Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)

Director: John McTiernan

Cast: Bruce Willis, Jeremy Irons, Samuel L. Jackson, Graham Greene

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I wonder sometimes what was the last movie I saw before starting these reviews in 2018. There’s a better than even chance that it was this during my last march through the sequels to Die Hard (1988).

Did I Like It: In my head, I’ve always viewed this as not just the best sequel in the series, but the only one even remotely worth a damn. I wondered, though, after my recent re-watch of Die Hard 2 (1990) if I would start thinking differently. Ultimately, though, I still think this is the strongest aside from the original, even if I finally found the charms in Die Harder.

It might be a fairly run of the mill 90s actioner. Indeed, it started out life as a completely unrelated original film intended as a vehicle for Brandon Lee. Abandoned after he died during the filming of The Crow (1994), it was then dusted off as a potential sequel for Lethal Weapon (1987) before eventually becoming what we have now.

One presumes that Simon (Irons) was not Hans Gruber’s brother the entire time, but that would certainly have been a choice. Come to think of it, the film seems so quintessentially New York-based (I don’t dare say that the city is like another character, so relax) it feels like it would have lost something had it followed Riggs and Murtaugh in LA, although I have no trouble imagining that the opening sequence with the sandwich board was written for Mel Gibson first.

It allows John McClane (Willis) to no longer be a fish out of water. Shedding the trappings of the first movie, it feels like this series can go pretty much anywhere.

Let’s just ignore where the series did go, shall we?

Die Hard 2 (1990)

Director: Renny Harlin

Cast: Bruce Willis, Bonnie Bedelia, William Atherton, Reginald VelJohnson*

Have I Seen it Before: Sure, I mean, I’m not stopping everything around certain major holidays to force whoever is in my proximity to watch it like certain other films. But I’ve probably seen it twice or so over the years.

Did I Like It: Oddly, yes? Sure, this might not be the little sequel that could that became Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995). There are parts that are a rehash of the original, sure, but there is an obligatory and appropriate expanding of the scope here. Where Die Hard (1988) is an oftentimes claustrophobic journey up and down the Nakatomi Tower, this spreads out the action and raises the stakes.

The cast surrounding Willis—a little more dour, as somebody bothered to tell him he’s a movie star—is also a delight, with the main threat coming from William Sadler and John Amos, two actors I’m bound to be delightfully surprised to see in things. The Grim Reaper and Chairman Fitzwallace causing trouble for John McClane and America? That’s pitch enough for a movie.

I’m even willing to overlook the fact that most of the plot hinges on the image quality of faxed fingerprints. I think I am, anyway. At least this isn’t one of the bloated, inept sequels almost completely unrelated to the original that we got in more recent years.

*Right out of the gate, this review is already running havoc with the in house style here on the site. You might want to call the movie Die Harder, but that’s not the real title of the movie. Also, the first three cast members credited after Willis appear in the film for a combined 15 minutes and each appears less interested in being in the same place with Willis for longer than they have to for more than 30 seconds.

Beavis and Butthead Do America (1996)

Director: Mike Judge

Cast: Mike Judge, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Cloris Leachman

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. Did anyone have HBO in the 90s and get around seeing this one? I think my parents might have even seen it at some point.

Did I Like It: I’ve been going through a bit of an MTV-renaissance lately. Well, I suppose it can’t be counted as much of a rebirth, when I never really watched the channel in my youth. And yet, between The Real World Homecoming (a show in which I thought I would never have any interest), my HBOMax hunger strike*, and Beavis and Butthead Do The Universe (2022), I’ve been parking it at Paramount + on the regular, and it more often than not feels like its the late 90s early 2000s all over again.

There’s an odd simplicity to this movie, when compared with its much later progeny. Universe felt the need to wrap the affair in a thoroughly meta plot line. That was probably rightly so, in order to bring the two heroes into the weirdness that is the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. Here, Beavis and Butthead (both Judge) are content to be what they were at their most pure: Two dimwitted and ultimately malevolent sex maniacs, too stupid to realize they never need to go on the journey insisted on by the road movie int which they have drifted.

That may feel like a complaint, but it isn’t. This is as pure a delivery system for Beavis and Butthead as one is likely to find. The only way to amplify this movie’s primary quality would be to stop the proceedings in the middle to be an unrelated concert film complete with running commentary. That might have worked less as a feature, but I would direct the reader to Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (1996). It could have worked. We would have watched anything that year.

*They know what they did. Odds are you do, too.

Unbreakable (2000)

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Cast: Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Wright-Penn, Spencer Treat Clark

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, man. It’s one of those key movie watching experiences of my life. It is the late fall of 2000. Florida is doing its very best to tear apart western civilization. I am sixteen and the notion that I can just go to the movies without having to concoct some kind of labyrinthine plan to physically get there* is a novel experience. Sure, the eventual twist ending (the first sign that Shyamalan would never be able to shake the need to include them) but at that moment, the film played me like a harp.

