54th Issue: Action Dads and Spunky Daughters

I was watching a movie on Netflix called Project Power the other day, and it has a teenage girl who is taken under the wing of two father figures – one who is on the ‘good’ side and one who is on the ‘bad’ side. This is very oversimplified, but you get the idea. It got me thinking about how it’s an established trope to have a tough action hero guy paired up with a spunky teen girl, and I began coming up with a list.

There are the big movies like Leon: The Professional, with young Natalie Portman, and True Grit, with young Hailee Steinfeld, but there are way more than that just in the last decade or two (which is the time period I’m most familiar with, pop culture wise anyway). There’s Taken, which is apparently about Liam Neeson trying to rescue his daughter. I don’t really want to count that one because I’ve never seen it and if he’s rescuing her the whole time they’re not exactly teaming up. Maybe they do in the sequels. I will never know.

In television, there’s the last season of The Punisher, where he teams up with a teenage girl. For some reason, this is a trope that a lot of people want to see, or so I would imagine given how many films feature it. They tend to be smaller films too, not indie, but not movies that most people would have heard of. Here are a few I came up with just with some very basic research – I am not vouching for the quality of these. None of them are masterpieces. Most of them are fun though!

• Safe: This movie features Jason Statham taking care of a young girl who is a math genius and has been working for the mafia memorizing the numbers of how much money everyone owes.
• Erased: Aaron Eckhart, a former spy, tries to reconnect with his teen daughter (Liana Liberato) but things go wrong when other secret agents try to kill them both.
• The Hunter’s Prayer: Sam Worthington, a drug addict and hired killer, abducts Odeya Rush but finds that he can’t bring himself to kill her. The two of them fight, outrun, and kill those who would do them harm.
• Getaway: A teenage girl (Selena Gomez) and a race car driver (Ethan Hawke) have to team up to fight the voice on the phone that’s the bad guy who’s come after them both for some reason.
• Maggie: Arnold Schwarzenegger takes care of his daughter, Abigail Breslin, who is slowly turning into a zombie.
• 3 Days to Kill: Kevin Costner is a CIA agent and Hailee Steinfeld (also in this genre in the abovementioned True Grit) is his daughter who gets in the middle of things.
• Homefront: Also with Jason Statham, in this one he has to take care of his young daughter and James Franco plays a bad guy.

Do you know of any more movies with this similar broad plot line? I don’t know why but now that I’ve started making a list I want to know when this started and why. These movies are all from approximately 2010 to 2020, so in the last ten years. Why father(figure)s and daughters? There are a few action movies where mothers protect their children, but not nearly as many. Please let me know what you think!