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This week, on Orchestrated Looney Tunes:
Celebrate the season with the second best Christmas movie, where parking tickets are a slippery slope to fighting terrorists. Die Hard 2 confirms John McClane only fights crime on holidays, and it has everything you could possibly need: A great (constantly yelling) cast, bad guys and good guys who don’t want John McClane around, a brief one-on-one with someone named Telford, louder than normal gunshots, and a brand new game called Borrow, Steal, Kill. Do you want to see 47 shots of snowmobiles? We have great news for you. Were you hoping for some kind of grunt/whimper acting? You’re in luck. Do you miss movies edited for TBS? We’ve got you.
So grab elderly woman’s taser, head over to the skywalk annex, and get ready to party with Mister Falcon in an adventure that will blow you sky high.
Greg and Joe remember how Bruce Willis could do no wrong in their eyes back in the day, answer important questions, create new drinking games, and somehow find a weird excuse to add another Limp Bizkit song to our playlist. We don’t feel great about it.
Joe’s Back of the Box
It’s Christmas and all the McClanes want to do is enjoy the holiday with family. Unfortunately terrorists have a different idea, as they shut down the DC airport. As the snow storm bears down on the airport, John McClane (Bruce Willis) must navigate untrustworthy allies and a platoon of terrorists to save his wife’s plane as it runs out of fuel. Stack ’em, pack ’em and rack ’em in this must-see action packed sequel, Die Harder will make your heart grow three times its size in what will be an instant Christmas classic.
The REAL Back of the Box
Boy, action movies in the late 80’s and early 90’s were a different kind of masculine. The men all scream at each other. They also scream at the women. If there were children in this movie they would have been screamed at as well. This is a decent sequel to the near perfect Die Hard, if a bit humorless. Bruce Willis is in his element as the everyman hero thrust into an extreme situation. Renny Harlin amps up the action and the explosions for a 2 hour snow filled romp.
Note: This transcript has been auto-generated, so… You know… It’s not our fault.
Greg: Joe in the movie we watch this week, Bruce Willis gets a parking ticket, and that parking ticket becomes a slippery slope into terrorists taking over an airport. My question for you this week is, have you ever gotten a parking ticket? That was a slippery slope into something crazy.
Joe: I get a lot of parking tickets. I should just say that up front. Clear the air. Just clear the air. Set the scene. I often. Well, just hope and pray. I will pay for parking. And now I can pay for parking more. But sometimes it’s like. It’s like a four hour parking. And you got to be there all day, and I’ll just be all right.
Joe: If I get a ticket, I get a ticket or a parking lot where if I get a ticket, I got a ticket. But I remember one time this wasn’t necessary, a parking ticket, but it was a slippery slope. If I was hanging out with a friend, we got out and we’re hanging out at his place.
Greg: What city are we in right now?
Joe: We’re in Seattle, so it’s coming out in kind of upper Queenan. Yeah, I accidentally while I parked in front of a fire hydrant away and then proceeded to maybe imbibe some alcohol. Other stuff. Maybe. Okay. And hung out with having a great time. Sure. Fell asleep there. Woke up at like six in the morning and my car had been towed.
Joe: Oh, no. So free cell phone? Yep. So I had to walk down to lower Queenan to a payphone and call a cab and take a cab home. And then I had to call a friend to take me to the impound lot where it was, which was down in what is now like one of the fanciest neighborhoods, but was not.
Joe: And by South Lake Union area, there’s a tow lot there. And I had to get my car out. Yeah. So but yeah. So it was, it was a nice shock to walk out to where you think your car is going to be, and it’s just not there.
Greg: This is before Paul Allen had bought South Lake Union and turned it into what it is.
Joe: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Wow. Okay, so that was mine. What about you? I know you have, a theory about parking in Seattle that I think our listeners would really appreciate and probably judge you for, partially or not.
Greg: Well, you and I live together in Bellingham, Washington. And then over the course of, I guess, post college, both of us moved down to Seattle, which is about 90 miles south. And I had that same thing, by the way, in that same neighborhood. I was living in Queen Anne, so we were we were blocks from each other and didn’t know it in like crazy.
Greg: But when I moved to Seattle, I found it just really difficult to navigate the city. I think it was because I only went out during rush hour to do anything. But I also found it really hard to park in the city compared to Bellingham. And so I just decided pretty quickly after I moved there. You know what I’m going to do?
Greg: I’m going to park wherever I can and I will just keep parking. Borderline illegally. Two very illegally in the in Seattle until I get a ticket. Greatest plan of all time. I lasted two years before I got a ticket.
Joe: Wow, that’s pretty impressive.
Greg: And I have the exact same thing where I parked in a spot that was not just a loading. It wasn’t even a loading zone. It was like the parking spot that has the red paint on the car.
Joe: Like.
Greg: For sure you’re not allowed to park here. Not even yellow. Just red. And I parked there and I did not return to my car until the morning and it wasn’t towed away, but it did have a ticket and it was like, oh my gosh. Okay, well that amazing run was over.
