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n/a
deleted
339 Posts |
 Posted - 03/18/2006 : 5:43:31 PM
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Hollywood has always been a cannibalistic town in terms of its art. It's ravenous for a good story idea and tends to gobble them up like jelly beans. It pilfers stage, print, and more recently television to satiate this appetite. Where Hollywood tends to feed the most is on itself. Remakes abound. When a movie on a certain topic comes out, knock offs follow it its wake. Sometimes similar films come out at roughly the same time (observe 1998's Deep Impact and Armageddon). But every so often, a film comes out that is so viseral in the way it hits an audience, that it can be reduced to a formula, which then gets used over and over again in subsequent films for decades to come.
One such example is Jaws, which set the template for nature-run-amok movies. (See the B-Movie Cabal on this topic) Another example is Die Hard.
Die Hard Is an amazing movie when you consider when and how it got made. It is easily one of the best action movies to come out of the 80's (arguably THE best) yet it is not typical of 80's action movies. 80's action flicks tended to have overly macho leading men who were practically superhuman in their abilities: stronger, faster, ably to withstand great pain, etc. The plot, such as there was, generally was just an excuse for the hero to beat up or kill a bunch of guys just to show what a badass he was.
Die Hard went a different way. This was largely due to leading man Bruce Willis. Willis was at the height of his popularity on the TV show Moonlighting, a comedy/mystery show about two detectives who simply want to sleep together but couldn't admit it. Fortunately, the other detective was played by Cybil Shepard and not, say, Richard Belzor. Willis was attempting to translate his TV popularity into a film career. This is no easy feet, as Shelly Long can tell you. I think she's serving soup down at the 'Y'. Willis had just finished Blind Date, a tepid comedy which would have spelled the end of his film career had he not already signed on to Die Hard.
Willis was not known as an action star at the time, being the star of a comedy show and all. Many younger reader may not understand the shock it was to see ads for Die Hard with Willis in a what appeared to be a serious role. Imagine Will Ferrell staring in Transporter 3 or something, with him as the transporter and it's not a spoof and you get the idea.
As such, Willis was willing, and in fact wanted to do things that no other action hero would do. He was interested in actually stretching his acting abilities and portraying the ordeal his character goes through realistically. That scene where he's pulling glass out of his foot, it was Willis's idea to have him crying as he did that. This made Willis's John McClane a more realistic action hero than most and this element became a selling point:
[b][i]High above the city of L.A. a team of terrorists has seized a building, taken hostages and declared war. One man has managed to escape. An off-duty cop hiding somewhere inside. He's alone, tired... and the only chance anyone has got.[/b][/i]
Incidentally, I rented Schwartzengger's flick Commando after watching Die Hard and I was amazed. Commando is one of Arnie's better flicks, but it appears dunderheaded with stuff like "This is my weak arm" as he holds a man over a cliff with one hand. This doesn't make Commando bad, exactly, but it does show how much Better Die Hard was in that the main character had more dimension and thus was more believable. I find it interesting that later day Schwartzenegger flicks tried to make the muscle-bound Austrian into a sort of "everyman" in flicks like The Sixth Day. More interesting is that the last major 80's superhuman action hero , Stephen Segal, had his biggest hit with Under Siege, a Die Hard rip-off.
However, most of the above is not the formula that became the template for Die Hard rip-offs. In fact, all that stuff may be what many of the clones were missing. But what was the formula?
Rule #1: Location, Location, Location
Every Die Hard clone took place in a specific location, a place easily recognized and understood. Such as a building, a battleship, a train, a hospital, a jumbo jet, a mountain.
A mountain???
Well, yes. A mountain. What's important about the location is that it's confining and inaccessable.
Confining allows for the kind of cat and mouse stuff as the hero atempts to thwart the villians while evading capture. A mountain is not particularly confining, but in Cliffhanger, the bad guys had Stallone's friend as a hostage, so he had to keep near them so he could try to rescue the guy. In this way, the enormous space of the Rocky Mountains became confining.
Inaccessable basically means cut off from rescue. Die Hard was based on the novel Nothing Last Forever by Roderick Thorp. Thorp got the idea for the novel from the flick Towering Inferno, where people are trapped in a high rise building by fire out of reach of rescue. Thorp replaced "fire" with "terroists". Hence being cut off from rescue is an important feature of the Die Hard formula because...
Rule #2 Everyman is a hero.
