Jack: What kind of movies do you pre­fer, the ones with the sad end­ings or the happy ones?

Claire: The sad ones def­i­nitely. I like movies that make me cry.

Jack: Then you’re with the right guy.

Jack is the lead­ing man. Such screen time is only reserved for pro­tag­o­nists, though anti-hero’s fit this mould too. You want to root for him, to dis­cover that in the end he’s smart enough to give up the crim­i­nal life, to stay out of trou­ble, to truly appre­ci­ate the one who loves him. That’s what Claire is bank­ing on too.

She wants to ful­fill the dream that she’ll get the bad boy, and she’ll be the one for whom he gives up his crim­i­nal life. A story that’s been told time and time again, in life and on the screen. But he won’t, and that makes her want him even more.

Through their rela­tion­ship, you have a hard time believ­ing that any­one would be so self-destructive to fall for a guy like this, the way you don’t believe a pro­fes­sional assas­sin would sud­denly develop a con­science when dis­cov­er­ing that his mark is a 12-year-old girl. But this is Hollywood, and we’re lead to believe that any­thing is possible.

And as he cleans Claire’s blood off his bed­room floor, you real­ize that it’s harder to believe he was able to fill a bucket of water from the faucet when he just got out on parole and his util­ity bills have been unpaid for over a year, than a girl falling in love with some­one so bad for her. After all, life has not proven otherwise.

This qui­etly fills you with bitterness.