Joe: But then I thought, but hold up.
Greg: How many times did I park over the course of two years before I got a ticket? This is the cheapest ticket in history. Now, I think I should continue doing this because I’m just going to get a ticket in two years. So we’re good to go. And that is not what happened. I started getting tickets all the time in Seattle.
Greg: They got used to my what was it. It was a 1981 Honda Civic hatchback. It had arrested out muffler. The muffler wasn’t even on it for a good chunk of the time that I.
Joe: Awesome.
Greg: Yeah. So it devolved into just a nonstop flood of parking tickets for me.
Joe: Yeah. And that’s not the 1982 Honda Accord, which no. Your favorite car ever.
Greg: That was the best car.
Joe: That we drove around in.
Greg: Yeah.
Joe: Constantly listening to music. And talking about movies and music.
Greg: Did I have a cassette tape on the dashboard when we drove around?
Joe: I think so.
Greg: Do you remember what that cassette tape was? No, it was the Return of Bruno by Bruce Willis back.
Joe: That’s right. You also had in your room when we lived together this big, like, picture frame window, and then you blew up a picture of Bruce Willis from that album. Yeah. And put it behind there. Sure. Yeah. That is how in the tank we are for Bruce Willis. But. Oh, and if you don’t know the return of Bruno is a musical album that Bruce Willis put out.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: In the late 80s, probably when he was on moonlighting. It was his first album and it was called The Return of Bruno.
Joe: Awesome. Great name.
Greg: Absolutely. And I want to say at the time he was signing Motown Records, and I want to say he was paid the largest advance in Motown history.
Joe: That’s so sad. So sad.
Greg: I don’t know if that’s entirely true, but I think I think that might be right. Okay. We’re just, like, bursting at the seams here. We got to go. Let’s get to the show.
Joe: Let’s do it.
Clip: Take it back.
Clip: It covers 1000 acres in our nation’s capital. Which way is the bus to DC? Each holiday season? 11,000 planes take off. This is Dulles control tower. Go ahead. And 11,000 planes land. I want to know. But tonight, on Christmas Eve, the tracking systems down. Oh, God. Now it will switch backup systems to a complete taken over the airport.
Clip: And one man is the only chance anyone’s got.
Clip: How can the same thing I do the same guy twice? Bruce Willis.
Clip: Die Hard two. Die harder.
Clip: It is known as the second best.
Joe: Christmas movie in all of history from 1990.
Greg: We are going to talk about Die Hard two, which had the tagline Die Harder. We’re talking about Renny Harlin directing, Bruce Willis starring Bonnie Bedelia, William Atherton and sort of Reginald Del Johnson returning. But we also have William Sadler, Dennis Franz, John Amos, Franco Nero, Art Evans, Fred Thompson, and of course, Sheila McCarthy as the journalist Samantha Coleman.
Greg: Joe Skye Tucker, what makes Die.
Joe: Hard.
Greg: Two a great bad movie?
Joe: So many things I have to say. This is of its time, so early, very early 90s, 1990 action movie. It’s a sequel that I feel like lives up to the original. It’s not as good every time I watch Die Hard and I’ve watched it innumerable times, I’m always struck by how good that movie is. But as a sequel, Die Hard two is great.
Joe: There is so much to enjoy in this movie from just the ridiculousness of the most crowded airport ever. The smoking indoors is happening all over the place. Sure, there is no security at this airport, no need, because Bruce Willis is there with an unlimited supply of bullets for his handgun. So true. So many things, lots of screaming.
Joe: So just, like, almost feels like every single line of dialog is is yelled from one actor to another. You have the bad guy doing naked martial arts in the opening scene.
Greg: We’ve all been perfect.
Joe: Yeah, you have so many shots of the basement of the airport where every pipe seems to be leaking steam for some reason. It’s like the most humid place that could be filming an aliens movie. Just steam everywhere.
Greg: Everyone is pointing in all directions at all times.
Joe: You have Renny Harlin action, which the gunshots feel like they are three times louder than anything else that’s happening. Nobody can hit anything. It’s so perfect. And you have the return of John McClane who is the everyman hero. Fish out of water. Just trying to do the right thing in the first one coming back. And you know, how does the same thing happen to the man.
Joe: Whatever. So I’m just spewing just kind of little factoids. I love to hear why you think this is a great movie. I have some other like, were there writers that weren’t looking at some of the script elements on this? But we’ll get to that. We’ll get to that part of that. Well, I love this movie.
Joe: Yeah, just I’m going to tell you it’s probably a great bad movie. I could be at a good, bad movie at moments. Okay? But because I love John McClane and the Die Hard franchise.
Greg: Yeah, that’s it right there. Yeah, it’s.
Joe: Hard for me to lie like I have such rose colored glasses for this franchise.
Greg: Totally.