The hero is generally in over their head. This makes them more interesting that the superheroes of other action flicks since it becomes credible they might not make it. We don't believe it for a second. We are watching a movie, after all, but it feels likely, which helps make things more dramatic. The hero is also supposed to be a normal guy who overcomes the villians by outwitting the bad guys. Which leads to...
Rule #3 Bad Guys! A whole bunch of them!
The villians are usually a cohesive group working together toward a particular goal. How much like a well-oiled machine the bad guys appear to be determines how great a triumph the hero's eventual triumph will be. The terrorists in Die Hard were exceedingly well-organized, which help with the success of that movie. Compare to Cliffhanger where the bad guys were a bunch of chowderheads who were given to in-fighting. Made it amazing they even got off their couch at home to go attempt to pull off their little caper.
Having lots of bad guys gives the hero lots of chances to kick ass, as the audience expects, while also making the stakes look high for the whole in-over-his-head thing.
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Sardu
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
1126 Posts |
Posted - 03/19/2006 : 12:29:58 PM
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Great analysis, Brandi.
You know, that could be a fun game- make up your own funny "It's like Die hard" pitch. Like,
"It's like Die Hard- on a dog sled!!"
or
"It's like Die Hard- in a crack house!!"
I like:
"It's like Die Hard- in a ninja training dojo!!" *g* |
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jackspencerjr
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
262 Posts |
Posted - 03/19/2006 : 1:05:39 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by Sardu
Great analysis, Brandi.
Thanks, but my name's not Brandi.
Don't ask me why this was posted under Brandi's name, but the forum crashed a bit when I posted this. I don't know if I caused that or what, but boy is it weird.
Jabootu moves in mysterious ways.
As you can probably guess, I'd been watching Die Hard and Die Hard clones a bit lately. I had recently picked up Cliffhanger, which is a blatant Die Hard rip off. Practically by-the-number. Hence why it got mentioned more than, say Air Force One (It's like Die Hard on a plane but, like, the hero is the President of the United States!!!) |
Edited by - jackspencerjr on 03/19/2006 1:58:14 PM |
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Neville
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
Spain
1590 Posts |
Posted - 03/19/2006 : 2:05:12 PM
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Great work, Brandi, but you forget one of the keys of the success of the movie: John McTiernan. Maligned as he is today, he was, when he was on his prime, an excellent film director. Watching his early films like "Die Hard" or "Predator" you can tell there's not a camera movement without reason, and that the man knows exactly what are the strong and the weak points of the material he is treating.
It's a pity McTiernan's star dimmed with the collapse of the genre -super-action movies- he helped to create and eventually to destroy with "Last Action Hero". He still can make his magic when the material he treats is good -proof of that is "The 13th Warrior"-, but we all know how good scripts are hard to find these days. |
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BrainFromArous
Preeminent Apostolic Prelate of the Discipleship of Jabootu
USA
102 Posts |
Posted - 03/19/2006 : 2:09:03 PM
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Every great hero needs a great villain. Let us acknowledge the wonderful Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber, bond thief extraordinaire.
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Boards don't hit back.
(Bruce Lee) |
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jackspencerjr
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
262 Posts |
Posted - 03/19/2006 : 2:15:17 PM
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| *sobs and sings something about how my life, love and my lady is the sea* |
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Sardu
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
1126 Posts |
Posted - 03/19/2006 : 3:14:51 PM
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| hehe- you might as well just change your name now. And here I thought we had a hot Jabootu-ette! |
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jackspencerjr
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
262 Posts |
Posted - 03/19/2006 : 3:18:40 PM
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| We do, though. That's the weird thing about it. She is a real user and stuff, just somehow my post wound up under her name. At least I wasn't posting, like, nekkid pictures of myself when that happened. That might have been more than the human brain can take. |
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nshumate
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
464 Posts |
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jackspencerjr
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
262 Posts |
Posted - 03/20/2006 : 2:27:18 PM
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Gay cowboys isn't a place.
Unless you mean that bar over on Seventh? |
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RVHorror
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
532 Posts |
Posted - 03/20/2006 : 2:43:18 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by Brandi
The hero is generally in over their head. This makes them more interesting that the superheroes of other action flicks since it becomes credible they might not make it.
I'd argue that this makes it easier for the audience to identify with the main character; they can see themselves in a similar situation and wonder if they would make the same choices, etc. Whereas a "superhero" type action star remains distant. |
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zombiewhacker
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
1475 Posts |
Posted - 03/20/2006 : 3:11:30 PM
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Interesting to note that Die Hard was originally to have starred Frank Sinatra. Back in the day, that is...
