Chris Pratt's Disappointing Masculinity

My wife and I recently finished our third or fourth rewatch of Parks and Recreation. What jumped out at me on this latest viewing is Chris Pratt’s character, Andy Dwyer. If you’ve never watched Parks and Recreation, it’s a workplace sitcom about the Parks and Recreation department in the small, fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana. The show works to find its voice in Season 1 before clicking in Season 2. Part of that includes retooling certain characters to make them more likable, which includes Andy. In Season 1, Andy is a selfish moocher off Ann (Rashida Jones), the best friend of main character Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler). In Season 2 onward, the writers figured out that Andy worked much better if they played him like a big puppy dog—quite stupid, but goofy and lovable. Andy is essentially an overgrown child, and Pratt’s performance imbues the character with loads of charm and affability.

While Pratt had been grinding his way through Hollywood since 2000 with a supporting role on the series Everwood as well as supporting roles in various films. In the early 2010s, it appeared that Pratt had found his niche as comic relief. He was funny but also by being overweight he wasn’t “leading man” material. That trajectory changed when James Gunn cast Pratt as the lead in the Marvel movie Guardians of the Galaxy. But to be a Marvel superhero, you have to be jacked, and so Pratt threw himself into redefining his physique so when the inevitable shirtless moment came, he would have a “superhero” bod.

2014 was a big year for Pratt. In addition to starring in Guardians of the Galaxy, which was a massive hit, he also provided the voice for the lead character, Emmet Brickowski, in The LEGO Movie. This one-two punch of massive hits in the same year catapulted Pratt to A-list stardom, and stayed with Parks and Recreation until the series wrapped in 2015, he wouldn’t go back to the chubby-and-lovable Andy Dwyer. He would be the jacked-and-lovable Andy Dwyer.

With a new physique and a couple of bona fide hits to his name, Pratt decided he would now be an action hero. And that’s a shame.

Chris Pratt: Man of Action

On its face, Pratt’s career decisions post-Guardians make a lot of sense. His next big movie was Jurassic World, and who wouldn’t take that gig? It was a legacy-sequel of the Jurassic Park franchise, but it positioned him as a rugged hero who trained raptors. He also signed on to star opposite Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence in Passengers, a script that had been languishing in development hell since 2007, but had a fascinating hook of two people stranded in space (its major failing is it’s a horror movie that thinks it’s a romance). He also played a cool Western dude alongside legends like Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke in a remake of The Magnificent Seven.

On paper, all of these choices make a lot of sense. You’re a newly crowned leading man with a physique that’s required you to work out a ton and ditch eating delicious foods. That’s supposed to be the trade-off, right? You sacrifice eating food you enjoy, spend hours pumping iron, and in exchange you get paid millions of dollars to be a movie star in the vein of action heroes you likely grew up worshipping. That’s the deal.

I suppose I should pause here and explain I do not care to dissect Pratt’s personal life and how that may or may not have affected his career choices. I tend to go by the maxim “Nobody knows anybody, not that well,”1, so the notion that I’m going to have any sense of Pratt’s psyche or personal life when I’ve never even met him seems like a deeply flawed place to start. I suppose I could pile onto him for an Instagram post or something, but that doesn't really interest me. I want to look at his career and how his acting roles have changed to highlight the least interesting things about him as a performer.

Poking Fun at the New Pratt

What makes Chris Pratt perfect for Star-Lord in Guardians of the Galaxy isn’t that he’s ripped. Writer-director James Gunn would have no issue finding any number of chiseled guys in Hollywood to play a leading man in a Marvel movie. What makes Pratt perfect for Star-Lord is that Pratt has both comic timing and a willingness for self-deprecation. Gunn is all about subversion, so his take on Star-Lord is to take the image of a masculine hero and then break it apart by showing that Star-Lord is not only a silly name (his real name is Peter Quill and in the first Guardians he has to keep reminding people to use his outlaw name), but a silly person. He’s someone who fashions himself a daring rogue only to continually come up against is own shortcomings. The completion of his arc is when he figures out that being a rogue isn’t the right path for him, and he needs to forge a new family despite the pain of losing his mother when he was a child.

While it’s an animated movie, The LEGO Movie follows a similar character arc where what makes Emmet special is what he discovers about himself rather than any prophesied greatness thrust upon him. He’s a sweet, unassuming guy that’s kind of bumbling and silly, but he learns that “The Chosen One” narrative is a total fabrication, and what makes someone special is what we decide to be. For Emmet, while learning to build things quickly is all well and good, what saves the day is when he empathizes and reaches out to the villain, Lord Business (Will Ferrell).

