A public argument over the anti-hero, the kind of movie protagonist audiences root for despite questionable morals, broke into the open Friday after California politician Spencer Pratt challenged actor Ryan Reynolds for calling the 1980s "brutal." Reynolds had made the remarks a day earlier at the New York premiere of his Apple TV+ film "Mayday," in which he plays a shot-down Navy pilot rescued by a former KGB agent.
Reynolds told Variety that nostalgia papers over the genuine difficulty of any past era. "When you get far enough away from a time period that's quite distinct, there's always a lovely feeling associated with it, almost like you pave over all the trauma with puppy dogs and ice cream," he said. He called the decade "a f---ing mess" and said people have since forgotten how hard it actually was.
Pratt, a former reality TV personality currently running for Los Angeles mayor, posted his reply on X. His argument, in plain terms, was that 1980s cinema drew clear lines between heroes and villains, and that Hollywood has spent the decades since erasing them. "In 80s movies, bad guys were villains," he wrote. "Today, the bad guys are the heroes." He cited "Top Gun" and Tom Cruise as symbols of what he called the "hero generation," and positioned Reynolds, who plays the wisecracking mercenary Deadpool in the Marvel films, as the face of the opposite.
The broader debate
Film critic Christian Toto, founder of Hollywood in Toto, told Fox News Digital that the exchange points to a real cultural divide. He listed "Bullet Train," "Hit Man," the "John Wick" saga, "Emily the Criminal," and "Carolina Caroline" as recent examples of films that ask audiences to side with characters who would once have been the villain. He also noted that the 1980s had genuine darkness of its own. The AIDS crisis, nuclear anxiety, and the Challenger explosion all belong to that decade, he said, alongside the pop culture many people remember fondly.
Theo Wold, a former assistant attorney general who served as White House deputy assistant for domestic policy under President Donald Trump, offered a sharper rebuke. He said Reynolds' characterization failed to account for what he called greater social cohesion and wider individual freedoms in that era. Wold noted that Reynolds grew up in Canada, suggesting his experience of the decade may have differed, and faulted him for citing the Cuban Missile Crisis as a marker of 1980s hardship while ignoring, in Wold's framing, crimes by figures he named as domestic terrorists Angela Davis and Bill Ayers.