Sean Bean is Misunderstood

Now, I've been watching Sean Bean movies for a while now and like most of you, I thought the same thing when I first saw him...this guy plays the villain in every movie. I was first exposed to him more than a decade ago when I first saw Goldeneye. He was the typical Bond villain: vain, cocky, prone to making baffling mistakes (why not just shoot Bond in the head instead of rigging easily escapable timed explosions?).

But then I saw a movie that changed my worldview forever. National Treasure starring Nicholas Cage as the "hero" and Sean Bean as the "villain." I remember getting to the end of this movie, thinking over what just happened, and wondering to myself, "Why did Sean Bean go to jail?"

It was the typical Hollywood treatment of Bean. We've been duped so long into thinking of him as a villain that even when he's being betrayed and dumped on by his friends, we still see him as the villain, rather than the victim.

You're probably wondering what I mean by this? Surely, you say, he was the villain in National Treasure. After all, he tried to steal the Declaration of Independence, and the only person who could stop him was Nicholas Cage. Is that really what happened? If you watch that movie again, you might have second thoughts.

In this blog, I'm going to watch each of Sean Bean's movies and prove definitively that Sean Bean is too often being being given the label of the villain. But he is never just a villain. There is always something more to him, something that we - the audience - aren't paying attention to. At worst, he's a villain, but a misunderstood one. But more often than not, he's the one being betrayed by someone, and being unjustly portrayed as the one doing the betraying. Watch his movies, follow along, and maybe we can change how people view this honorable man...