The sequels to these movies are even more fascinating when you look at how they relate to Pratt. In Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2, Star-Lord screws up even more, forsaking his found family for his biological one, the Living Planet, Ego (Kurt Russell), and the whole movie is about why Star-Lord needs to grow up (the Lindsay Ellis video essay on this is a must-watch). Rather than reinforcing Star-Lord’s masculinity, the film shows that he’s still pretty childish.2

The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part goes even further, lampooning roles Pratt had played by casting him opposite himself as new character Rex Dangervest, “galaxy-defender, archaeologist, cowboy, and raptor trainer.” While I’m sure Pratt picked up on those job titles poking fun at his other recent roles, the larger subtext of The LEGO Movie 2 is pretty damning (spoilers ahead). The film reveals that Rex is a version of Emmet from the future that got trapped under the dryer. Those years of loneliness curdled him and turned him into the hyper-masculine Rex (his spaceship is shaped like a fist). The larger point of the movie is that the things we recoil at as “girly” are things like empathy and caring, and the things we prize as “masculine” are typically fragile and harmful.

Pratt seems indifferent to these messages because he’s veered as far away from anything humorous as possible to not only be an action star, but the least interesting action star possible. That image reaches its apotheosis in Jurassic World Dominion.

The Worst Blockbuster Deserves the Worst Action Hero

I won’t go into the myriad of ways that Jurassic World Dominion is terrible. There are plenty of reviews that take care of that. It’s a bad movie and it appears it’s already well on its way to crossing a billion dollars worldwide like its Jurassic World predecessors.

What I want to talk about is Chris Pratt’s character, Owen Grady. What’s fascinating about the Jurassic World trilogy is how uninterested it is in character. It relishes its archetypes and would hate to see them grow or change in any perceivable way. Where most franchises tend to rest on likable characters who forge a bond with the audience, the Jurassic World movies use humans as action-delivery vehicles who exist to chase things or be chased by things. To even remember the names of the Jurassic World characters would be a monumental feat.

In Jurassic World Dominion, Owen and his girlfriend Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) are trying to rescue their adopted daughter from the evil BioSyn corporation. What this requires from Pratt is to deliver a steely glare. That’s it. That’s the character. If you ever watched Parks and Recreation, you may recall that Andy had his own self-created character, “Bert Macklin” a no-nonsense FBI agent who took no prisoners. Macklin is a parody of the action hero that Andy worships; Pratt is now basically playing Macklin but without the comedy. Honestly, you could have increased Owen’s personality and charm by 5000% if at some point he said out loud to no one in particularly, “Grady, you son of a bitch…”

But Owen is humorless. So are the rest of Pratt’s heroes. They may fire off a joke here and there, but they are not “funny” guys because Pratt has made it clear that unless he’s voicing an animated character (and he’s set to voice Super Mario and Garfield in upcoming movies), he’s to be taken seriously. In The Tomorrow War, he’s the action hero and the comic relief is handed off to Sam Richardson’s supporting character Charlie, and while I’m all for more Sam Richardson in movies and television, it’s such a disappointing stance for a comedically gifted actor to be like, “I’m done making people laugh because I want to be taken seriously.”

Again, I don’t know Pratt personally, so I’m more comfortable talking about his career choices as a symptom of a larger cultural issue, which in this case is what it means to be a strong man. While we’re slowly crawling towards a place where different kinds of masculinity can be accepted, it still exists in a framework built around physical strength and violence. We can admire the personalities of our multitude of superheroes, the men must be extremely fit (while Eternals has a lot of issues, it at least nods at different bodies being superpowered although for its female characters the choices are “slim” or “child”). Pratt couldn’t be Star-Lord until he underwent a massive physical transformation and shed the pounds because the superhero genre would reject a leading man who looked like Andy Dwyer.

And yet I’d counter that Andy is more of a man than any of the macho guys that Pratt has played (I’m not counting Star-Lord as “macho” because I think Gunn’s whole thing with the character is showing that his macho posturing is a character flaw that makes him look silly rather than tough). From Season 2 forward, Andy shows that while he may not be the brightest bulb in the drawer, he’s intensely loyal, sweet, empathetic, and thoughtful. A guy who was happy just to shine shoes eventually excelled at doing nonprofit work and being a children’s performer. None of that came from how much he could bench press.

I don’t know what the future holds for Pratt’s career. He’s due up to play Star-Lord a couple more times, first in Thor: Love and Thunder and then again next year in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3. However, his next project outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the Amazon series The Terminal List where he plays a tough-as-nails Navy SEAL at the center of a conspiracy. And look, if this makes Pratt happy, then more power to him, I suppose. Life is short and if you can get paid handsomely for playing a macho guy, then take that money. But for the audience, I feel like we’re missing out when Pratt buries what makes him a unique performer in favor of some dated idea of masculinity.