Donald Trump Just Revived a ’90s Action Franchise — Here’s Why Rewatching It in 2025 Is So Awkward
Donald Trump Just Single‑Handedly Revived a ’90s Action‑Movie Franchise — So, About Those Old Movies…
Somewhere between the nightly churn of cable news outrage and the algorithm’s endless nostalgia bait, a long‑dormant ’90s action franchise has suddenly become appointment viewing again—thanks, improbably, to Donald Trump’s second administration. A new, Trump‑era installment has pushed people back to the original trilogy, and a 24‑hour binge of all three movies doesn’t just deliver explosions; it doubles as a crash course in how American anxieties, politics, and macho fantasies have warped—and in some ways, stayed eerily the same.
The Slate piece that kicked off this rewatch is less about gotcha politics and more about cultural archaeology: what happens when a franchise built on simple good‑guy/bad‑guy binaries is revived in an era when the “bad guys” feel uncomfortably close to your Twitter feed? Let’s unpack how this revival happened, what rewatching the trilogy in 2025 actually feels like, and why the whole thing lands somewhere between fascinating and “yikes.”
How a ’90s Relic Became a Trump‑Era Talking Point
The new film didn’t arrive in a vacuum. Trump’s return to the White House has reignited every culture‑war fault line, and Hollywood—never one to miss a synergy opportunity—has rushed to mine both nostalgia and outrage. The resurrected franchise slots neatly into this moment, marketed as a back‑to‑basics, “we say the quiet part loud” alternative to what right‑wing commentators like to call “woke Hollywood.”
That framing has done the PR heavy lifting. The mere association with Trump World turned a modest IP into a viral curiosity. Streaming platforms promoted the original trilogy to capitalize on renewed interest, and suddenly, a weekend rewatch went from “background noise while you fold laundry” to “accidental crash course in 30 years of political mood swings.”
- The original films: late‑Cold‑War/post‑Cold‑War paranoia weaponized into straightforward shoot‑’em‑ups.
- The revival: explicitly marketed as “unapologetic” and “not afraid to offend,” a dog whistle in 2025 entertainment marketing.
- The discourse: critics treating it as a Rorschach test for how the second Trump administration is reshaping mainstream pop culture.
“A 24-hour binge of all three movies explained a thing or two.”
The 24‑Hour Binge: What Watching All Three Movies in a Row Feels Like Now
Viewed one at a time back in the day, the movies played like generic but serviceable Friday‑night fodder. Watched in a single 24‑hour marathon, they morph into a time‑lapse of America’s fears and fantasies. You can practically feel the shift from Cold War residue to post‑9/11 jitters to pre‑social‑media nihilism.
- Movie One: The “simple times” fantasy — bad guys with foreign accents, moral clarity you can set your watch to, and a hero whose politics are “America, full stop.”
- Movie Two: Grimmer, meaner, and more comfortable with collateral damage. It flirts with cynicism about corrupt institutions while still insisting that one righteous man with a gun can fix everything.
- Movie Three: A transitional oddity, half‑aware of its own absurdity but too commercially timid to commit to satire, and too self‑important to lean into camp.
In 2025, that tonal wobble hits differently. Bingeing reveals not just evolving set‑piece technology—bigger explosions, slicker VFX—but an increasingly desperate need to reassert the fantasy that problems can be solved through righteous violence, with just enough plausible deniability to play in red and blue states alike.
Politics in a Bullet Casing: How the Franchise Mirrors Trump‑Era Rhetoric
It would be too easy to say the series “predicted Trump.” It didn’t. But it absolutely helped normalize some of the emotional beats of Trump‑era rhetoric: grievance, victimhood, retributive justice, and the fantasy of the lone outsider who “tells it like it is” by punching people through walls.
What jumps out on rewatch isn’t subtle subtext; it’s how blunt everything is. Villains are ideological stick figures. Civilians are background decoration. Institutions are either useless or need a “real man” to show up and set them straight. If you’ve spent the last few years watching rallies where policy is less important than vibes, the continuity is hard to ignore.
“The movies don’t argue a thesis so much as embody a feeling: that the world has gone soft and only a certain kind of man can harden it back up.”
