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?

Dances with Wolves (1990)

Director: Kevin Costner

Cast: Kevin Costner, Mary McDonnell, Graham Greene, Rodney Grant

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I’m not entirely sure why, but a nearly four hour run time has probably scared me off for over thirty years. Is it even possible to get a hold of the theatrical cut—the one that everyone loved so damned much—on disc?

Did I Like It: It’s rare that a four hour movie becomes is best self in the final quarter of the runtime. All of the fat in this special edition cut is up front. Sure, a little bit of Dunbar’s (Costner, pulling Welles-ian triple duties as Star, Director, and Producer) life before coming to the frontier can buttress not just character development but story logic, but the full hour we spend seeing him encounter death in the Civil War, becoming an improbable war hero, requesting to escape the world around him in favor of the frontier, finding that frontier does not reflect his prejudices, and then embracing his isolation could have been—and presumably, were—handled with much more brevity in another version of the film.

Characters like Major Fambrough (Maury Chaykin) and Timmons (Robert Pastorelli) might even be able to prop up an entire (probably less affecting) film in their own right. Here, they are merely added color to fuel a plot that should have already been underway by the time they are dispatched. By the end of the film, I’m feeling a great deal of affection and sadness for the Sioux as depicted here, and have all but forgotten the early parts of the film which dragged. In fact, the only thought I give the first hour is wondering how in the hell Dunbar survived a quickly infecting wound at the time that he did.

All of this is symptomatic of a problem Costner would display to greater detriment later in his career. As an actor, he has a fine presence. Sure, he would be miscast in things like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), and astonishingly well-case (if underserved by the writing) in Man of Steel (2013), but he is certainly a movie star for the ages. As a behind-the-scenes force he was far too over validated far too early in is attempts, that he lost all sense of what is (or ought) to be part of the film at hand, and what isn’t. Thus, we’re eventually left with things like Waterworld (1995) and The Postman (1997). Art thrives in restriction, so there was very little hope that an expanded cut of Dances with Wolves would somehow improve upon what might have rationalized such an exercise in the first place.