1995 - DIE HARD WITH A VENGANCE, aka Die Hard 3

The third installment in the Die Hard series, In this film we follow Detective John McClane who is now on suspension.  He's being pursued by the brother of Hans Gruber the villain from the first Die Hard movie.  But all is not as it seems as McClane starts to piece together the real reason that chief bad guy Simon Peter Gruber is messing around with him.

I'll give them credit they approached this sequel with some new ideas.  This time McClane has a partner played by Samuel L. Jackson.  The main bad guy is played by Jeremy Irons in kind of a paycheck performance but a very witty paycheck performance.  The other main character is New York City.  A lot of Die Hard 3 was shot there and they did a pretty good job of capturing the vibe of the city.

Die Hard 3 also has a decent sense of humor with Willis tossing off the one liners while taking on the usual small army of terrorists.  The director John McTiernan is back at the helm of this film and he keeps things perking along from one action scene to the next.

 

The chief problem with Die Hard 3 is as usual it's length.  Once the action moves out of New York City the tension kind of dissipates and it's mostly a matter of the story going through it's paces so we can wrap it up with the now Willis signature line "Yippee- Ki-Ya..." etc as he takes down another elaborate bad guy plot.  This is the last Die Hard film that was any good.  The subsequent sequels had a major drop in the quality department.

The film was written by Jonathan Hensleigh with a little more wit this time.  The film runs an overlong 128 minutes.

1988 - DIE HARD. revisiting this 80's action thriller

Is it an action movie? Is it a Christmas movie? Does anyone still care about this silly argument that could only show up on social media?  It's been over 30 years since I saw this film in the theater. I was curious to see how it held up.  After viewing Die Hard again I would say it mostly still works but it's a little slow and creaky at times.  Present day audiences are pretty much conditioned to having their action movies kick into gear almost immediately after the credits.  Die Hard actually takes about 30 minutes before the big action scenes start.

 

 

The film is famous for the beginning of Bruce Willis's action hero character.  Willis was primarily a television actor but the producers had such a problem finding someone to portray John McClane, Willis  who was practically at the bottom of the list was hired.  He turned out to be a good choice to play the tough New York City cop taking on a bunch of European terrorists.  He was the every man who could shoot up a bunch of haughty bad guys out to mess with the American way of life.  It took a few movies before Willis descended into his snarky movie actor persona.  

 

Viewing Die Hard now I would have to say that I would give the real performing honors to British actor Alan Rickman. His very clever take on the lead terrorist Hans Gruber, the main bad guy taking on Willis is a real treat.  Rickman gives a very smooth and witty performance, the film really comes alive when he shows up.  Bonnie Bedelia was cast as Willis's wife and she wasn't a conventional Hollywood beauty.  She actually looks like she could be a wife and mother.  

 

As a movie Die Hard is rather overlong coming in at 132 minutes.  Towards the middle of the film the action and the story kind of slow down with lots of unnecessary personal issues among the main characters.  The story also gets very silly with the appearance of two FBI agents with the same last name, Johnson. 

For the most part Die Hard is still entertaining. The director John McTiernan  was at the top of his game staging the various action sequences and the whole film has that kind of superior professionalism that  Hollywood could bring to a big studio production.

The was written by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza.

1993 - THE LAST ACTION HERO, Arnold spoofs his films and himself.

 Columbia pictures lured Arnold Schwarzenegger with a big salary to star in a summer movie.  The choice interestingly enough was to make a film poking fun at Arnold's action star image and in a very strange way a tribute to Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr.  

In this film a young boy who is an avid fan of Arnold's screen hero Detective Jack Slater is magically transported into the current Jack Slater sequel he is watching.  Here he is confronted with being a character witnessing every action movie cliche in the book. As the boy tries to persuade Slater that he is really only a character in a movie the audience is treated to a list of cameos and tributes to movies like Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal of all things.

This movie was a big critical and commercial failure.  Critics felt the film never found the right tone for the story and all the bad publicity regarding the difficulties in making the film probably kept the audience away.

The director John McTiernan worked under intense pressure to meet the studio's release date which probably affected the final form of the film.

 

Seen today the film is actually very funny, Arnold was game to make fun of himself and in a way it was almost the pinacle of Arnold's career as his projects got less and less interesting after this film.

The film's listed writers were Shane Black and David Arnott but a number of uncredited writers worked on this film including William Goldman, the running time was 131 minutes.