When exactly was it that John McClane got super powers?
By Burbanked on Apr 24, 2007 in Movies, Trailers | 1,569 views |
I don’t know about you, but I was always a John McClane fan, right from the very beginning – the very day – when I left the theater in that hot July of 1988 in Upstate New York. I was hooked and forever changed. The seeds that Star Wars and Raiders had planted in me had grown into full-blown, stuff-the-detonators-into-the-C4 movie geek love.
And I really think that it was because McClane was a normal, recognizable guy. Indiana Jones, James Bond, Luke Skywalker – they were great movie heroes, brave and cunning and clever and all of that – but they were also the ones that you never really thought would fail. They made all the right decisions, said all of the most clever things. They were wonderful, amazing – the stuff that fuels the dreams of a young would-be filmmaker like I was. But they were fantasy guys, Supermen without the cape.
But along came John McClane. Sweating, bleeding, cursing. He makes bad decisions and he’s a jerk to his wife. Even so, he’s cool, macho, funny and resourceful. His fists were good and his one-liners were better. There was still never a doubt that the guy would come out on top – but somehow you knew that it wasn’t going to be easy. He was going to sustain damage.
Here’s what I’m talking about: take a look at this still from near the climax of the movie in which McClane is doing something very movie-like, extremely heroic: standing on the edge of the building, about to jump off. But remember: what’s he saying here?
I promise, I will never even think about going up in a tall building again. Oh God, please don’t let me die.
You can say what you’d like about Godless Hollywood, but that there is an action hero in one of the most influential blockbuster films of the last two decades saying a prayer for survival. Consider for a moment how rare and amazing that actually is – and what a real-life, three-dimensional character McClane is for having brought that moment to the screen.
But as happens so very often in the world of Hollywood sequels, McClane has lost his identity along the way. In the effort to make him a bigger action hero, facing more villains and increasingly lopsided odds, he’s become just another infallible cinematic superhero whose exploits have become more and more ridiculous with each passing exploit.
Take a look at what I mean after the jump.
Keep this in mind as you read the following: in the original Die Hard, McClane’s goal was to rescue his wife from a building. He killed a dozen terrorists to accomplish that goal.
 In Die Hard 2, McClane has to rescue an entire airport. And he kills about 40 people to do it. Sure, along the way he gets into a fairly realistic shootout in which we see that trademark McClane vulnerability… |
 And then later, after intoning his now-signature kiss-off line of dialogue to no one in particular, McClane realizes that he has the capability to bend the laws of physics to his will as he lights a trail of gasoline… |
 …that travels at several hundred miles per hour and then leaps through the frigging air to incinerate his foes. |
 In Die Hard With a Vengeance, McClane is somewhat back in regular-guy fighting form, including a very kickass scene in which he takes out four huge guys in a cramped elevator. Nice work! |
 And then later he goes surfing on a big truck. What in the wide, wide world of sports has happened here? Where’s the guy we knew before? You know, the one who had to rely on real-world circumstances, action and reaction, and Newtonian laws of movement and physics? |
Which brings me, at long last, to my real point. As you may remember, I thought the first Live Free Or Die Hard teaser was cool, exciting and fun – just enough quick action beats to get me interested.
But the full trailer for LFODH has really bummed me out, mainly because John McClane no longer functions as a human being bound by the laws of Earth. Allow me to illustrate this with two stills from the trailer:
1. This is John McClane, having just jumped from the tail of a flying jet.
2. This is the broken highway that John McClane will ostensibly land on after jumping off the tail of a flying jet. It’s supposed to be reasonable to assume that he will do so without breaking every single bone in his body.
3. This is the jet from which John McClane has just leaped. How fast is it traveling and in what direction? How much air resistance could there be? Are the jet’s afterburners – presumably right there in the neighborhood of McClane’s white-socked feet – not a factor here?
And this still is the very next cut in the trailer:
1. Again, John McClane having just jumped from a jet.
2. The broken highway, roughly a mile and a half away from where he’ll safely fall.
3. The jet from which he has just jumped, only now it’s not a jet, it’s just air because John McClane has officially become Superman.
I understand that Hollywood operates under the assumption that “bigger is better”. I get that movies like these aren’t supposed to be realistic or believable; they’re supposed to be old-fashioned summertime popcorn fun.
But the fact is, Die Hard is truly one of the best action films ever made. Ever. Instead of making the sequels bigger and better, why couldn’t they simply have made them as good?
