Incompetence Porn

In a world run by idiots, these protagonists fit right in

Project Hail Mary (2026)

This weekend, I spotted a billboard advertising Slow Horses author Mick Herron’s latest book, Clown Town:

IN A WORLD RUN BY IDIOTS, THESE SPIES FIT RIGHT IN

Replace “spies” with “protagonists,” and you have a pretty good thesis statement for contemporary American cinema. Over the past few years, our movies have subjected a succession of protagonists to lobotomy for our amusement.

Project Hail Mary was sold as a “science, bitch!” ode to problem-solving akin to The Martian or Apollo-13. Instead, the film takes every opportunity to undercut its protagonist’s genius with displays of lovable buffoonery befitting a non-problematic Jar Jar Binks.

The paranoid thriller was once the realm of handsome, intrepid men trying to outsmart the Blob. Now, it fronts a basement-dwelling mode of hero who has spent more time furiously browsing Reddit than fighting the good fight (One Battle After Another, Bugonia, Eddington).

Action was once the bastion of cold-eyed competence. No longer. The Amateur replaces the ice-cool killers of Bourne and Bond with a bookish weakling. The Killer’s titular assassin fucks up every kill. The titular Monkey Man’s modus operandi appears to be “John Wick but shitter.”

No genre is safe. Robert Pattinson plays a sentient lettuce in Mickey-17. King Kong’s latest American outing saw him slip and stumble around like Charlie Chaplin. Longlegs reimagines Hannibal Lecter as a falsetto-toned weirdo who loves T. Rex. Even Napoleon is just a horny sub now.

Napoleon (2023)

I wrote the other day about how a wave of filmmakers are using their films to tackle the current moment:

In 20 years, when they look back at Eddington, Bugonia, One Battle After Another, House of Dynamite, Weapons, Cloud, It Was Just An Accident, No Other Choice, and 2024’s Civil War, they’ll see a culture grappling with the post-social media, post-COVID, post-AI collapse of shared reality.

The rise of the idiot protagonist is one manifestation of this trend. If we feel unable to navigate the quicksand of modern life, and if we’ve lost faith in society’s powerbrokers’ ability to help us do so, then why on earth would we make films about protagonists who actually know what they’re doing?

Marketing copy for Clown Town by Mick Herron

The best way to make a story feel realistic in our chaotic, confusing reality is to include a buffoon at the centre of it. A competent protagonist would be trapped in the uncanny valley. Why pretend to be Frank Grimes when we live in a world of Homer Simpsons?

This is why, when we do see good old-fashioned muscular competency - F1, Rebel Ridge, Top Gun Maverick - it explicitly feels like a throwback to a bygone era; a nostalgic retread of the kind of bold popcorn-sellers that Hollywood used to do so well. I doubt Christopher Nolan’s Odysseus will receive the Napoleon treatment.

There is, perversely, a degree of wish fulfilment in our obsession with idiot protagonists. There’s something validating, cathartic even, about seeing lovable buffoons fuck up, muddle through, and succeed anyway. They may be fools, but at least they win. The message smuggled inside purportedly optimistic films like Project Hail Mary is that this is the best we can hope for.

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