Joe: That it becomes almost impossible for me to have a critical eye on anything. So everything that is bad about it is just like, wow, okay, so what? Why don’t you just keep your opinion? Csrf.
Greg: This movie gets a pass.
Joe: This movie gets a pass. It probably shouldn’t. Like if it was. If this were the first Die Hard, it would not be. I would kill this movie at first. Certain things and we’ll talk about some of them. Okay? Because it’s the second and because John McClane is just beloved. Bruce Willis for us, obviously was our favorite probably actor at the time when we lived together.
Greg: Probably because of Die Hard.
Joe: Yeah, because of Die Hard. Yeah, because of the return of Bruno. Sure. It’s watched every movie that he put out.
Greg: Almost every movie. Yeah, he put out a lot of movie.
Joe: He did follow us. And during this time he’s like as he’s like, this is on his rise to stardom, too. Like, yeah, Die Hard puts him on the map. He’s climbing up, but he hasn’t hit his peak yet. But he also does indie movies. He does other kind of different kinds of movies. But yeah, yeah, his bread and butter is this character that John McClane.
Greg: Yeah. The reason he was able to do whatever he wanted to do in his career was he just would say, well, maybe we’ll do another Die Hard.
Joe: And they did, and they were awesome, right?
Greg: Or a Die Hard like movie. Yeah, he did quite a few kind of off brand movies as well.
Joe: Yeah. So I’ll stop talking because I could talk about this for a while. I know you can too. So why? Greg’s fine heart is Die Hard. Die hard are a great movie, man.
Greg: I’ve been fighting for this movie since it came out. And then as the progressive sequels came out, it’s hard for me to talk about this movie as just itself, because it is 100% an established rehash of the first movie, which was such a big deal to me. And then there was Die Hard with the Vengeance and then Live Free or Die Hard and A Good Day to Die Hard.
Greg: And so I think about this movie these days, the most in context of where it sits within those five films and how I feel about those five films. And so the first thing to say is, I was just so excited that John McClane was in a movie again, and it’s just two years after the first I heard came out.
Greg: Yeah, but I was so excited that he was back to being John McClane. I was so excited that Bonnie Bedelia and William Atherton from the first movie were in it. I was bummed that Reginald Dale Johnson was only in it for like a scene and a half, I guess, just like a measly two phone calls. Yeah, and that was because he was on a super hit sitcom and was like, I’m not available.
Greg: So Family Matters took, precedence for him. But also, I had never heard of Renny Harlin. And then this is our third Renny Harlin movie on this show in its first year, and this was the first Renny Harlin movie I ever saw. And I was.
Joe: Too.
Greg: Interested. Yeah. And so the fact that it was a Joel Silver produced movie, and Joel Silver had produced Lethal Weapon and Die Hard and Predator. I was super excited about Jumpin Jack flash. That would be good movie back in the day.
Joe: Yeah, like I saw that.
Greg: I just he was one of those producers when I was little where I was like, this guy’s directing all the movies I enjoy watching what’s going on here?
Joe: Yeah, yeah.
Greg: And so I had to I have to just start talking about it in context of the five movies. This is my second favorite Die Hard movie. I think Die Hard two is not as good as Die Hard one, but it’s the second good, Die hard. I think that Die Hard two is better than Die Hard three, which no one I know agrees with me on.
Joe: I don’t agree with you on this.
Greg: Yeah, okay, okay. I have all of my reasons about why that is so this might be a borderline versus Ode, even though I’m sure we’ll get to Die Hard with a vengeance at some point. And so I love this movie. I don’t understand why I feel the way I feel at the end of this movie. I’ve watched it so many times, and even the times that I didn’t really enjoy it.
Greg: By the end, I was so into it. You know, there is some kind of magic that happens at some point in this movie, and it’s not in the first 20 minutes, the first 20 minutes of this movie, I just go like, okay, what are we doing? What’s happening here? And then at some point between like 20 minutes and 30 minutes in, I get on its level and I’m just I’m now on board.
Greg: So this movie’s ridiculous. It’s trying to be kind of a carbon copy of Die Hard in a lot of ways, which I really like about it. And when those things start to disappear from this franchise, I really, really miss them. And I feel like some of the magic is gone. Yeah, I love this movie because of the way I feel when it ends, and it’s kind of like, that’s how I’m supposed to feel at the end of a Die Hard movie.
Joe: Yeah, so I think we just did plain. Yeah, and I couldn’t wait. One of the one of the things that I was missing was raising the stakes, at the end of it and this movie you have multiple things colliding where you have the plane that his wife is on, is running out of fuel, and it’s got to land.
Joe: You have the bad guys on their plane about to take off. He’s fighting them on the wing of the plane. Sure. Like how much can they just amp up the pressure over and over and over. And I do feel I agree this movie ends way better than Die Hard with Avengers I think Die Hard with Avengers up till its penultimate moment is a better and its ending kind of falls flat.
