(Reply in two parts for length reasons) It's not an "American" thing, it's modern studio-controlled movie thing. Studios don't allow those sorts of bleak endings, and psychopathic criminal protagonists, because bleak endings aren't liked by test screening audiences, and they think heroes have to be more relatable. In the 1970s (when the original Get Carter was made), during the so-called "auteur era" of film making, American film makers would make films fully as bleak, and protagonists every bit as cold-blooded as any European film studio. Watch the original 1972 version of The Mechanic, with Charles Bronson. Arthur Bishop is a highly functioning psychopath. He's a totally remorseless killer, and when he's given an order to kill his underworld contact, Harry McKenna, he does so quite coldly and even cruelly. There's a scene where he and Harry's son Steve McKenna, who he has taken on as a protégé just watch, amused, after Steve's girlfriend has cut her wrists open. And, of course, Bishop is killed in the end by Steve, though he gets a posthumous revenge and Steve dies too.
Now contrast that with the 2011 remake with Jason Statham as Bishop. This Bishop is not a psychopath. He has to be duped into killing Harry, and only agrees because he's been told the killing will happen one way or another, and Bishop will at least be quick and merciful. He does it, and finds out later he's been tricked, and he sets out to revenge himself on the guy who tricked him (there's no such revenge in the original). Steve still tries to kill Bishop at the end, for his own revenge for Bishop killing Harry (in the original he didn't know Bishop had done it, or give a shit when he found out, Steve was just a psycho himself). Bishop survives Steve's attempt on his life and retires from being a hitman.... (more below)
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Darren (1461)
2 years ago
(Continued) Why all these changes? To make the ending less bleak, and the hero more relatable. That's what modern studios insist on. In the '70s, the studios gave directors carte blanche, and the result was some pretty daring, gritty movies, of the sort studios just won't make anymore. The auteur era came to an end with United Artists gave Michael Cimino complete free reign on Heaven's Gate, and the movie went hugely over budget, and then became one of the all-time biggest box office bombs in cinema history. It bankrupted United Artists. One movie, but it bombed so hard it tanked a studio that had been around since 1919, co-founded by Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks. After that, the studios would never again allow directors such latitude. You can't really blame them after something like that.
But the result is that movies made after the '70s have never been so dark and unconventional. Terry Gilliam had to fight tooth and nail for the tragic ending to Brazil in 1985. If he'd made the movie ten years earlier, he wouldn't have had to struggle for it. But Heaven's Gate put the final nail in the coffin of the auteur era, and movie studio executives won't allow certain things they feel will turn off audiences.
So... Sylvester Stallone's Carter was never going to be as much of an anti-hero as Michael Caine's was. It's just the way things are nowadays.
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