It’s a common complaint online that America wields its superpower status in ways other nations can’t match. What critics often miss is how power actually works in practice. “With great power comes great responsibility,” Uncle Ben told Peter Parker in the 2002 Spider-Man movie. But the less-quoted part of that lesson is what responsibility actually entails: the obligations, costs, and trade-offs that come with the job. Peter Parker’s journey showed this clearly: once you have the power to act, choosing not to act has consequences too.

Typically when you hear “coming of age” movies, you’ll most likely think of flicks such as Mean Girls, American Pie, Project X where the teenagers are up to some really cool, rad stuff but never in a million years would you have thought of Gran Torino. Partly because the movie wasn’t marketed as one and the plot has different age groups interacting with each other which makes it easy to pass off as just a regular drama genre. Neatly wrapped beneath all that drama, is the coming of age experience of Thao which the average teenage boy can relate to.