Follow-up: John McClane’s super powers actually not quite as super as was previously thought.

Last month I speculated about the progression of John McClane’s abilities to face down increasingly insurmountable obstacles over the course of four Die Hard movies. What inspired my rant was a particularly ridiculous screenshot that I had grabbed from one of the theatrical trailers for this summer’s Live Free Or Die Hard.

That still, in which McClane leaps from the tail of flying jet, looked like this:As I observed last time, notice that McClane is about 75 yards above what should be a rather unforgiving cement landing pad, as well as the fact that the plane he’s recently stepped off of is nowhere to be found.

But now, courtesy of some new LFODH TV spots featured yesterday at RopeofSilicon.com, that same shot from the movie has been altered to look like this:

Amazing. I had to move from Hollywood to Pittsburgh and start a little blog before the movie industry would start taking my opinion more seriously.

Seriously, the SFX addition of the jet and the reduction of airspace between McClane and the broken highway certainly improves the believability of the shot. It’s still pretty silly - that he could not only stand on the tail of a jet but also have the frictionless capability to run and jump accurately off of it - but it seems as though someone took a look at the previous footage and decided to tone down the Foolishness Factor just a bit.

But really, why show us the original version at all? I understand that trailers sometimes have to include incomplete movie footage - and often they contain dialogue, shots or scene snippets that don’t even make it into the film’s final cut. It’s pretty much a given anymore that studios rush promotional material into the marketplace far in advance of a movie’s completion, and in their zeal to show us something we haven’t seen a dozen times previously online, they’ve got to up the ante.

It’s hopelessly old school of me, but I just wish that the trailer-cutters would hold something back. Why not show McClane jumping off the jet - but not show what happens to him? Isn’t our reaction then more likely to be along the lines of “Holy shit - that dude just leaped off a frigging jet! How in the hell can he possibly survive that?!” As it is, the filmmakers have now spoiled one of their movie’s major stunt sequences (if indeed one can even term a CGI stunt as a true “stunt”) pretty much in its entirety.

And I’ll bet anyone out there that this is among the biggest moments of the film’s climax.