Joe: This movie builds to a perfect ending and a perfect climactic. Yeah Bruce Willis wins. The plane explodes and I remember the first time I watched it. Yeah. It was like chef’s kiss. Perfect. That was probably what I was like 1516 years old. Whenever I was on HBO. I don’t know if I saw it in the theaters or not, but it was like perfect.
Joe: Everything about it was perfect. There are lots of those little moments are like, how is he going to get out of this moment? So it is so good in so many ways. I loved it. I have not seen the fifth Die Hard. I will say that I don’t feel like I’m necessarily missing anything. No, the fourth Die Hard was fine, but you know, you could have slapped any title on that and it.
Joe: Sure, there’s no rhyme or reason that that needs to be a die hard movie, but the first Die Hard and this one really are trying to run back. It’s like, let’s just run it back. Yeah, just do the same thing again. Totally. I think the pieces that are a little off for me on this one are we don’t have the same caliber of bad guy that we do in the first one.
Joe: Well, and so that’s the biggest like, yeah, you have John McClane, who’s perfect, and Bruce Willis is perfect in this. And you have kind of the henchman bad guys, but you don’t have the charismatic. Yeah, bad guy that they have in the first one who makes the movie. To me, he is one of the best parts about it.
Joe: Like, you have the starting of a new kind of genre of action film, but you also have Bruce Willis and nobody really knew before. And the bad guy, and I’m blanking on his name. Alan Rickman. Hans Alan Rickman. Yeah. Hans Gruber.
Greg: The best.
Joe: Perfect. The best.
Greg: I mean, you guys there a better bad guy?
Joe: No, there might be someone that’s on his level, but there’s no one that’s going to be better than Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber. Yeah.
Greg: I agree. William Sadler plays the main bad guy, Colonel Stewart, in this. He’s a guy that has been canned by Congress. We find out and he is taking over the airport so that he can get a guy from Valverde, from Central America who is going to be landing, kind of like a Manuel Noriega.
Joe: Right?
Greg: Type like somebody that the U.S. used and gave arms to, to fight communism in their country, but not a good person, probably. Yeah, maybe like close to a fascist. Probably. But, that person is landing in Colonel Stewart. Worked with him. Esperanza is his name in this movie. And so when his plane is about to land, they want to safely get him off the plane and then take him to an island somewhere and live a happy life, I suppose, is really what it is.
Joe: I have a question about this plot point. This is a movie I’ve seen countless times, so yeah, yeah, I never realized it until I was thinking of it in the context of this show. So you have he’s on this plane. Flying here and then the planet he lands and then they get on another plane and fly. But he takes over the plane he’s on.
Joe: Yeah. Why doesn’t he just fly to the island.
Greg: Hilarious. That is amazing.
Joe: The whole point of it is they land. And then they’re going to get on this other plane with the crew. But he doesn’t need to. He can just fly. I know, that’s why.
Greg: Maybe he’s out of gas.
Joe: I mean, the window does break open, but he still is able to land, so. Sure. And I had never noticed this one plot hole there. Many other times. Yeah, but.
Greg: So then they shoot through his windshield. Is that this movie? I might be confusing this movie with plane.
Joe: They do shoot through the windshield. Okay.
Greg: He’s flying blind.
Joe: Yeah, deep pressurizes the cabin, right? But he’s still flying there to land to get on another plane. Right. He is just taken over a plane. And the other thing that I realized from, you know, a movie will for sure get to air Force One. Sure, they can just shoot the plane down pretty easily. Once it takes off, you know, the US military is right aside from a massive snowstorm that’s coming through.
Joe: But you would think that they could just follow it with some fighter jets and blow it up. And totally we are so.
Greg: And why aren’t fighter jets in the mix finding planes and helping lead them out of the storm or something and help them land? They do try to address this a little bit with a line like the storm on the east coast is so bad that the airport this takes place at Dulles, they’re actually even sending other airports to this one because the storm is so bad or something.
Greg: Yeah, and so they try to fix that with a line, but it only sort of works.
Joe: Yeah. It doesn’t really hold up like on cross-examination if you think about it at all. You know, the East Coast, I think DC has at least a couple airports in it. Everything is really close. So Philadelphia is really close, so is sure. Yeah, I’m trying to think of other that, you know, within 100mi², there are many other airports that are they can’t get there because if you are then they circle forever.
Joe: Sure over this. So again, minor plot points and the action film that we adore. So yeah, you know.
Greg: But I mean, what you’re alluding to there is this movie is a little bit more of a stretch than the first one.
Joe:
Greg: The first one just makes sense because we all understand a building. Yeah. With this one it’s kind of like wow how is this happening. But you know we do want Holly to be able to land in John McCain’s wife is on one of the planes. And so, you know, he’s doing all of this not to save the world, not to avert nuclear disaster.
Greg: He’s doing this because he’s trying to get his wife to safely land. Yeah, they’re back together. They’ve been back together for a year. He’s now in LA cop, not a New York cop like he was in the first movie. So. And they seem very happy they have a phone call.
