
Die Hard and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Shia LaBeouf stars as Bruce Willis's estranged son, and single handedly manages to destroy yet another multi-million pound franchise?
Since he's no longer required to save Earth from asteroid armageddon, Bruce Willis has been checking out potential helmsmen for Die Hard 5 - The Zimmer Frame. Actually, we made that last bit of the title up, since any suggestion that Willis is too geriatric to reprise his role as John McClane would doubtless be a matter for a …
Wasn't 'Rocky: the fight for Depends' enough?
What's the next worn-out franchise to spawn another episode?
Looking in my crystall ball I see:
300 +.05
Back to the future: Origins.
Alf: The hidden years.
Avatar: The really, really extended directors cut, now with sweepings from the cutting-room floor!
Shrek: Oops, we did it again.
Watched Bruce last night in RED (Retired Extremely Dangerous) and he was excellent for his age or half his age, he did seem to have got a decade younger than the last film I saw him in though. On the other hand the love interest was Mary-Louise Parker who is 46 but doesn't look it either.
RED was a very good film IMHO. Of course, with Hollywood, they can make anyone look young/old (with a margin of success at least....some actors are exempted by this sweeping generalization too....).
As for content, most movies you watch nowadays are as much BS as watching "The NET" was.... "What did you do to stop the upload????" "I injected malicious code in the upload stream and caused a buffer overflow in the router that broke the Internet." "How many were affected?" "All of them...." (last NCIS: LA episode...). They seriously need to get a REAL tech consultant. Or at least become better at shoveling BS....
Either way, I'll likely was DH5, if for no other reason than why I watched Bond last time...or the time before that....and before that....
Realistic isn't the point. Die Hard and Raiders are both absolutely brilliant films on their own terms in a way that makes any nitpicking null and void.
I couldn't give a crap about Die Hard 4 - I stopped watching when Kevin Smith's stupid face hove into view - but Crystal Skull made me quite cross. Now I pretend it was all just a bad collective hallucination.
up until the last half hour or so when it all got exceedingly silly. Until it's compared to the other Indy films it's ok as a film, not terrible. The reason the other films got away with so much is that they had a pretty much perfect mix of humour, fantasy, action and good dialogue. The plots were incidental to those other components but held up enough to set the stage for them. The problem I had with DH4.0 was that it just didn't make sense from the word go. You've got international terrorists who are watching these kids, have had access to their apartments, HAVE TO ACTIVATE THE BOMBS before they can be triggered, and then are reliant on the kid pressing escape (the escape key? Seriously? Do these people use computers?). If you had all that explosive, and knew when the person you wanted to kill was in their room, why not just have some sort of trigger? And if you don't care if it looks like an accident or not, why not just shoot them full stop? When you have to be that contrived to make the start of the movie work, I just lose all interest. The great thing about the first films was that, no matter how ridiculous it got, you actually felt like it all made sense because of the slow and well-executed escalation and the fact that the bad guys took the SIMPLEST route to their goal that you could think of, with the really silly stuff near the end. Is it really sensible to wire explosives to the ground floor of a tall building? I don't care, it works in the film, but once you drive a car into a helicopter, the film can't go much further.
As Reality Dysfunction and Lee mentioned before me, RED was really enjoyable.
The cinema was packed full and there was no engineered trailer to get people there. Just word of mouth.
Bruce can still pull the crowds and he can still play, but please No more Die Hard.
Watching 4.0 was way too traumatic, I can't and won't go through that again..
... than Die Hard 4?
The first one was great - as in *really* great. Die Hard and Aliens between them define what an action film should be. Doesn't have to be stupid, doesn't have to be badly-scripted or acted. Blowing shit up is nice, but if you don't care about the people then you're screwed.
Second was distinctly average. Third was rather good, mainly because it went back to character-driven, and one of the characters was Samuel L Jackson.
And then there was Die Hard 4, which was such a gross turkey that even Bernard Matthews couldn't have mechanically-reconstituted it.
Ok, not weeks old but this was around last week, pigeon post would have been faster.
What isn't mentioned is this chump's "distinguished" filmograpy - Bruce has a nasty habit of choosing directors he can lord it over - see Len Wiseman's experiences on DH4.
When he's an actor for hire, you get Die Hard or Pulp Fiction.
When you're the star with director approval, you get striking distance, die hard 4 and pretty much every film he's made in the last 10 years.
but the "psychopath in a battered grubby white hat" characterisation. It's as if every time he does something ridiculously heroic he's thinking "fuck this is going to hurt, but I have to do it because I'm the good guy - no matter, I'll get you for it later".
Admittedly, it did seem a bit daft and over the top at times the first time i saw it, but the second and third times i've seen it i really enjoyed it.
I also enjoyed the A-Team and Wolverine though - i wasn't expecting amazing pieces of cinema from them, and what i got was an enjoyable film.
So I shall expect no more from DH5 and see how it turns out.
Ba, for those of you who are Die Hard fans, you all know that you will watch it, dont lie now!
You may think it will suck but you will have that little itch thats screaming to be scratched.
Course you could all just download it whenever its out there by releaving you of that nasty itich and showing the producers no mercy which will hopefully perswade them to not make more crap
course if it turns out ok, then you also know you will buy it too, so everyone wins!