{"id":379217,"date":"2025-12-31T05:24:06","date_gmt":"2025-12-31T05:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/379217\/"},"modified":"2025-12-31T05:24:06","modified_gmt":"2025-12-31T05:24:06","slug":"move-fast-break-stuff-how-tech-bros-became-hollywoods-go-to-baddie-in-2025-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/379217\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Move fast, break stuff\u2019: how tech bros became Hollywood\u2019s go-to baddie in 2025 | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Between the slash-and-burn US government reboot<\/a> led by a dank meme fan and the relentless pushing of AI by venture capital-backed blowhards, 2025 has felt like peak obnoxious tech bro. Fittingly, jargon-spouting, self-regarding digital visionaries also became Hollywood\u2019s go-to baddies this year in everything from blockbusters to slapstick spoofs. Spare a thought for the overworked props departments tasked with mocking up fake Forbes magazine covers heralding yet another smirking white guy as \u201cMaster of the Metaverse\u201d or whatever.<\/p>\n

With such market saturation, the risk is that all these delusional dudes blend into one smarmy morass. It felt reasonable to expect that Stanley Tucci might sprinkle a little prosciutto on The Electric State<\/a>, Netflix\u2019s no-expense-spared alt-history robot fantasia. As Ethan Skate \u2013 creator of the \u201cneurocaster\u201d technology that quashed an AI uprising then turned the general populace into listless virtual-reality addicts \u2013 Tucci certainly looked the part: bald and imperious in retro Bond villain wardrobe. But even the great cocktail-maker couldn\u2019t squeeze much out of sour existential proclamations such as: \u201cOur world is a tyre fire floating on an ocean of piss.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hall-of-mirrors feel \u2026 Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor in Superman. Photograph: Jessica Miglio\/\u00a9 2025 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved. TM & \u00a9 DC<\/p>\n

There was more baldness in Superman<\/a>, where Nicholas Hoult\u2019s Lex Luthor embodied the worst kind of wannabe paradigm-changer: one desperate to appear on talkshows. Incensed that the world seemed to be ignoring his genius in favour of a flying alien do-gooder, the LuthorCorp founder spent a fortune to rig social media, deploying an army of vivisected monkey cyborgs to swamp platforms with anti-Superman hashtags and memes. That the film itself was met with farmed outrage about perceived wokeness<\/a> added a disconcerting hall-of-mirrors feel to what was essentially an overstuffed crowdpleaser. Hoult\u2019s Lex was also a distractingly hot tech CEO, which pushed the film further into the realm of fantasy.<\/p>\n

Is it more appealing when these self-regarding douchebags are funny? In the heightened world of killer doll action thriller M3gan 2.0<\/a>, Jemaine Clement was sleazily overconfident as Alton Appleton, a high-functioning billionaire whose latest wheeze was pushing an unwanted neural implant on the masses. Seduced by an impassive fembot assassin, Alton was humiliated in his final moments, his signature Altwave tech effortlessly hacked, his weird prosthetic six-pack coming unstuck. It was pathetic but humanising. As the movie trundled on, you actually began to miss him.<\/p>\n

If Clement nailed tech bro obliviousness, Danny Huston had to remain deadpan opposite Liam Neeson\u2019s blathering Frank Drebin Jr in The Naked Gun<\/a> reboot. Huston\u2019s Richard Cane was a hybrid Jeff Bezos\/Elon Musk-esque blowhard who used the galactic profits from his online retail and electric car empires to make a Primordial Law of Toughness device . His master plan was to zap the general public back to a prehistoric mindset, violently culling the herd and ushering in a new age for humankind (or at least his zillionaire class). Cane was obsessed with men\u2019s sperm counts, building luxury bunkers for the super-rich and Black Eyed Peas. In other words: truly psychotic.<\/p>\n

Truly psychotic \u2026 Danny Huston in The Naked Gun. Photograph: Paramount Pictures\/AP<\/p>\n

In the goopy, grungy world of The Toxic Avenger<\/a> reboot, Kevin Bacon\u2019s floppy-haired biotech baddie Bob Garbinger stood out simply because he looked so pale and pampered. While it\u2019s not a great sign when a self-proclaimed \u201chealthstyle\u201d guru gets Sisyphus and syphilis mixed up, Garbinger\u2019s habit of going shirtless while flogging \u201cproprietary cutting-edge bio-boosters\u201d in TV ads felt like a timely skewering of immortality-seeking biohackers such as Bryan Johnson<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 2022, Evan Peters played the lead in Netflix\u2019s ghoulish Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story<\/a>. Did that influence his casting as a second-generation nepo baby in Tron: Ares<\/a>? To be fair, his Julian Dillinger \u2013 grandson of David Warner\u2019s boardroom bully from the original 1982 Tron<\/a> \u2013 seemed more neurotic than psychotic: a baby-faced tech huckster with crappy circuit board sleeve tattoos whose audacious move into 3D-printing wicked neon war machines and digital commandos was only slightly scuppered by the fact that they imploded within 30 minutes. A wildly expensive, resource-intensive, essentially useless product? Intentionally or not, it felt like an appropriate metaphor for the AI bubble.<\/p>\n

Pale and pampered \u2026 Kevin Bacon in The Toxic Avenger<\/p>\n

But why stop at just one douchey tech bro? Jesse Armstrong\u2019s jagged satire Mountainhead<\/a> took the bold step of making every single character the absolute worst of the \u201cmove fast, break stuff\u201d billionaire mindset, isolating them \u2013 and the viewer \u2013 in a remote, repellently deluxe ski lodge while the spectre of possible Armageddon encroached. As the Musk-alike owner of a social media app spreading dangerous AI-augmented misinformation, Cory Michael Smith captured the glib, morality-agnostic tone of someone richer than God who views the world as their plaything.<\/p>\n

As Venis (Smith), silverback investor Randall (Steve Carell), canny algorithm tamer Jeff (Ramy Youssef) and would-be wellness app supremo Souper (Jason Schwartzman) relentlessly needled each other, there was the illicit thrill of dialling into the combative quartet\u2019s inside-baseball repartee of boasting, toasting and roasting. But as the globe lurched further into chaos, watching these four nominal thought leaders clumsily workshop how best to exploit the situation was depressing, not least because it seemed so plausible. We have all been forced to absorb the pathologies of our tech overlords due to their disproportionate influence in the real world. As a new cinema year looms, is it too much to ask that we don\u2019t have to keep doing it at the movies too?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Between the slash-and-burn US government reboot led by a dank meme fan and the relentless pushing of AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379218,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-379217","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}