Joe:
Greg: In the beginning of the movie where they seem to be very happy. Yeah. You kind of have to. And I’m 1,000% willing to do this. Yeah. For the sake of how much I love Die Hard, you kind of need to not think about some of these things. And by the end of the movie, I kind of don’t care how it all came together.
Greg: Yeah, actually, when I saw this in the theater, I saw this movie in the theater, and it might have been like the first movie like this I ever saw in the theater. At the end, right before he touches his lighter to the gas, the film broke when the theater, like the projector actually broke. And so my heart was pounding and I’ll never forget that feeling like, oh my gosh this movie is incredible.
Greg: And that it’s making me feel this way at this moment, you know. Yeah. And I don’t think I realized at that moment that it was right about to end, you know. So then we waited like ten.
Joe: Minutes.
Greg: And they got it fixed, like they taped the film, and then they put it back in the projector. And so we were able to see the end and was kind of like, wow, I don’t even know he’ll stay for that. But it’s a movie that works despite a lot of this ludicrousness it’s just nothing’s going to be as good as that first one.
Greg: You know, it’s the plot. So nice. They tried it twice basically is what happened here? Yeah. And I can see why they kind of got away from trying to do that for three, four and five. Bruce Willis in the past has complained about how much Die Hard two was just a retread of the first one, but in my mind, the magic in a bottle of Die Hard was at least alluded to in every way possible.
Greg: On the second one, and then it was kind of disregarded after that.
Joe: Yeah. I mean, and it’s bond and a totally new genre of action film that we had never, you know, hadn’t seen before that totally the place being a character and the cloistered nature of that. They’re kind of trapped in one area. Yep. Was the new thing. And so, countless movies from Under Siege to Passenger 57.
Greg: Executive decision. Yeah. Plain.
Joe: All of Air Force one. Yeah. You can draw a direct line back to Die Hard and then this one because and it’s, and it’s even a little campy with you know I remember when the ads came out for it. Die hard to Die harder. It’s like ridiculous. Yeah. This has spoiler alert for the drinking games. It opens with the loudest title locking into place I’ve ever seen, like the classic what we think of when we created.
Joe: When you thought of that drinking game, is this as the only title? There’s no anything else except for Die Hard two slamming in as loud as it possibly can.
Greg: Absolutely.
Joe: You have all the Renny Harlin stuff that I love, so the gunshots are way too loud when innocent people are shot. It’s even more overdone. He does this to great effect in the cliffhanger as well. When the bad guys shoot, good people in it, everything else kind of goes quiet except for the gunshots. And he does that in this as well.
Joe: Yeah. And now and just incredibly loud like numerous gunshots aren’t like they just have unlimited bullets. Yep. That don’t seem to be able to shoot anybody. Even Bruce Willis struggles in this as the good guy to shoot people. So great bad shots everywhere or bad shots. You have John Leguizamo making a cameo in this. You have Robert Patrick is in this as well.
Joe: He’s got like one line, like, what are you doing here? And it’s like some classic killing you or I can’t remember what it was, but like, when they kill the Swat teams or the Swat team is killed by two people or three people, and Bruce Willis has to save everyone. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s awesome. And I remember that scene where, like, he uses a walkway and he has to, like, he’s trapped under something.
Joe: I remember the first time I watched it and I was like, how is he going to get out of this? Because, you know, he’s not going to get hurt, really. But then you’re in the moment. So it’s so perfect.
Greg: They do the thing where the timing is all wrong in the editing, like a guy is like five feet away from him and sprinting towards him, and it takes him like 20s to get to him.
Joe: Yeah. And they just.
Greg: Keep cutting between the two and it’s like, this is too much.
Joe:
Greg: If you were looking for the line it was behind you.
Joe: This is just so unbelievable. You have this scene where he, when the bad guy lands his plane the first time and he, like, captures him. Yeah. And then they, they come, the bad guys come and then he’s, like, trapped in the cockpit. They shoot a thousand rounds into the cockpit. Do not hit him. Nope. Then they throw with amazing accuracy into there.
Greg: They have three grenades each.
Joe: Yeah. So like 912 grenades. But the longest timer is possible.
Greg: There 92nd grenades.
Joe: Apparently. And that’s time for him to get into the seat. Yeah. Strap himself in and form the jack cord, which is still an awesome scene, I love that.
Greg: Totally. And yeah, Renny Harlin had to fight really hard for that shot because the camera is way above the plane and his his ejector seat like, flies up towards the camera.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: It’s just so awesome. So obviously a special effects shot.
Joe: I don’t care.
Greg: In a movie that is largely not special effects. It’s like miniatures and whatnot, but not like CGI. You can’t quite see it the way you do now. It feels like a real movie, you know? Yeah, it feels like you’re watching a real thing that’s made to entertain you, you know?
