, faster, and preferably never aging.

This is how we ended up with Batwoman, a show so ideologically charged it forgot to be watchable. It’s how Gal Gadot was transformed from a compelling feminine presence into a Wonder Woman meant to serve as the female equivalent of the modern male action hero. A brave move, some might say. An asinine one, I say.

Action cinema thrives on stakes. Remove them, and you get pantomime, not progress. A world where everyone’s unstoppable is a world where nothing matters. The audience senses this immediately. They may not articulate it in essays or tweets, but they feel it in their bones. And when people feel preached at rather than thrilled, they tune out.

Call it woke or whatever you like. What it really amounts to is a studio coping mechanism dressed up as entertainment—reheated power fantasies served cold, long after the audience has lost its appetite. Hollywood isn’t telling new stories. It’s recycling old ones with wilder messages and worse plots, hoping volume will substitute for vitality. It won’t. It can’t.

Strong female characters are harder to write, not easier. They require restraint. They require writers willing to accept difference without hierarchy, strength without sameness. The 1990s understood this instinctively. Today’s industry seems determined to forget it.

Apex will stream. It’ll earn high praise from a mainstream press dominated by millennial women. Then it’ll vanish into the dustbin of cinematic refuse. And somewhere in the wreckage of another algorithm-approved atrocity, Hollywood will once again ask why audiences have stopped caring—while sprinting past the answer at full speed, immune to exhaustion, objective reality and self-reflection.