The Female Hit Man

Violent action movies are a dangerous fantasy. I like them anyway.

Natalie Portman and Jean Reno on the set of the film “Leon.” (Photo by Patrick Camboulive/Sygma via Getty Images).

One of my guilty pleasures is to watch action movies about hitmen, and in particular hitmen who are female (hitwoman? hitperson?). The guilty part comes from the fact that I am a firm believer in the need for a strong rule of law, and it is impossible to make a film about a sympathetic hitman who doesn’t nonetheless break the law, often in bloody and flagrant ways. Indeed, this genre doesn’t just tolerate protagonists killing people, it positively celebrates them and turns them, for the most part, into heroes.  

The pleasurable part is twofold. First, when the hitman is female, she is almost always striking back against a ugly male patriarchy that is expecting her to be, alternatively, a sexual object, weak, submissive, or some combination of the three. She doesn’t just defeat her male enemies in court like Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich, she pounds them to a pulp, guts them, or scratches out their eyeballs.  

The other pleasurable aspect, if that is the right adjective, is related to the first: in these movies, justice is done. The 2018 movie Peppermint, for example, begins with a sweet suburban housewife (played by Jennifer Gardner) whose entire family is gunned down because her husband got into trouble with a Mexican narco gang. She disappears for several years to train, and returns as an avenging angel who takes on (and kills) the cartel boss and most of his associates.  

One of the earliest films in this genre was the 1994 movie Léon: The Professional, starring a very young Natalie Portman as Mathilda. Mathilda’s dysfunctional family is killed by a rogue NYPD detective and his cronies. She is adopted by a not-so-bright neighbor, Léon (Jean Reno), who, after repeated entreaties, teaches her how to shoot a sniper rifle. While it is Leon who eventually kills the corrupt policemen, he is driven to this by Mathilda’s single-minded determination to extract revenge.

Justice isn’t always at play in these movies. Sometimes you simply end up admiring the skill and resolve of the lead character. This is the case with one of my favorite movies in this niche genre, Kate, set in Japan where the bad guys are yakuza. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays the eponymous hitman Kate, raised from childhood by her mentor Verrick (Woody Harrelson) to be a paid killer. She is double-crossed by Verrick and poisoned with a radioactive substance which leaves her only 24 hours of life in which to extract revenge. She goes up against a yakuza family with incredible efficiency, shooting her way up the ranks and displaying unbelievable martial arts skills before expiring at the movie’s end.  

Indeed, a complex martial arts sequence is de rigeur in this type of movie (as in all action movies), in which the heroine is jumped by a crowd of burly men whom she singlehandedly kills or disables. To a much greater extent than in movies with a male lead, these sequences defy the laws of physics: no matter how well-trained, a woman jumped by six armed men twice her size and weight is very unlikely to survive such an attack. But it is the demonstration of female physical prowess that makes the outcome so satisfying to a certain demographic. Other movies in this genre include the 2020 Ava and the 2024 Trigger Warning. (For a male version of the same thing, see Denzel Washington’s three Equalizer movies.)  

There is a more ideological feminist theme running through some of these films. The 2021 movie Gunpowder Milkshake depicts a multi-generational underground organization of well-armed women who take revenge on the male power structure. In the tongue-in-cheek final sequence, the women and men literally shoot it out with pistols, assault rifles, and crew-served weapons until all the male oppressors are dead. Several women end up dead or wounded as well, but as in conventional action movies have the fortitude to dig the bullets out of their own bodies and keep fighting.

There is a bit more moral ambiguity to the recent British series Killing Eve, where Jodie Comer brilliantly plays the hitman Villanelle and Sandra Oh the MI5 intelligence agent Eve sent to stop her. Villanelle is not really into justice, and in the course of this multi-season show dispatches any number of perfectly innocent people. She recognizes that she was born a psychopath; at one point she tries to turn to the good by pretending to be a Christian, but ends up killing her priest. This makes her an object of fascination for Eve, who by the end of the series ends up becoming her lover. Neither character is redeemed by the fact that they are fighting a shadowy international cabal called The Twelve.

A consistent theme running through almost all of these films is that our conventional justice system does not produce actual justice, and that people have to take the law into their own hands. In the aforementioned Peppermint, for example, the lead character is finally arrested for having killed a few dozen cartel members. Her resurfacing had been announced by the discovery of a couple of her tormentors’ bodies hanging upside-down from an amusement park ferris wheel, in the manner of the narco gangs themselves. The film ends with the detective who tracked her down giving her the key to the handcuffs that keep her shackled to her hospital bed, presumably so that she can go free and continue her killing spree.

There is, in other words, a very pronounced cultural vibe that says that extra-judicial killings are OK if they are targeted at the right people. We are facing this issue in real life. The past president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, encouraged extra-judicial killings of drug dealers and drug users that led to several thousand deaths. President Nayyib Bukele of El Salvador was recently re-elected with an 80 percent vote share for having brought down the country’s crime rate by jailing, without trial, a very large proportion of the country’s gang population. Donald Trump himself has suggested that shoplifters be gunned down as they exited the stores they’ve robbed, no trial or jury necessary.

This is why movies about female hitmen are so insidious. They create a moral universe and permission structure in which the casual gunning down of people becomes an act of justice, in which the rule of law is so encumbered by senseless rules that actual justice becomes impossible to achieve except through the use of unconstrained force. The heroine of Kate won’t kill women or children; Peppermint’s lead is a saintly figure who uses violence to force a negligent father to care for this daughter, and protects an encampment of homeless people living under a freeway overpass. These films allow no moral complexity in the other direction. The hitman’s target is simply evil: they never have loving parents, or wives or children who depend on him for survival.  

Part of the permission structure has to do with the fact that most middle-class Americans do not experience significant physical violence in their day-to-day lives.  Boys these days, much less girls, do not grow up getting into periodic fights in which they lose a tooth or come home with a black eye—their helicopter parents wouldn’t permit that. Our information economy does not prize physical strength; women have done well in modern job markets precisely because brains and self-discipline are more important that risk-taking and upper-body strength. The female hitman movie by contrast unabashedly celebrates physical prowess rather than intelligence or sophistication. A petite but skillful female hitman throwing a 300 pound thug against a concrete wall is so absurd that our brains tell us we have exited the real world and are living in a parallel fantasy universe that operates by different rules. I imagine that many young men on the right see these films as political correctness run amok, and long for a world in which male dominance is celebrated and taken for granted.  

I guess that in the end this is why I love these movies. My life is spent making complex moral and political judgments; it is very relaxing to let go and see unconstrained violence being used in a just cause. I fear that our politics is being corrupted by the loss of faith in our existing legal institutions, and worry that we may soon go the way of the Philippines or El Salvador (whose president a number of US politicians like Marco Rubio claim to admire). But in the meantime I look forward to further movies in which a skillful hitman is always in the right.

Francis Fukuyama is Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He writes the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.

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