Are Male Action Heroes Too Angry for Their Own Good?

Like a well-trained Pavlovian response, Indian audiences have been conditioned to return to the same action fantasy on loop for decades. Moviegoers are used to an angry young man, a pliable moral universe, and violence as the ultimate solution.

For the longest one can remember, the hero punches first, explains later, if at all but certainly framed as righteousness, emotional strength, protector who despite all the disadvantages at his disposal wants to fight brutally cause that's all he got to uphold his honour. Incongruously, women have often been portrayed to appear at the edges of this spectacle, cheering, suffering, or waiting to be avenged. And we have plenty of examples of those movies such as Animal, Kabir Singh, the upcoming Telugu film Toxic that lean into this fantasy, treating dominance as character and brutality as emotional complexity.

But that familiar fantasy is no longer unchallenged. Replace the ruthless-hero with a heroine and the whole narrative flips.

Indian cinema has traditionally positioned women near violence — as victims, witnesses, or motivators — rather than as agents of it. However, every once in a while, movies like Manikarnika, Malayalam film Jaya, Jaya, Jaya, Jaya Hey, the upcoming Priyanka Chopra starrer The Bluff and Samantha Prabhu led Maa Inti Bangaaram shift the perspective.

However, what distinguishes these films isn't limited to the gender of the protagonist, but the way violence itself is treated. When women occupy the centre of action narratives, brutality is no longer assumed to be virtuous. It must be justified, contextualised, and reckoned with. Rage doesn't simply exist; it has to be explained. Power is not inherited or taken for granted either, it is negotiated and comes with a price.

How Is Female Rage Different From Male?

This narrative shift exposes the shortcuts long relied upon by male-led action films. In many mainstream spectacles, male violence operates as entitlement. The hero’s anger is framed as instinctive, even noble, and its consequences are rarely examined. The body count rises, but moral scrutiny does not. By contrast, female action heroes are denied that cultural immunity. Their violence carries weight, consequence, and often, cost.

Importantly, these characters do not offer a sanitised or “softer” alternative to action. Films like Jaya, Jaya, Jaya Hey or Manikarnika do not shy away from force as violence is tactical rather than theatrical, rooted in survival or strategy rather than ego.

This is what makes female action heroes an antidote to toxic masculinity rather than a gender-swapped repetition of it. They dismantle the idea that power must be loud, that control must be violent, or that honour demands brutality. By refusing to romanticise dominance, these narratives force the action genre to confront its own excesses.

Crucially, this shift also reshapes masculinity on screen. When male dominance is no longer the organising principle of action cinema, male characters are freed from the obligation to perform aggression as identity. The fact that they don't, is another story. Films built on male rage continue to succeed commercially. There's no debate about it. It is what pulls the crowd.

Female action heroes have introduced friction into a genre that once thrived on repetition. They remind viewers that violence need not be celebrated to be compelling, and that action cinema can evolve without abandoning its intensity.

In doing so, they expose the limits of toxic masculinity on screen through better storytelling. When violence is no longer automatically masculine, it has to mean something again.