And John, who or what have you become? There was a time when you had me at “fists with your toes”. But now…I just don’t know any more.
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Ray | Apr 24, 2007 | Reply
AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME post!!! You said EXACTLY what I was thinking about that trailer!!
You put a hell of a lot of work into that!! BRAVO!!!
Ray
http://www.therecshow.com
damian | Apr 24, 2007 | Reply
I call the phenomenon that you’ve described the “Rambo syndrome.”
If you watch First Blood you may notice that Rambo is rather flawed, though still sympatehetic, character. He may be disturbed but that makes him interesting. He manages to elude the police not with the aid of superpowers, but through the use of his own wits and training. He never actually kills anyone and he gets injured along the way. The things Rambo does, and which are done to him, are entirely plausible and logical.
In the sequel (entitled Rambo, subtitled First Blood Part II) Rambo became more of a superhero, doing impossible things and surviving relatively unscathed with little or no complexity left to his personality. Consequently, he became less interesting, a stuntman more or less going through the motions. By the third film (bizarrely titled Rambo III, which always made me wonder “Whatever happened to Rambo II?) Rambo was taking on an army with only his friend Richard Crenna and a couple guns. All connection to reality had been abandoned. Rambo was a cartoon.
I agree that Die Hard is one of the greatest action movies ever (if not THE best action movie ever) and the all-too human John McClane was a welcome relief from these kind of Stallone/Schwarzenegger supermen (also helped by the fact that Willis is actually a good actor) but now McClane has fallen victim to the very thing he was originally a reaction against. McClane has become a cartoon.
Having said all that, I still enjoyed the two Die Hard sequels to varying degrees and am actually looking forward to this one (though I am not expecting too much from it). Obviously I am not anticipating something nearly at the level of the first film, but I hope to go in, turn off my brain and just have a good time. If nothing else, the film looks like fun… and I always enjoy watching Willis.
Burbanked | Apr 24, 2007 | Reply
Thanks, Ray – I should put up a poll; seriously, can anyone tell me where the jet goes in that second shot from the LFODH trailer? Do you remember the original Cliffhanger trailer – it had a similar shot where Stallone leaped about 100 yards between two mountainsides; they ended up taking that shot out of the movie because people reacted to it in the trailer as being entirely ridiculous. Could a similar thing be going on here or will that shot above be in the movie?
And thanks, Damian – I agree with you; the original First Blood has a lot of similarities to DH, and if anything has gone a lot farther off the rails in the ensuing years. I still want to see LFODH, but how unfortunate is it that we’ve got to go in and “turn off our brains”?
Sulu at the Helm | Apr 24, 2007 | Reply
Aren’t the film makers paying attention? They have a choice here: Run this franchise into the ground ala Rocky or Rambo. Or, they could sit in on multiple screenings of Batman Begins and Casino Royale to get an idea of how to revive a great character. Lesson one: make him vulnerable and human (also, place armed guards at the studio to keep Tim Burton, Joel Schumacher and the clowns responsible for Die Another Day as far away as possible–shoot to kill if necessary). Batman became cool again when he stopped being Batman and started being Christian Bale’s character, the same way Bond became cool again when he became Daniel Craig’s Bond and stopped lapsing into self-parody. Granted, the audience for this movie is looking for big stunts, lots of explosions and tons of gunplay, but you can have that without making the character look ridiculous. If summer audiences are that dumbed down that they’re willing to watch any ole movie with lots of stuff blowin’ up real good, there should be plenty of available seats for the screen showing Transformers.
DougJ | Apr 24, 2007 | Reply
Good analysis.
What struck me about the trailer is that it seems like the narrowly ducking a flying car that is coming straight for the protagonists head thing is getting to be a bit too common.
Burbanked | Apr 25, 2007 | Reply
Sulu: I guess the best that we can hope for is a fun movie that (hopefully) doesn’t completely blow our memories of the franchise – and then maybe it’ll be done for good.
Until they remake the original in six years.
DougJ: Agreed. Flying-narrowly-missing-car thing is the new Bullet Time. Filmmakers have their work cut out for them trying to conjure up the next best ridiculously overused CGI stunt.
MC | Apr 26, 2007 | Reply
I agree with you as well. What made John McClane such an interesting character to watch was he literally got the shit kicked out of him for the entire movie and yet, he still gets the job done.
If he doesn’t get progressively more messed up throughout the movie, then that isn’t really worth watching, now is it?