Joe: Yeah. And it. And he loves a great explosion. Sure. So there are a couple, like a plane that crashes like it’s clearly a miniature that hits, but then he just blows the hell out of it. Yeah. It’s just like, yeah. Thank you, Renny Harlin. Thank you for just leaning in to everything you said at one point on a snowmobile ride.
Joe: Jumps over. I rode it as a truck goes by and then it gets shot and the snowmobile explodes with more explosive than you ever think possible. Right. And he’s fine. He walks away from it as perfect.
Greg: Truck out of nowhere is what that was called. Why on earth is there a truck out there in the middle of.
Joe: The ice, just to show how high up he is? You know.
Greg: This is a prequel to the movie Ice Road with Liam Neeson.
Joe: A movie will for sure. Probably not actually get true, but that’s.
Greg: Deep down on the list. Yes. And let’s face the famous thing about this movie was that it takes place during a horrible snowstorm. Yet it was filmed in the winter of 1989, which was a notoriously warm winter in America, and it was actually supposed to be filmed in Moses Lake, Washington.
Joe: You know, it just.
Greg: Kind of over by Spokane.
Joe:
Greg: And, they got there ready to shoot and they were having a warm spell. So then they started chasing around to like different places in Colorado. I think they were all over the place. They would land at night and see all the snow. And they would wake up the next morning and it would all be melted.
Joe:
Greg: And so it’s all like fake snow.
Joe: I remember when it was they were filming it because I, I think I had watched Die Hard by that time. And I remember like I think Bruce Willis was on David Letterman talking about it because he used to go on that show all the time.
Greg: Yeah, it was great sitting with the band playing harmonica.
Joe: Yeah, yeah. Come as John McClane. One time, I think I was around Die Hard three, but okay. Spoiler alert. We may have watched a lot of Bruce Willis. Yeah. Yeah.
Greg: It either blends together.
Joe: Yeah. But yeah, I remember that was the big thing about this movie was I couldn’t it was like a small storm that they couldn’t film with any snow storm, which is probably why they’re under the the airport so much in the, you know, luckiest, most humid basement ever.
Greg: Where Marvin lives.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: Me listening to Cape Cod.
Joe: Yeah. Good old Marvin. Marvin Gaye got.
Greg: Longer. Marvin. Scenes in the, deleted scenes of this movie, by the way. He does work there, but he’s also living there secretly.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: Deleted scene that they took out.
Joe: That does not surprise me. No, he’s in it. Probably 1 or 2 scenes. Too many in my mind. Yeah.
Greg: I mean he is kind of the al character in this movie. This movie desperately needed an al character, like, Reginald Bell Johnson.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: You know, his ally that’s helping him out. That isn’t the authorities.
Joe:
Greg: So he’s sort of al he’s sort of argyle like he drives, you know Argyle drives them off at the end of the first one half and drives them off at the end of the second one.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: When I look for problems in this movie I just think well what they do in the first one, they should have just done that. Yeah. And that’s almost also a big criticism of this movie is it’s too much like the first one, which I don’t, I don’t really agree with.
Joe: But yeah, I don’t share that. I think the only piece that I wish that this movie had was and, you know, again, this is a little bit of a spoiler for when we talk about like, how could this movie be fixed? It’s a little bit more humor, a little bit like other nice characters that we like. Yeah. Yeah.
Joe: And then I come back to like, the bad guy being charming in the first one, as we don’t have that. And so that’s to me just the missed opportunity of. I kind of liked Hans Gruber.
Greg: He was almost the protagonist of Die Hard because we were all rooting for him. That’s the magic of that movie. You’re rooting for the bad guy in a way.
Joe: Yeah. And so we don’t have that in this one. And there is just so much yelling, so many men yelling at other men and women just yelling every line. Yeah. Dennis Franz’s whole character. And I don’t think there is one line that he says that isn’t a raised voice.
Greg: It’s pretty annoying.
Joe: Yeah. And if you have if you don’t know who he is, he’s Sipowicz in NYPD blue, where he kind of.
Greg: But that’s what he did a couple of years after this. He was like 94.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: So we didn’t know who he was at the time.
Joe: No he and I, he’s one of those characters like he’s a bad guy and lots of things. Yeah. You know. Yeah. He’s a face that you recognize but might not. And there are a few other people like that in this. But yeah I think missed opportunity having a better bad guy arc.
Greg: Totally.
Joe: But that’s about it. That’s all I can really think of. I loved all the action. I liked the plot even though it was ridiculous. It’s a sequel. You’re supposed to amp it up and it’s kind of hard because the first one really throws the kitchen sink and at the action sequences in my mind. Yeah. Yeah.
Greg: I really liked that. John McClane in the first one was like a Luddite when it came to technical things. He he was afraid to fly. He didn’t really know how to use anything like a computer. And like when he was about to jump off the building before it blew up at the end, you know, he was just like, please don’t let me die or something like that.
Joe: Yeah, he.
