A good day to quit while they were ahead was the day they wrapped production on Live Free or Die Hard. This is one too many times drinking from a very dry well.
A Good Day to Die Hard
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Films featuring
Bruce Willis
Bruce Willis
Live Free or Die Hard
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It’s been a good couple of years for restarting movie franchises. 2005 gave us Batman Begins and 2006 begat Casino Royale. It also gave us Superman Returns, so no trend is bulletproof. However, it did continue in 2007 with a fourth installment in the Die Hard series, which was easily the most consistently entertaining of the sequels. The original is, of course, still miles ahead, even from this one, but that’s to be expected.
Die Hard: With a Vengeance
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It’s almost axiomatic that the third iteration of a movie franchise is when the sucking starts to begin, assuming that the first sequel didn’t already bring the suck to the table. The good news is that the third Die Hard movie, with John McTiernan back at the helm, manages to avoid this “curse of the third movie.” The bad news is that it doesn’t miss the mark by all that much. This is a Die Hard movie done mostly by the numbers and it’s only because of the sheer professionalism of the enterprise that they bring it off at all.
Die Hard 2
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This follow-up to the 1988 genre-buster is one of those movies that does just about as much wrong as it can without completely sucking. It’s also not bad for a Renny Harlin movie, but if all you can claim is you’re better than Cutthroat Island, that’s not much to hang your hat on. The best you can say about it is that it keeps your eyes and ears sufficiently entertained that you don’t notice that your brain hasn’t joined in the reindeer games.
Die Hard
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When 1988 began, this guy Bruce Willis was a popular enough TV star, known for his years on Moonlighting, but his two ventures into film were a pair of alleged comedies that had a negligible impact at the box office. At the same time, action movies had been in a creative black hole, full of invulnerable superman battling hordes of commies and terrorists. So, when Die Hard appeared with an unproven star, there weren’t a lot of expectations for its success. It certainly wasn’t expected to reinvent the entire genre. Well, Merry Christmas in freakin’ July, Hollywood.
Perfect Stranger
The director of this misbegotten chunk of lifeless cinematic afterbirth is James Foley, previously responsible for Glengary Glen Ross, a brilliant adaptation of David Mamet’s play. That earlier work was top drawer and it still had half as many virtues as this movie has vices. Perfect Stranger smacks you across the face with plot holes so huge that it would be an insult to your intelligence if only you could be bothered to care.
The Siege
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Viewed through a post-9/11 prism, Edward Zwick’s The Siege seems at times both impossibly naïve and uncomfortably prescient. Ultimately, however, this movie is more effective as postulation than it is as a narrative, smarter about its subject matter than about its story. Whatever points it scores are undermined by shallow, clichéd characters and a stock, predictable ending.
The Fifth Element
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The Fifth Element is a big, noisy, goofy piece of cotton candy, and I mean that as compliment. This is not a film that tries to be anything more than what it is and it’s a lot of fun. Director Luc Besson has put his own adolescent daydreams up on the screen and surrounded them with a dense, richly imagined universe.