Notes on the "Dad" Thriller

In recent years the term "dad thriller," and related terms like "dad action movie," seem to have come into vogue.

What do they really mean?

Simply put, they are thrillers that are supposed to be appealing to "dads"--stereotypically middle-aged and "middle-class" family men--because they have protagonists who are middle-aged, "middle-class," family men to whom they can easily relate, and premises with a special resonance for men of their social background, time of life, generation, as with the common "At this moment in my life I am not a natural action hero but I have to become one to protect my family from nasty foreigners" scenarios, which enable relatability because for all the implausibility unavoidable in the form they are fairly grounded compared to other kinds of action movie.

In the piece where he seems to have coined the term (and given us a fair bit of theorizing about the concept in the bargain) Max Reed references Harrison Ford a lot. (Indeed, Reed offers a handy list of questions for those wondering "Am I watching a Dad Thriller Right Now?" that begins with "Is Harrison Ford in the movie?) And it seems to me that Reed is right to do so--with, I think, Ford's 1992 Jack Ryan film Patriot Games a good example, precisely because of when and where Jack Ryan was in his life in that movie (and the novel that was its source material). Most hear the name "Jack Ryan" and think "CIA" and therefore "action hero," but Ryan was an analyst who moved very high up the administrative ranks very fast, not a field man (that's John Clark's territory), while that story was a prequel to The Hunt for Red October in which in spite of his past, brief, work for the Agency (again, in an analytical capacity) Ryan was still an historian teaching at Annapolis who found himself physically intervening in an assassination attempt and then as a result stuck in an "At this moment in my life I am not a natural action hero but I have to become one to protect my family from nasty foreigners" scenario.

In discussing such films Reed acknowledges that they were far more prominent at the box office in that period, the '90s--as one sees when comparing Patriot Games, which was made, marketed and released as one of the summer of '92's big action movies, and still more such movies as Ford's The Fugitive (1993) and Air Force One (1997), as against how the not dissimilar Firewall did, the former movies among their year's big hits, but Firewall (2006) coming and going scarcely noticed at the box office. Indeed, like many other stars Ford saw his career suffer along with the decline of the genre with which he was associated--the dad thrillers that were the post-Han Solo, post-Indiana Jones basis of his box office success broadly declining, with such movies no basis for what career recovery he has had since, these today "January release" material, when not simply made-for-streaming, and that often as a series rather than a two-hour film. Thus did it in fact go with the Jack Ryan franchise to which Patriot Games belonged--its last made-for-and-actually-released-in theaters feature, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit dumped in theaters in January 2015, with results that a decade on have not prompted another such Ryan movie, the more in as the figure seems to have found his new home on streaming in an Amazon TV series.

What happened to them? The answer is that the action movie changed. The genre became a lot more science fiction-al, not incidentally as it relied on bigger and flashier spectacle to keep audiences coming to theaters, with superheroes in particular taking over, as the genre got to be a lot more "young adult," both of which tendencies the consistent success of the Spider-Man franchise through the twenty-first century exemplifies (and in their way, so too such hits as the Fast and Furious franchise). The old dad thrillers couldn't compete with that for box office dollars, not least because these other options were more enticing to younger moviegoers--rather less likely to see them than prior cohorts at the same age. After all, back in the '90s the "dad thrillers" the big thrillers were dad thrillers, and the young action fan took them in stride, with one ironic result the appeal of the dad thriller now lying partly in nostalgia, today's "dads" having seen them long before they were dads, grown up on them and ended up nostalgic for them, as their children grow up on Marvel.