Not Coming to a Theater Near You
You know him?”
“Not socially. His name’s Jaws, he kills people.
On his recent press tours for Die Hard 4.0, Bruce Willis apologized for making this third instalment, admitting that it was something of a misstep in the series. This just goes to show why Bruce is floundering in dire action crap and limp thrillers, because Die Hard With A Vengeance is, even on my third or fourth viewing, completely fantastic, with it’s insanely fast moving plot, wild set pieces (the taxi chase! the exploding subway station!) and snappy, clever-dumb dialogue. There’s at least four or five movies sharing screen time here- an action thriller, a chase movie, a buddy comedy, a heist picture and a terrorist bomb plot, to name just a few. The film’s genius is that it never gets confusing, rattling along at breakneck pace from minute one.
Okay, so I’m leaving out the last ten minutes here, in which the entire thing goes to hell- there’s just no way to make a car park on the Canadian border look exciting, and no one seems particularly inclined to try. But for 100-odd minutes this is top-class smash and grab, a witty, streamlined example of the classic 90’s actioner.
by Tom Huddleston | Source: ITV2
17 Jan 2008 11:29 AM | Comments (6)
Does that final ten minutes include the part in which Bruno uses the top of that dumptruck as a surfboard before being spewed out of the pipeline at miraculously the same point near the Taconic State Parkway where Samuel L. Jackson happens to be? Because that moment created a massive trauma in my adolescence which I have yet to fully deal with.
Yeah, that’s one of those things you just have to go along with.
I guess the thing that really just sucks for me about the third film is that it drops the idea of Die Hard as a site-specific enterprise in favor of being a generic, geopolitical action film about saving the world. The selling point of the second film (which I haven’t seen in years, but enjoyed at the time — whither Renny Harlin?) is that it’s just “Die Hard in an airport.” I suppose the filmmakers started to think that this idea was beginning to become absurd — that every few years John McClane would find himself trapped in some kind of architecturally based terrorist situation, with his wife endangered —but surfing on a dumptruck is less absurd? And of course avoiding the quasi-nuclear explosion of a boat mere feet away from you because you’re underwater?
One begins to wonder if Holly Genero divorced not only her husband, but also the entire franchise.
But this is exactly what I like about the third movie. The second movie is pretty dire, Under Siege and it’s sequel had tackled boat and train, and Speed and it’s sequel had done lift, subway, bus and, um, another boat. So they took an existing script- called ‘Simon Says’- and wrote McLane into it, upped the banter quotient and presto. I love all the daft tasks and running about, and the fact that you think Jeremy Irons is a vengeful terrorist, then he turns out to be a bankrobber, then he’s some sort of Nazi dictator. So maybe the movie would have worked better outside the franchise, but it’s still, in my opinion, a cracking script, ludicrous coincidences and dumb (and extensively rewritten) ending notwithstanding. (On which note, wouldn’t Die Hard 4 have been better if they’d done the same thing with the script for 16 Blocks?)
This discussion of script choices and franchise concepts has reminded me of the fact that the script for Under Seige was actually supposed to be used as script for the 3rd instalment of Die Hard and that the “Simon Says” script was actually supposed to be used for the (at the time) upcoming Lethal Weapon movie. Hence we have the black & white antagonising buddies angle thrown into the Die Hard series. I always thought this movie would have worked better as another episode of Lethal Weapon. Remember when Mel Gibson just played crazy instead of living the lifestyle? Ah‚Ķ good times.
Most of the complaints about this movie seem to come from the snobby film geeks who are threatened by change, by the very idea of a sequel going in a new direction, and arrogantly think that they know the “correct” formula for a Die Hard movie. Gimme a break. They already tried making a Die Hard sequel that was identical to the first one — it was called Die Hard 2, and it’s the worst movie in the series. (It’s a good movie, but Vengeance is about 17 times better.) The people who complain about Vengeance not feeling like a Die Hard movie would be the first ones pointing how much it feels like Die Hard if it didn’t have the Die Hard name. Vengeance is one of the best action movies ever made — not quite as good as Die Hard, but it comes close — and I question the taste of anyone who dismisses it.
leo
17 January 2008
9:08 AM
Website