I spent the next several weeks insisting to anyone who would talk to me for longer than thirty seconds that they must go and see it. Many did; few liked it as much as I did, with the possible exception of Bill Fisher. We then spent the next two years trying to tap into the films vein in our own way.

Did I Like It: I may have tipped my hand a bitIt is, without a doubt, Shyamalan’s best film. Sure The Sixth Sense (1999) has its charms, Signs (2002) shows an unusual level of restraint, and Split (2017) is quite good (although it benefits highly from its connection to this film). But this is the purest, most direct version of what Shyamalan has to offer the movies.

It’s attempt at depicting a world where superheroes could be real dominated my imagination for a very long time. It’s story of a man coming to embrace the best parts of himself, which he had spent a lifetime trying to ignore is something that still sticks in my craw every time I watch it now. I would not be me without this movie.

I’d say something more about the film, but there’s very little chance any additional words would be equal to my feeling and esteem for it.

Die Hard (1988)

Director: John McTiernan

Cast: Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Alexander Godunov, Bonnie Bedelia

Have I Seen it Before: Every Christmas Eve for years…

Anybody got a problem with that?

No? We good?

Did I Like It: It’s reputation as a one of the greatest action films of all time would be hard to dispute. Every moment of the film is precisely to design. I can count on one hand the amount of films that waste not one second of their screen time. The movie made Bruce Willis a star beyond the dreams of Moonlighting, when his subsequent work in films has only intermittently earned that degree of notoriety. It birthed an entire of subgenre of “Die Hard on a…” action movies that actually contributed a few pretty great movies.

Someone might not care for action films, and on this level one could not recommend the film. Otherwise, it is one of those superlative films that repels controversial or contrary assessments.

Except on that one issue. Fine, let’s talk about it. Is Die Hard a Christmas movie? Many—including the film’s star, apparently—have dismissed the idea completely out of hand. Many insist that it objectively not only qualifies as a Christmas movie, but in fact is at or near the top of the greatest Christmas movies. Still more find the debate between the two points to be tiresome and tedious.

I think all three perspectives need to take a minute and remember both the holiday they’re dragging through the mud and the movie they’re taking the piss out of in the process. It’s about family. It’s about togetherness. It’s about trying to be with family on certain dates in late December. If that’s not a Christmas movie, then I think the universe is fundamentally at odds about fundamental truths.

I watch Die Hard every Christmas Eve. The holiday is not real, nor does it even officially start until Argyle (De’voreaux White) drives Mr. and Mrs. McLane away in his limo.

If it’s not a part of your Christmas celebration, then it is not a Christmas movie for you. Can the rest of us do what we want in December?

Good.

Now if I only could get everyone on board with the idea that Batman Returns (1992) being a Christmas movie, then we could finally have peace on Earth and good will toward man and Bonnie Bedelia.

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis

Have I Seen it Before: I’m a pop culture junkie who grew up in the 90s. Had I not seen the film, it’d be sort of like a Catholic not know the catechism.

Did I Like It: Let’s put it this way: I made the fewest notes for this film of all of the reviews I have written. 

Could anyone—and I do mean anyone—construct a screenplay like Tarantino did for this movie, and not have it be immediately dismissed as confusing pile of racist, self-referential garbage? I think one need only look at some of the other films that cropped up in the grunge-adjacent independent scene around it—Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994) comes chiefly to mind—or the other fragmented crime movies that launched in its wake—Suicide Kings (1997), a film I only have the faintest memories of loathing, comes to mind in that category—to realize that no, you cannot simply reverse engineer the deft touch that Tarantino has brought to each of his films.

Pulp Fiction is a film that beggars belief. It shouldn’t be, and yet it is. Even those who might detract from it in the past (it has certainly aged better than some of the above mentioned contemporaries), complaining that it is too lurid, or too violent for its own good seem to miss the point. Yes, there might not be a film in all of creation that shows drug use so lovingly as this does, but it also, with the OD of Mia (Thurman) brings it all back down to Earth. Drugs are bad, mmmkay? So, too, is it with the violence. When people are killed, yes the carnage is vivid, but the violence is either integral to the plot or given its proper weight under the circumstances. Mr. Wolf’s appearance in the film if Marvin (Phil LaMarr) didn’t have his little accident? I’m also often struck by the awful, real toll of the gunplay between Marsellus (Ving Rhames) and Butch (Willis) before they run afoul of Zed (Peter Greene) and company. Anyone who accuses Tarantino of glibness is focusing too much on the cheeseburgers and the foot rubs, if you ask me.

As I said above, my thoughts on the film are ultimately rather few. It is the superlative entry of its time and place, and if you haven’t watched it, well then you’re just… Where’s Uma Thurman when you need her to draw a square for you?

Split (2016)

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Cast: James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, Betty Buckley, and (dun dun dun!) Bruce Willis

Have I Seen it Before: I thought I was done with M. Night for several years now. People said I needed to go see it.

Did I Like It: They were right.

