"Welcome to the party, pal." Celebrating Bruce Willis and his Career.

mtm

mattjoes wrote: »

I didn't care for how Die Hard 4 looked when it came out, it didn't gave me a Die Hard vibe. But I watched the unrated version last year and thought it was a lot of fun. I still don't think it's got as much of the Die Hard vibe as the previous movies, but it's well made. I love the very first action scene and how at the end McClane shoots through himself (!) to kill the bad guy.

I remember seeing it in the cinema and being surprised just how much fun it was; as ringfire mentioned, the fighter jet stuff was too much, but for the most part they got it right and it zipped along better than most action films. The only thing for me was that Willis seemed to have forgotten how to play McClane: he seemed way too grumpy. There's a few moments where you can tell it's John (maybe the best is when he starts talking to himself when he's about to kill the helicopter with his car) but it's otherwise a bit frustrating.
The score is good though, they remember to use the DH theme motif plenty.

ringfire211 wrote: »

I just think whoever thought that a Die Hard film should end in Chernobyl must have been high on something. This ain’t Jack Ryan or some foreign espionage series. THIS IS DIE HARD!! Don’t take McClane out of the USA 🇺🇸
He’s a blue collar guy who fights crime on his home turf.

The one bit of that film I thought showed promise was the Chernobyl stuff: the idea of being trapped in a radioactive town with a load of terrorists was the only part that felt Die Hard-ish, and quite an original idea at that.
I caught the opening of that film on telly recently and it's shocking: it looks horrible, filmed with some horrible crushed grade, and the scenes don't have any of the big screen wit you'd see from the openings of the previous films, just a really flat pedestrian TV show feel.

DarthDimi

mtm wrote: »

mattjoes wrote: »

I didn't care for how Die Hard 4 looked when it came out, it didn't gave me a Die Hard vibe. But I watched the unrated version last year and thought it was a lot of fun. I still don't think it's got as much of the Die Hard vibe as the previous movies, but it's well made. I love the very first action scene and how at the end McClane shoots through himself (!) to kill the bad guy.

I remember seeing it in the cinema and being surprised just how much fun it was; as ringfire mentioned, the fighter jet stuff was too much, but for the most part they got it right and it zipped along better than most action films. The only thing for me was that Willis seemed to have forgotten how to play McClane: he seemed way too grumpy. There's a few moments where you can tell it's John (maybe the best is when he starts talking to himself when he's about to kill the helicopter with his car) but it's otherwise a bit frustrating.
The score is good though, they remember to use the DH theme motif plenty.

ringfire211 wrote: »

I just think whoever thought that a Die Hard film should end in Chernobyl must have been high on something. This ain’t Jack Ryan or some foreign espionage series. THIS IS DIE HARD!! Don’t take McClane out of the USA 🇺🇸
He’s a blue collar guy who fights crime on his home turf.

The one bit of that film I thought showed promise was the Chernobyl stuff: the idea of being trapped in a radioactive town with a load of terrorists was the only part that felt Die Hard-ish, and quite an original idea at that.
I caught the opening of that film on telly recently and it's shocking: it looks horrible, filmed with some horrible crushed grade, and the scenes don't have any of the big screen wit you'd see from the openings of the previous films, just a really flat pedestrian TV show feel.

Well... except that in Western movies it had at this point become a bit of a cliché that Russia + terrorists equals Chernobyl-- which isn't in Russia, by the way. I remember being already sourly disappointed by the film before Chernobyl got mentioned, only to barely hold back my anger in the theatre when it did. I'm surprised they didn't blow up the Kremlin first.

I subscribe to the notion that Die Hard works best on American soil. Also, AGDTDH was based on a spec script turned into a Die Hard vehicle after being reworked to include John McClane. Technically, retrofitting McClane into unrelated action scripts had become standard practice since the second movie, but where most of the sequels got away with it (especially DHWAV in my opinion), AGDTDH placed an even bigger bet and lost.

I'm not very fond of Moore either. As a fan of the games, I loathe his Max Payne adaptation, which also ends with a slow motion helicopter climax. That utterly redundant Omen remake was a misfire too. Behind Enemy Lines was stupid. I haven't even tried watching I.T. because after AGDTDH, I decided to stay way from Moore like I stay away from madmen, Jehova's Witnesses and football hooligans.

mtm

Fair enough, I can't think that I have seen Chernobyl featured in stuff like that, and I just mean that people are always trying to find Die Hard situations (Die Hard on a boat, Die Hard on a train, Die Hard in a prison, Die Hard in an airport etc.) that 'Die Hard in a radioactive abandoned town' seemed to be an idea which held more promise than they used and they probably could have done the whole movie in that location and ended up with a tighter, more Die Hard-ish plot. Did someone say it was in Russia?

I don't massively mind the idea of him leaving the US. I wouldn't want McClane jetting off around the world constantly like Bond to solve problems, but the first film is him being massively fish out of water on the opposite side of the States to where he feels comfortable (and indeed in the skyscraper of a Japanese company, fighting Germans), without the backup of his usual fellow officers; and indeed every film has him end up isolated, out of his comfort zone and on his own, so I think putting him in another country is a fair way of doing that.

Seve

I used to work with a Jehovah's Witness, she was a fun person and didn't make a big deal about her religion, in fact it was a long time before she even mentioned it.

Moore appears to be a journeyman director, why anyone thought Owen Wilson could star in an action movie is a mystery to me, but it made enough money for someone to feel it was worthwhile to keep the name alive for three (otherwise unrelated) sequels...

Max Payne was dull, IT uninspired... a really good director can often still make something entertaining out of second rate material, but not this guy, so AGDTDH was doomed from the get go.

thedove

Steven Segal did Die Hard on a battleship and then on a train and called them Under Siege. I am half remembering a Kurt Russel action thriller where he's on a plane as a tech guy over his head. I think that had some Die Hard vibes. It really defined a new action movie trope or story arc. In the wrong hands and with the wrong cast I think Die Hard might have been another generic 80's action movie. Willis wasn't the first choice for McClane but ended up being perfect for the role.

Haven't seen it mentioned but has anyone here seen 12 Monkeys? I have heard good things about it but have never watched it. Is it worth a watch?

RichardTheBruce

12 Monkeys is very recommended. I watch it every Christmas season.

This is one of my all time favorite films, very moving for me.

MaxCasino

RichardTheBruce wrote: »

12 Monkeys is very recommended. I watch it every Christmas season.

This is one of my all time favorite films, very moving for me.

Frank Gorshin was perfect in 12 Monkeys. His small scene was truly enjoyable.

RichardTheBruce

So many compelling developments play out.

The cast really delivers through Bruce, Madeleine Stowe, Christopher Plummer, David Morse, Tom Waits, Carol Florence, the aforementioned Gorshin, and many others. And I'm not a Brad Pitt fan but yeah.

I gotta stop there. And gosh that makes me want to watch it now.