Greg: Just was like vulnerable, afraid. And the writer of part one and part two, Stephen Idas, who’s a he said that after the first one, people told him, we really thought John McClane was going to die at the end of this movie. Because I guess that’s what used to happen in movies like The good Guy would save the day but die.
Greg: And so he was like, that’s part of the magic of this film, is people actually thought this guy was in danger. And that sort of goes out the window.
Joe: In a.
Greg: Sequel. Because you’re probably going to make more sequels.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: So suddenly you kind of don’t have that. So they were trying to figure out how they were going to fix that for the second one, in the way that they decided to do it was to give him something that where he, like, colossally lost some battle and like, had a huge failure. That was kind of the way that they kind of like set him back.
Greg: And it was with the plane that they crashed into the British plane.
Joe: Windsor 114. Right.
Greg: I don’t think they can really do this in life. But they told the plane that the ground was actually lower than it really was, so that they didn’t realize that as they were going through the fog, they were going to hit the the ground and blows up. And there’s a shot before this happens where you meet all of the people on Windsor 114 and there’s like an an old British woman and there’s like kids.
Greg: And it’s pretty crazy that they did this in this movie.
Joe: Yeah, I couldn’t believe it. The first time I watch it. Totally. They kill by like that plane crash because you expect at some point like, okay, okay, we get it, change it back or whatever. We’ll give you whatever you want. Yeah. You know, cause it’s kind of like a hostage situation. Yeah, but they prove their point that they’re not trifled with, and.
Joe: So. Right.
Greg: Yeah. And there’s a really good scene with the guy who runs the tower. Fred Thompson.
Joe:
Greg: Really good scene with him and Bruce Willis after that. Those are the two best actors in this movie.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: The two best actors with the best performances. I mean, there are other good actors in this movie that just didn’t have the part that they, they should have had. But Fred Thompson talking to Bruce Willis after that happens, that’s one of the best scenes in the movie, I think. You know, it’s it’s John McClane at a low point.
Greg: That’s probably the end of the second act in the movie. And right at the end of the second act, Fred Thompson says your wife’s plane has 90 minutes before it runs out of fuel. Yeah. It’s like, wow, right? When we’re at our low.
Joe: Point, we get a clock. Yeah. Yeah. I needed, like, one more character or more Fred Thompson and then. Yeah, yeah. I think to really kind of balance it out cause I got, I can’t say it enough. How many of the scenes are just people yelling at each other? Yeah. And that does get tiresome the more I watch that.
Joe: Yeah. Of like, why is Dennis Franz yelling every line like he has at every stage and that’s made mistakes and we’ll not admit it. And yeah, just that gets a little tiresome. His character to me is probably the worst in it. Like I get the other ones. But yeah, he’s just kind of an annoying head cop at the what is it, Dulles airport pre TSA.
Joe: We should say as well with what is allowed to go on or through security. Yeah.
Greg: And totally totally. And you can just smoke wherever you want as you’re drinking your double whiskey and checking out bad guys. Dennis Franz I did get a vibe as he was yelling in that first scene where he’s in his office and Bruce Willis walks in, I got the feeling like, I bet Dennis Franz has done a lot of stage time.
Greg: He’s doing this like we’re watching a play right now. And I kind of got the feeling like Bruce Willis was really enjoying being in the scene with them, because they’re both really good actors. Right. You know they’re like little moves where Bruce Willis grabs the piece of paper from Dennis Franz and Dennis Franz grabs it right back to him.
Greg: And that kind of makes.
Joe: Bruce Willis laugh.
Greg: I don’t know, there were some good moments, but it’s kind of downhill from there. I kind of I wanted more for Dennis Franz in this movie. Where do you stand on Reginald Dale Johnson getting called and eating a Twinkie in this movie? Behind the orange, just sky and history. Yeah, over in L.A..
Joe: It was, like, tokenistic. Let’s just remind you that they’re friends and they can help each other out. And. Oh, yeah, he was in the first one. It could have been anybody that he calls or sends the fax to. Yeah, it’s just a note on the fax. That is the clearest fax I’ve ever seen sent ever in the history of the world.
Joe: Yeah. For those who don’t know, they send fingerprints over a fax, but then they’re able to match to somebody who was in the military and supposedly died two years earlier. And so.
Greg: Right. That’s kind of the the red flag, like something’s up here.
Joe: Yes. But anyone who’s ever sent a fax and I don’t know for any people who are Gen Y, Z, whatever, you know, probably no idea what we’re talking about. They’re not clear images of anything. They’re barely legible transmissions of papers, basically. Yeah. No, that was my most, like, old technology. Oh, sure. You’ve gone to the fax that’s going to have your fingerprints, that people are going to actually be able to match.
Joe: But yeah, whatever.
Greg: I love that he was in it. I love that they found a spot for him. I’d rather have him in it for us in the not in it at all. I wished that he was in the third and fourth movie. Yeah. William Sadler and we’ve talked about him as Colonel Stuart. He’s kind of one note. He’s just brutal.
