The hot trend in movie heroines is not the damsel in distress. It's the damsel who causes distress. Today's top actresses, such as Angelina Jolie, Keira Knightley, Jennifer Garner, Jessica Alba and Jessica Biel, have cultivated reputations as tomboy sex symbols, women with delicate features who can disarm a tough guy equally as well with a sultry look or a kick to the throat.

They are playing James Bond-type roles that would have gone to men 10 years ago, producer Todd Garner says.

Casting a woman helps reverse the Hollywood axiom about what makes an exciting hero: Men want to be him, and women want to sleep with him.

"It's just flipped around: Guys want to sleep with her, and women want to be her," he says.

This new generation of tough babes follows in the bootprints left by Sigourney Weaver ("Alien") and Linda Hamilton ("The Terminator") Even Naomi Watts as the blonde who captures King Kong's heart in last year's Peter Jackson remake was more of a firecracker than the original's Fay Wray or even Jessica Lange in the 1976 version.

Hollywood is learning that a neo-feminist hero — showcasing beauty, brawn, brains and seductiveness — can appeal to both genders for different reasons.

Uma Thurman, who had her biggest hits as the volatile gangster's moll in "Pulp Fiction" and the vengeance-seeking Bride of the "Kill Bill" movies, is again testing the limits of male moviegoer masochism with the comedy "My Super Ex-Girlfriend."

Thurman plays superhero G-Girl, who makes love to her regular-guy boyfriend (Luke Wilson) while flying over Manhattan and saves him when he falls from the Statue of Liberty.

But she also hurls a live great white shark through his apartment window when she's angry.

"There's nothing coy about some of these characters," Thurman says. "They're not simpering, soft-moaning creatures. They're kind of dynamic."

The joke in the movie is that Wilson's character is much more infatuated with G-Girl when she's the intense, miraculously strong, invulnerable superhero and less interested in her secret identity as a mousy, emotionally needy art dealer.

"We've all been through it," Thurman says. "When somebody's really attractive and great, but they suffocate you and need you much more than you're comfortable being needed, it's too much. You're not interested. And as soon as you're not interested, they desperately want you.

"And as soon as they desperately want you, they become kind of unappealing."

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"My Super Ex-Girlfriend" is the reverse of last summer's "Mr. & Mrs. Smith," in which Jolie and Brad Pitt were a married couple tired of each other's blandness until each discovers the other is a covert assassin. The volatility brings them together. In "Ex-Girlfriend," the volatility is part of the initial appeal, and the neediness when she loses that strength is part of the joke.

Playboy magazine editorial director Christopher Napolitano says fearsome beauty is a male fantasy. "It's an exciting thought for a guy to know that a sexy woman can turn on a dime and offer more than he can handle," he says. "They like the idea of being challenged. On the physical level, that's what men understand, while an emotional challenge might weary them."

Producers see fiery heroines as potentially win-win. It's a way to appeal to both men, tempted by the dangerous sex symbol, and women, who like the concept of an empowered babe.

"Movies reflect modern culture, and these films take female empowerment to the extreme," says Sanford Panitch, production chief at New Regency Productions, which made "Smith" and "Ex-Girlfriend."

"I don't think women want to see a mousy, submissive persona being dramatized in a movie. That's not what women are."

Perhaps that's why Kate Bosworth's Lois Lane in "Superman Returns" was slammed by some critics for being in constant need of rescue.

Thurman said one woman she spoke with wished that G-Girl had remained a dynamo.

"She was bemoaning it on some political level. 'Gosh, she was great, but does she have to be such a cloying (brat)?' " Thurman says. "But would it be funny if she was a superhero who was invulnerable and fabulous?"

Characters such as Jolie's Mrs. Smith, Garner's "Alias" spy, Evangeline Lilly's outlaw castaway on "Lost" and Knightley in "Pirates of the Caribbean" (who gets more sword fighting time in the new hit sequel) strike a nerve with guys because they clearly don't need the men in their lives, but they still want them — maybe.