They might have enjoyed dressing up as superheroes, but vigilante group Fathers4Justice never had a movie-production arm, as far as anyone knows. Look around the multiplex, though, and it's easy to see why: Hollywood is doing a good job already. Action cinema seems to be obsessed with dads charging to the rescue of daughters in distress. If there's a custody battle being waged across popular culture, the men are fighting back – by, er, fighting.
Take this week's Stolen, in which Nicolas Cage goes through bank heists, car chases, shoot-outs and other spectacular action-movie stuff, all because some creep has kidnapped his teenage daughter, played by Sami Gayle. If that title reminds you of Luc Besson's Taken, it's probably intentional, since that movie also involved a middle-aged ex-CIA operative (Liam Neeson) opening a can of whupass on his daughter's abductors. And coming up, we've got The Expatriate, in which Aaron Eckhart, another former – CIA man, is forced to act like he's in a Bourne movie, alongside his daughter. Fortunately, the kidnappers have only targeted dads with lethal combat skills so far, but his could become a problem.
In fact, it is the solution to a problem: faced with its greying stable of bankable action stallions, Hollywood has had to rejig the hero-rescues-virgin formula a little. After all, who wants to see a middle-aged man rescue a middle-aged princess? That would necessitate putting an older woman into the movie. A middle-aged man and a young princess, on the other hand, feels a bit Woody Allen. And an action movie with just blokes slugging it out is, of course, unthinkable.
So the daughter angle is the perfect commercial proposition. The hero gets to rescue a princess, you can insert a photogenic young female into the cast without it seeming gratuitous, and your ageing, wheezing action man comes out a manly hero and a great dad. And invariably they are daughters, they are young, attractive, and even virginal: Neeson's daughter in Taken, whose virginity is being auctioned off by Albanian traffickers even as he intervenes and kills them all.
On the rare occasions when action heroes have sons, they're fighters just like Dad – and the punters don't seem to like it. Bruce Willis could tell you that. When he rescued his kidnapped teenage daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) in Die Hard 4.0, it was a commercial hit, but when he teamed up with his son (Jai Courtney) in Die Hard 5, interest was far lower. The fact that nobody had heard of Courtney might have something to do with that, but then there was The Cold Light Of Day, in which Willis (secretly a CIA agent, wouldn't you know?) and his son (Henry Cavill) team up to rescue the women – a colossal flop.
Aside from assuaging older men's virility issues, there's something else going on. Invariably in these movies, the parents are separated, the daughter is in the custody of the mother (and her touchier-feelier second husband), and Dad's training in how to kill with a paperclip is surplus to requirements. But a good kidnap/rescue scenario presents the perfect opportunity to reset the balance. It's a way of saying to the daughter: "Yes, mum can perform just about every useful aspect of parenting, but when the shit goes down, you really need a dad." And it's a way of saying to the ex-wife: "See? I told you I should have got custody." Talk about justice for fathers.
Then again, when dads do get sole custody, that doesn't tend to work out well either. They end up training their daughters to become stone-cold death machines like themselves, as Cage did in Kick-Ass, or Eric Bana in Hanna, or Jean Reno in Léon. Come to think of it, watching your dad brutalise and massacre scores of people in the process of rescuing you can't be all that healthy. We never see the family therapy sessions that continue years after these action splurges are resolved, but then again, who'd pay to see that? Sounds like a bit of a girl's movie.
