Tag: Bruce Willis

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Matthew joins the MovieRob Minute Podcast to talk Die Hard minutes 31 through 35!

MovieRob Minute: Die Hard

I’m a bit late posting this, but this month I joined my friend MovieRob on his minute-by-minute podcast to talk about the action classic Die Hard! For those unfamiliar with the concept, each episode of the show covers one minute of the movie. I joined Rob to speak about minutes 31 through 35 -a great villain scene with the legend Alan Rickman.

Embedded here are players for each of my five episodes and where you can find the show on Apple and Spotify podcasts.

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Awesome: Bruce Willis Out Of Expendables 3 But Harrison Ford Is In!

ford1

Yippie-ki-yay, mother lover. Sylvester Stallone confirmed today ([via Twitter](https://twitter.com/TheSlyStallone/status/364831174075486208), of course) that Bruce Willis is being exchanged wholesale for Harrison Ford in the upcoming *Expendables 3*. According to further tweets, there’s quite a spat forming between Stallone and Willis, with the former calling the latter “greedy and lazy”. Fighting talk indeed.

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Review: G.I. Joe: Retaliation

GI Joe Retaliation

My biggest problem with 2009s _G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra_ was that it says just too generic. G.I. joe was always about colourful characters and ridiculous world domination plots and while it certainly had the latter it definitely lacked the former.

Retaliation fixes that first problem, mostly by casting Dwayne Johnson but also by adding Ry Stevenson and Jonathan Pryce. That’s not to say its perfect though, as it also adds Adrianne Palicki and D.J. Cotrona, the former of whom seems to phone in everything except her admittedly smoking hot body and the latter of which does pretty much precisely nothing except occasionally admire the formers admittedly smoking hot body.

Jonathan Pryce in particular has a ball playing Zartan playing the president, but it’s Johnson who anchors the film and he does a great job doing it. He’s perfectly suited to a movie that’s all about the action and explosions, not because he’s bad but because he buys in more than any of the other Joes that aren’t killed in the first reel. That would be a spoiler except that its in the trailer.

Channing Tatum is also nice to see and he has good chemistry with Johnson, and when Bruce Willis shows up he’s his usual Bruce Willisy self. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s not exactly extraordinary either.

The plot is pretty basic and picks up a few years after the last film ended. Zartan is still the president. Joes still fight the bad guys. Cobra still wants to take over the world. Many explosions ensue. Zartan has the Joes and attacked and the few that survive fight the good fight.

That’s pretty much literally it. This movie isn’t rocket science it’s a toy commercial, remember? Cobra takes over the White House after the Joes are eliminated and the proceed to try to take over the world. They come pretty close too, and even blow up London –also not a spoiler as it’s in the trailer, but what’s not in the trailer is that they’ve actually clearly targeted Birmingham on the map– which elicits … well, nothing really. It happens and then no one ever mentions it again.

Also, Snake Eyes is half way around the world for most of this and leads his own subplot for the first and second act. Yes, the nameless, faceless, silent guy is the main character in his own separate thing for most of the movie. Of course if this movie were trying to sell character development that’d be a problem but since it’s trying to sell ninjas fighting on mountains and men with guns blowing things up it’s not really a problem at all.

The film’s main problem then is that it’s not really tense. There’s no real feeling of peril in the film. Even with 99% of the Joes dying in the first act it never feels like any of them are ever in any real danger. It’s not boring either, the action is well executed, it just falls somewhere in between. There aren’t any real surprises except possibly what new cars and guns they are going to show up to the next scene in.

So that’s it really. G.I. Joe: Retaliation is not a bad film and if you like movies with explosions you could do a lot worse this weekend. For those of you who had the toys growing up you can rest easy that yes this at least looks and feels like a G.I. Joe movie which is a welcome change from the previous one. There are plot holes you could drive a tank through but when it comes right down to it? I had fun watching this movie and that’s all that really matters with a movie like this.

**Rating: 7/10 **
[rating=7]

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Review: A Good Day to Die Hard

A Good Day to Die Hard

I’ve written quite a bit about this movie so for those of you who just want to TL;DR version that covers the important bits here it is:

* A Good Day to Die Hard is fucking terrible
* John McClane is even less relatable than he was in Life Free or Die Hard
* Jai Courtney is alright, but if you’re a fan you’ll wish he had a different big break into movies
* Die Hard is still the best Die Hard movie, and always will be (followed by “With a Vengeance”, “Die Harder”, “Live Free” and now “A Good Day”, and in that order)
* Mary Elizabeth Winstead needed to be in this movie more

So here we go.

In 1988 John McClane was a different kind of action hero. He was an everyman, nor an adonis or a martyr or highly trained ninja/soldier/pastry chef, he was just a guy who was thrust into the position of being a hero by shitty circumstances. He got the shit kicked out of him, no one believed him when he initially called for help, and when he finally prevailed he was so beat up it’s amazing he could still walk.

All of this worked because not only was John McClane more relatable than every other action hero (and indeed went on to be the template for so many other action heroes through the 1990s and on to the present) but because Die Hard was also a well constructed film. It’s an action movie yes, but it takes a good half hour before any of the real action starts allowing for a lot of character development and plot set up that’s often missing from the bigger more bombastic action films.

Fast forward to 2012 and the sad fact is that they’ve now basically unmade the character and fit him every so neatly into the mould he originally broke.

John McClane is no longer an everyman, he’s an action god, casually sending a flatbed mercedes cargo truck into an e-brake spin to avoid an oncoming RPG or driving a commandeered SUV through a guard rail on an overpass, landing it on a moving semi truck with a car trailer and literally driving over traffic to get to the road below, all the while spewing off bad one liners which have clearly been added in ADR.

I can’t tell if Jai Courtney is terrible or if it’s just the material he’s given to work with. He plays the son angry at his absentee father bit alright, but it’s kind of unbelievable. Especially when you consider that the reasons John McClane Sr. was absentee were a) his mother kept moving him away and b) John MCClane has literally saved three major cities and the entire country at this point, so it’s not like he was gone because he was a deadbeat dad, but that’s the angle they play it from rather than the “you were there for all those strangers but not for me” angle.

And since we know he was there for those strangers, and his exploits are known to people in that universe, it makes no sense that the bad guys don’t seem to know who he is and don’t kill him immediately when they find out. But of course they couldn’t even if they wanted to because the bad guys are actually incompetent in this movie. Previous bad guys just underestimated John McClane, these guys are actually idiots.

The main henchman even goes off on a cliched and pointless monologue at one point, after having John and John Jr. tied up, and they tie John Sr’s hands _in front of him_ so he can lunge at a bad guy when the moment strikes, and John Jr’s _behind his back_ so he can reach the super secret spy knife/gun –which they previously gratuitiously showed him putting in his shoe– so he can cut his bonds and strike said moment.

Oh, and that bad guy? He’s meant to be malevolent but it’s so poorly executed that quite literally the only thing about him that I remember, let alone dislike, is that he chewed a carrot with his mouth open during his excruitatingly terrible monologue. That made me dislike him, but not for the right reasons.

This is the problem with structure of the movie: there are no surprises. Literally everything that happens is so obviously telegraphed that you always know what’s about to happen.

_Live Free or Die Hard_ was not a great movie but at least it tried to be something. I mean, it tried and _failed_, but at least it tried. _A Good Day to Die Hard_ feels like a movie that was made with a checklist. Big car chase? Check. One liners? Check. Kill a helicopter? Check.

It’s just a shame the checklist didn’t include “make this all fit together in any decent way.” Or maybe it did and they didn’t get to check that item off.

**Rating 2/10
[rating=2]**