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Week Of June 25, 2007 - Wed / Fri
June 27, 2007
It's Shit AND ShinolaLive Free Or Die Hard is truly extraordinary. I don't know if I have ever seen anything quite like it. Make no mistake ... it is an epic piece of shit. I mean, wow! Once I got past the eye-rolling of the first act, I found myself laughing out loud much of the rest of the way ... "Did I really just see that? Did someone really have the balls to do something as utterly stupid as that?!?!?"
The answer was and is an unqualified, "YES!"
The thing is, it really plays like a supermuscular version of a Screen Gems movie ... not far from Shrek The Third, a veritable TV version of the high-quality original, but with a massive budget that allows so many effects that a hack director like Len Wiseman has every opportunity to prove just how spectacularly untalented he really is.
The screenplay, from start to finish, feels like a development Frankenstein. Even the opening sequence, in which we meet John McClane's daughter ... a college hottie who is having a fight with a guy in her car who is ... oh my ... touching her breast!
Now I completely understand a woman, of any age, not wanting to be felt up by some horny guy on a date. Perfectly reasonable. But this is followed by a multi-page comedy conversation about whether or not he is her boyfriend. Now ... do you know of many college kids in 2007 who are at the boyfriend/girlfriend designation point where Second Base is a major point of contention? I don't. But the gag of dad not knowing what to call the boy (boyfriend? not boyfriend?) is more important than the reality of the situation. (Oh, we've come a long way from Bruce McGill in the closet after "banging" Chelsea Field in The Last Boy Scout!)
And so goes the movie.
It's kinda like they got a good script together with a smart interesting idea and then said, "not enough action," and started adding big boom sequences without regard to whether they made any sense at all.
My favorite piece of ill-logic is when a helicopter outside and above the opening of a tunnel is shooting bullets that somehow riddle the hood of a car a quarter-mile or so inside of the tunnel. Huh? Did they buy from the same magic bullet salesman who sold to Harvey Lee Oswald? This, of course, is the prelude to perhaps the least realistic stunt in movie history as McClane, as they say in the commercials, "kills a helicopter with a car."
But it gets pretty stupid well before then.
Action sequence after action sequence feels like a crummy piece of derivation from a much better movie. And yes, we will even get black stretch pants on a great ass right out of Underworld. But if a machine gun did it in Die Hard, we get 12 machine guns here. If there was a grenade in Die Hard, we get explosions that look big enough to knock out 6 floors, but that somehow knock out only a select studio apartment.
Then there is the idiotic comedy bit by the "computer expert" that has NOTHING to do with his computer expertise, but with bad acting that should make OnStar or whomever was supposed to be the auto support service represented sue for the suggestion of criminal stupidity.
By the time we get to the Stealth fighter (or something that looked like one) flying in and through freeway underpasses and a man riding on its wing, we are in an excessive version of True Lies. (Amazingly, not a redundacy!)
But the whole thing that was so great about the Die Hard series was that as big and ballsy as it could be, John McClane was made of skin and bones and blood. The Governator in True Lies was a walking cartoon ... Tom Frickin' Arnold was actually terrific in the movie, because HE is a cartoon ... and Jamie Lee Curtis was a cartoon of female machismo. The film was a cartoon and demanded that you accept it on those terms. Die Hard was a more modern, more muscular version of the great westerns, a lone man against a bunch of bad guys, plus some jokes.
And then there are the basic rules for this series:
1) Have a great, cool villain who is truly twisted. Love Tim Olyphant, especially in Go ... but here, he is just a slow talking angry guy wearing black. Even his relationship with Maggie Q is not one-tenth kinky enough to be interesting.2) The story is contained in some remotely realistic way. Here, they go from New Jersey to Washington to West Virginia. There is nothing containing the story at all, except for the clock, which is not very well designed. Finally in the third act, there is some clock, because a character is put in jeopardy. But even then ... anything could happen ... which means we can anticipate nothing.
3) Whatever is presented, the crooks are always crooks and that becomes clear at some point. Here, the motives for the action are all over the place. And the notion of what their actions might do to the world economy is never very clear ... just blindly threatening.
Even the central idea of this story ... that the bad guys need to kill off everyone who helped them ... doesn't hold up. Outside of a brief period, it really doesn't matter who the bad guys are. The actions they are taking is positioned as too powerful for them to hide or to need to hide. So why the obsession? And if it's so easy to get in their way, why isn't it easier for those in power to defend themselves from these attacks?
However ...
As stupid and incompetently made as Live Free of Die Hard is, I laughed a lot. It is so amazingly bad, that it really is kind of good. Sometime I was shaking my head at the bad direction ... sometimes it was Justin Long, left to improvise something funny that was never really all that funny ... sometimes it was Bruce Willis looking like he was thinking, "Who do I have to fuck to get out of this franchise?" ... sometimes it was the quality supporting cast forced to choke out bad expository speech after bad expository speech ... sometimes it was Kevin Smith as a punchline, which seemed a waste of a very talented guy, who would have been much better in the Justin Long role ...
It was agonizingly bad ... and resultingly, a lot of fun. We were just Elizabeth Berkley as Lucy McClane, Kyle McLachlin as The Bad Guy, and Kate Beckinsale as The Skin Tight Spandex Panted Karate Chick away from one of the best horrible movies of all time ... Show Hard: Evolution
I'll tell you how bad this movie is. The CG stunt with a car flying at Willis and Long and not crushing them because two cars that are about to run over our hero duo gets in its way, which also stops the deadly cars in their tracks ... they put it in the ad. That utter absurdity, which would be at home in nothing better than Van Helsing or a Troma movie, is the sales tool for this thing.
I'm a guy who likes good junk. I'll laugh through Eight Legged Freaks or Lake Placid and go with that flow. This film is junk. There is not a director (nor a judge nor a producer nor a P.A.) on On The Lot who could not have done as well as Len Wiseman with this budget. But I laughed. I laughed a lot. It was horrible, but not offensive (outside of the odd interest Wiseman shows in hitting women in the face really hard, no less than four times in the film). So maybe it will hurt so good for a lot of audiences, not limited to teenage boys who just want to see stuff blow up and to take a few minutes to consider feeling Mary Elizabeth Winstead up.
Maybe.
But I'll take Transformers to block.
E Me.
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