Blammo, it’s Burl, here to review a mid-90s action
spectacular! Of course it’s Die Hard:
With A Vengeance, the third in the series that was theretofore comprised of
Die Hard and Die Hard 2, and ought to have stayed that way as far as I’m
concerned! I recall seeing this one in the movie theatre, but couldn’t remember
if it was any good or not! Well, now I’ve got my answer: not really terrible,
but frankly not much good either!
The script was originally something else, not a Die Hard movie at all, and that really
shows! Bruce Willis, perhaps best known from The First Deadly Sin and Moonrise Kingdom, once again stars as John McClane, the dipsomaniacal officer of the
law previously seen on multiple occasions happening to be in the vicinity of
major terrorist/burglar activities! Here he is again, in the middle of it all
but for the first time not entirely by coincidence! Ha ha, just mostly!
It seems the stars of Moonlighting,
Willis and Jeremy “Dead Ringers”
Irons, are together again for the first time, ha ha! Irons plays a Gruber
number two, the brother of the fellow Alan Rickman played in the first one, and
is pretending to seek revenge for the time Willis tossed his brother off a
roof! It all gets started right away, with an explosion in New York, a phone
call from the perpetrator, and the bleary-eyed McClane preparing to undertake
that caller’s demand! And, ha ha, that task and a bisection-by-wire that takes
place later in the story were all that I could remember from my previous
viewing!
Anyway, he has to wear a terrible sign in Harlem, and there
makes the acquaintance of Samuel L. Jackson from Exorcist III and Django Unchained! The two jolly pals go on a merry adventure masterminded by
Irons, which includes more explosions, or threats of explosion that don’t follow
through; crashing subway cars; harrowing Central Park cab rides and many narrow
escapes! Ha ha, the very last narrow escape our true-blue friends endure is
particularly unbelievable, as they hop off a boat that is in the process of
exploding with the force of a Nagasaki bomb!
Cops played by actors as varied as Graham Greene from Seattle’s Loch Ness: The Lake Washington Sea
Monster and Colleen Camp from Track 29 are backing Willis and Jackson up as best they can, and indeed by the
time of the truck-stop anti-climax, they come through!
It’s curiously forgettable as an action picture – somehow
the action scenes, as competently handled as they are, just don’t stick! Maybe
they’re too silly and unbelievable, like the time McClane outruns a wall of
water in his dumptruck and is fired out a manhole like a balding, unshaven
jack-in-the-box! Ha ha! But watching it now, the movie seems curiously if
pointlessly prescient! The picture’s now all-too-familiar imagery includes
buildings blowing up in New York and citizens running from billowing clouds of
dust and debris; its themes touch on race relations and the dispiriting
likelihood of black people being shot by police! Ha ha, there’s even a Donald
Tr*mp reference! It was all very up-to-the-minute, almost disconcertingly so!
As
I said though, even with all that and some sharp dialogue and performances,
it’s a curiously forgettable movie! It’s much better than the Die Hards that followed it of course,
but not a patch on numbers one or two! I give Die Hard: With A Vengeance one and a half toilet bugs!
No comments:
Post a Comment