Sinatra had played the lead in 1968's The Detective, which was also based on a Roderick Thorp novel. As jackspencerjr mentioned, Thorp's follow-up novel,"Nothing Lasts Forever", placed Sinatra's character in a high rise building (attempting to rescue his estranged daughter from terrorists). So the film version was also intended to be a Sinatra vehicle, only Old Blues Eyes said no. Supposedly Robert Mitchum was offered the picture next. He likewise turned it down.
Over a decade later, 20th Century Fox still owned the rights to the material, so Joel Silver took over, ordered a new script to be written, and the rest is history.
Which goes a long way to explaining why Die Hard may come across as more "humanistic" than others of its ilk. Clearly a late sixties/early seventies potboiler like "Nothing Lasts Forever" would have been short on the explosions and derring-do we come to expect from a Bruce Willis film. However, it would have been long on characterization and mano-a-mano, something the Silver version does reasonably well. Let's face it, the real appeal of Die Hard isn't the explosions, it's watching Willis and Alan Rickman constantly trade taunts and insults as they outmaneuver and outsmart one another. ("Khan, I'm laughing at the superior intellect." Oh, wait... wrong movie.)
All that being said, Die Hard to me is a hit-and-miss venture. Had it been only Willis vs Rickman (and Alexander Godunov) with Bonnie Bedelia the feisty hostage and Reginald VelJohnson as the supportive LA cop on the scene, the movie would have been only top notch.
Unfortunately, to cite the Jaws analogy, there are way too many Murray Hamiltons running around making a mess of everything. Paul Gleason's character ruins, and I mean, ruins every scene he's in. In real-life, one could understand tension arising from a law enforcement turf battle; McClane, after all, is a NYC cop on LA soil. But Gleason's mind-boggling and unreasoning hostility to every single move John McClane makes (even when one of those moves saves the lives of LA cops) doesn't come even close to making sense. The fact that Gleason is not a very subtle actor makes his character even more cartoonish. Someone in the Clu Gulager mold might have softened the character's edges and made him more palatable.
Plus we have to put up with the stupid LAPD SWAT commander (whose only purpose, it seems, is to make Gleason's character look smarter), William Atherton's obnoxious reporter, and the tag-team match of Robert Davi and Grand L. Bush as even stupider (if that's possible) FBI agents, and the second half of the movie just collapses under their combined weights. |
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jackspencerjr
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
262 Posts |
Posted - 03/20/2006 : 3:40:09 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by RVHorror
I'd argue that this makes it easier for the audience to identify with the main character; they can see themselves in a similar situation and wonder if they would make the same choices, etc. Whereas a "superhero" type action star remains distant.
Yeah. I think it's because the superhero doesn't seem like a real person. It lack dimension, something that helps a ficitional character appear more human, so we watch them, root for them, but do not feel for them. |
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John Doe
Diocesan Ecclesiarch of the Sacred Order of Jabootu
USA
91 Posts |
Posted - 03/20/2006 : 5:40:43 PM
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and then there are the Die Hard sequels, which basically threw that winning format out the window in favor of bigger explosions and more "witty" killer comments.
my eyes!! the goggles do nothing!! |
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Neville
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
Spain
1590 Posts |
Posted - 03/21/2006 : 03:47:11 AM
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| "Die Hard with a vengeance" wasn't that bad, stupid ending aside (Willis often says in interviews that Simon won in the original script), but "Die Hard 2 - Die Harder" is bad, bad, bad, it lacks a decent villain, despite William Sadler's efforts, the script is silly, and the direction by Renny Harlin sucks, it makes the movie boring and unnecesarily bloody. |
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Flangepart
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
2329 Posts |
Posted - 03/21/2006 : 1:26:02 PM
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Nice work "Brandi".
Gotta go with the Zombiewacker on the other elements of the film.
The FBI nuts were a ham handed attempt to slapping gov. burecrats, i guess ( Why bother, i don't know), and the Yahoo Gleason plays is an "Obstical to the hero #15 - Thickheaded official" Not a character, but a problim to be over come.
How much does the idea of the smarmey villian, who gets his pantys in a bunch by the hero screwing with his well laid plan, play into the audience rooting for John McClaine?
"Cole, stop handing Dr. Doom the Keys to the Baxter building." Brent Sienna/PvP.
"I speak 34 different languages. But gibberish is not one of them."- Danger Mouse.
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Edited by - Flangepart on 08/24/2009 12:24:49 PM |
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