Do the Movies Actually Work as Action Cinema in 2025?
Strip away the politics for a second and you’re left with a more basic question: are these still good action movies? The answer is… complicated. There’s a tactile, analog charm to the earlier entries: squibbed gunshots, practical fireballs, real stunt performers dangling from real helicopters. In a landscape dominated by green‑screen sludge, that alone carries real appeal.
- Strengths: clean geography in action scenes, memorable practical gags, and a lead who understands the power of a well‑timed deadpan.
- Weaknesses: paper‑thin side characters, clunky exposition, and a habit of punching down with “comic relief” that hasn’t aged well.
Compared to contemporary action franchises like John Wick or Mission: Impossible, the revived movie feels almost quaint in its staging but louder in its messaging. The set‑pieces are fine; the subtext is a megaphone.
Weaponized Nostalgia: Why This Revival Hit a Nerve
Revival culture usually runs on comfort. Studios bank on the idea that audiences want to return to the worlds they loved when life felt simpler—whether or not it actually was. In this case, that nostalgia has teeth. The “simpler time” being sold was one in which America could project power without much public self‑doubt, at least in mainstream media.
The Trump‑era twist is that the new film doesn’t just evoke the past; it argues that the past was better because it was less complicated, less “sensitive,” less questioning. That’s what makes the rewatch feel uncanny. The original trilogy wasn’t shy about its worldview, but it wasn’t self‑consciously trolling either. The revival, by contrast, is built to inflame as much as entertain.
Nostalgia used to mean “remember when”; now it often means “remember when—and admit you liked it better that way.”
Where the Revival Fits in 2025’s Entertainment Landscape
In the streaming‑era attention economy, almost everything is content and almost nothing is neutral. The franchise’s return lands in the same ecosystem as true‑crime podcasts, political docuseries, and algorithmically recommended outrage clips. Studios now count on a movie living at least two lives: one in theaters or on streaming, and another as fodder for discourse.
The new installment seems engineered for that second life. Its talking points are built for cable panels and social media beef, which in turn drive curious viewers back to the original trilogy. For the industry, controversy is a feature, not a bug. For audiences, it raises an old question in a new form: are you watching to enjoy, to critique, or just to understand why everyone else is yelling?
For context and cast/crew details, the franchise’s pages on major databases like IMDb and coverage on sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic trace how critical reception has shifted from “solid time‑waster” to “problematic fave” to polarizing political artifact.
Trailer Talk: How the Revival Sells Itself
Even without naming names, the marketing strategy is easy to spot. The trailers splice in news‑style footage, vague threats to “our way of life,” and a grizzled hero who promises to do “what has to be done.” It’s less a story pitch than a vibes statement, tapping into the same adrenalized dread that powers cable news chyrons.
If you stumble across the official trailer on YouTube or a studio site, it’s worth watching with the sound off first. The imagery alone—flags, burning skylines, tactical gear, crowd shots—tells a story of its own, one that feels closer to political advertising than classic popcorn escapism.
So… Should You Rewatch the Old Ones?
As pure entertainment, the original trilogy is a mixed bag that will land best for viewers who already have a soft spot for muscly ’90s excess. As cultural artifacts, though, they’re unexpectedly rich. The Slate writer’s 24‑hour binge becomes a useful lens: a reminder that these films didn’t just reflect their eras; they helped teach audiences what to fear and how to imagine “justice.”
In the Trump‑redux era, that’s the part that feels most “yikes”: not that the movies are uniquely evil or uniquely prophetic, but that their fantasies now rhyme so cleanly with real‑world rhetoric. Watching them today is less about escapism and more about connecting dots between the background noise of your youth and the front‑page anxieties of 2025.
If you do queue up the trilogy, it’s worth doing what the best criticism does: enjoy what still works, wince at what doesn’t, and keep an eye on the patterns that bind it all together. The franchise may have been revived by Trump‑era politics, but its real legacy is the way it quietly trained generations to cheer for a certain story about power—and to mistake that story for common sense.
Verdict: an uneasy but illuminating rewatch; three stars out of five as action cinema, four out of five as a case study in how pop culture and politics keep chasing each other’s tail.