The text of this review appeared previously in a blog post entitled “Surprise! On M. Night and his rebound.” published 02/05/2017.

NOTE: SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS FOR SHYAMALAN’S LATEST MOVIE, Split (2016) follow. Also, I’ll talk about significant spoilers for plenty of other movies including Arrival (2016), Midnight in Paris (2011), and Back to the Future (1985). However, if you haven’t seen Back to the Future, what in the absolute hell are you doing reading my blog? Go watch Back to the Future. I don’t even know what to do with you anymore. Have you watched it yet? Okay, now we can get on with the blog.

Surprises in movies are a rare thing.

I spent last week heralding the art form of the movie trailer, but movie previews do have the tendency to load up the prospective movie goer with too much information. Honestly, when was the last time you went into a movie and didn’t know nearly everything about what you were going to see? It’s a rare thing to be surprised by a movie.

The stories of the test screenings for Back to the Future are an interesting example of the opposite phenomenon. A California audience was brought into the screening and told nothing about the film that would follow, besides that Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd is in it. Could you imagine how that movie played without any additional information? It’s a light and breezy 80s teen comedy for the first half an hour, before the very fabric of the space-time continuum is up for grabs.

Surprise time-travel may be one of my favorite things in movies. Arrival does it well, and Midnight in Paris singlehandedly elevates the late Woody Allen catalogue based solely on the device.

Then Lora informed me that she had both a) been spoiled on Split’s surprise ending and b) I would love the ending.

I had been pretty cool on M. Night Shyamalan’s work in recent years. Since I guessed—and then immediately dismissed—the twist ending of The Village I’ve had the feeling that his work was going downhill pretty fast. The Visit (2015) was a return to form for him, but I felt like he may never reach the zenith of his output, Unbreakable (2000)…

More about that in a minute.

With Lora giving it her now-spoiled seal of approval, I thought only one thing could force my wife to guarantee that I would love the movie’s inevitable twist ending. McAvoy’s split personalities would somehow be tied to some bending or breaking of the rules of the fourth dimension. That’s fine, I guess, but I wasn’t sure how they could possibly fit such a plot development into the movie.

Turns out I was wrong, but Lora was right that I loved the twist that was in the movie.

Ever since Shyamalan completed Unbreakable, there have been whispers about a potential sequel. The principals involved were game, but the original box office receipts were tame, especially compared with the money explosion that was The Sixth Sense (1999). It seemed like an Unbreakable 2 would join the ranks of Ghostbusters 3*, The Rocketeer 2**, or the Star Wars sequel trilogy*** as things that were just never going to happen.

But the moment that McAvoy’s Kevin Wendell Crumb escapes authorities for one final discussion with himself and the supernatural beast that lies within, a very familiar James Newton Howard score begins to play. That can’t be right, I think. Then we cut to a diner, where a news report of the events of the film plays out. Someone mentions that it reminds them of that crazy terrorist in the wheelchair they captured fifteen years ago. No one remembers his name.

“Mr. Glass,” David Dunn replies, looking an awful lot like Bruce Willis. “They called him Mr. Glass.”

Boom. Credits.

I’m the only one laughing in the theater. Some fifteen-year-old in the front row who thinks he is the smartest entity currently alive cries out, “DID ANYBODY GET WHAT THAT WAS ABOUT?”

“YES!” I cry, happy to engage with someone who was likely too young to possibly understand what was happening.

“OKAY, SO WHAT HAPPENED?” the little shit retorted.

“GO WATCH UNBREAKABLE!” I tell him.

“OH, OKAY,” the little kid says. An unspoken “old man river” is appended to his dismissal.

My unbroken trend of wanting to get into shouting matches with strangers after movies conclude aside, I’m blown away by this movie. It’s a solid Hitchcockian-with-a-touch-of-the-supernatural yarn, something that by this point Shyamalan should be able to do quite well. 

But, as with all great twist endings, the final moments of the film make it something else: a surprise sequel to Unbreakable.

A. Surprise. Sequel.

Has that ever been done before? Dan Aykroyd shows up for a cameo—ostensibly as Ray Stanz—in Casper (1995) but that is more of a gag than a greater link to a larger mythos. Robert Downey Jr. reprises the role of Tony Stark for the first time in The Incredible Hulk (2008), but that little easter egg was well-advertised in the initial push to create hype around the then-embryonic Marcel Cinematic Universe…

But this? I legitimately don’t think anyone has ever made a surprise sequel before. Maybe I’m wrong. If I am, let me know in the comments. In the meantime, I’ll be watching my well-loved Unbreakable blu-ray and waiting patiently for the climactic showdown still to come between David Dunn/Everyman/Security Man and Kevin Wendell Crumb/The Beast/The Hoard.

*For the record, <I’m fine with the remake>, but that doesn’t diminish how much I would have enjoyed seeing another direct sequel with the players still all in there prime. Probably by 1995, that was never going to happen.

**Which might still happen! Believe!

***Wait, what?!