Films directed by
John McTiernan

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.

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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.

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The Hunt for Red October

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How quickly did we leave the Cold War behind? The dust had barely settled on the fall of the Berlin Wall when this 1990 Tom Clancy adaptation was treating the subject like a period film. Of course, the world had changed so drastically since the novel’s 1984 publication that it was impossible to view the material as current events.

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