Joe:
Greg: Nobody envies his position in this movie where he’s following the greatest bad guy in movie history. Yeah. So I guess he just kind of went to the other side of the room you know. But they went to the opposite pole where it was like, well, I’m just going to be not likable in any way, shape or form. He’s introduced naked doing tai chi, which was really Harlan’s idea, and I don’t get it at all.
Greg: I don’t understand, and then he, like, grabs his remote and turns off the TV like he’s shooting them. Like he’s like James Bond, like turning quickly and shooting them. And and it is the best. I talk about red flags. Every time I watch this. I’m like.
Joe: Okay, I don’t know how I get the.
Greg: Willis back on the screen.
Joe: Here. I know I had a moment like this. He’s he’s like all sweaty while he’s doing it. Right. Like the shower or what’s what’s happening here. Like that was my thought of. Yeah. Yeah it was. It made no sense. Don’t add nothing to the movie. Doesn’t add to the character other than you’d see that he is strong and apparently does naked martial arts, which probably is a bad sign.
Joe: So maybe it’s doing its work of like, oh God, this guy is the worst total, just the worst.
Greg: He had been training for months for that final scene that they have the fight scene on the wing at the end and the script said half naked. So he just thought like, oh, well, I have my shirt off or whatever.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: And so when Renny Harlin said, here, what do you think of this idea? He said he’d do it, but can we film it at the very end of the movie so he could get in better shape? And this was a five month shoot?
Joe: Wow. Yeah, that’s pretty crazy.
Greg: This is December 14th all the way through to May 14th. And then this movie came out the 4th of July.
Joe: Awesome.
Greg: Okay. William Sadler did the best he could.
Joe: Do the best he could with what he had. He didn’t have a lot.
Greg: Right? I mean, Hans Gruber was so likable. You know, you could see him get frustrated with his coworkers. You could see when Bonnie Bedelia said, like, unless you want people having accidents around here, we need to start doing things, getting people to the bathroom. And also a woman’s pregnant. Like, we could use a chair for her. And he’s like a human being when he negotiates with her like, oh, I like this guy.
Greg: This guy’s a normal guy.
Joe:
Greg: We don’t get that from William Sadler.
Joe: No.
Greg: John Amos as Major Grant.
Joe: I like John Amos on this. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you’re supposed to. Yeah. It’s a little bit of a different flavor. He turns out to be a bad guy. But you don’t know that until the end. Really. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah I liked him in this. I wouldn’t change anything about him and his character just because I think it’s it works.
Joe: He is kind of a breath of fresh air. It’s a it’s all he’s a little lighter. Kind of brings a different flavor into the movie for sure.
Greg: Totally. He, passed away this last August, so we miss you, John Amos. He had some interesting things to say about Bruce Willis in the last couple of years.
Clip: There were some real, there was some genuine three dimensional live hostility. But I won’t go into that. That’ll be for a chapter in the book. I guess I’ll just say Bruce Willis were never insulting me in public again. You got that, Bruce.
Joe: Wow.
Greg: And then he passed away. We didn’t get the book. Yeah, okay. Aunt Evans is Barnes.
Joe: I like Barnes. Barnes? He could have easily been killed. He could have been the trope of the kind of person of color sidekick that gets killed.
Greg: He works for the airport. He’s, like, trying to figure out how to communicate with the planes. Yeah, we need to get to the skywalk annex. He says that 80 times.
Joe: Yeah. So drinking game. If you have Skywalk Annex, you’re drinking a lot. Yeah. When he’s talking. Sure. He’s with them when they go to the church where those their headquarters. So he’s kind of right. It becomes a little bit of his sidekick on the ground to help him out and is one of his allies because basically everybody is against Bruce Willis.
Joe: Yeah. And yes, Dennis Franz doesn’t want to messing around. Right. The military doesn’t want him there. The bad guys obviously don’t want him there. So everybody’s trying to get rid of Bruce Willis, and he’s still kind of standing tall in the face of it all, except for Barnes is really on his side.
Greg: Yeah, I guess Barnes is kind of the owl in this movie, Yeah. He is the one who explains how to get into the code to get into the walkie talkie.
Clip: This is a ten digit controlled kind of six digit readout. Yeah, that could be a million combinations.
Greg: That was also stolen for cliffhanger.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: Anyways, I have a controversial take on Barnes.
Joe: All right.
Greg: Kind of annoyed by Barnes and Barnes. This is my favorite character. And this time watching it, which was like my 407th time, I was like, okay, Barnes isn’t bad, but I’m very lukewarm on Barnes as a character in this movie. I just don’t buy his intensity for some reason. And it might be just that he the tone of his voice.
Greg: I’m not sure what it is, but I just kind of don’t buy Barnes.
Joe: Interesting. Yeah.
Greg: He’s one of the things about this movie that I just, I feel like I’m thinking about something else when he’s on the screen. What is this guy? I don’t think this guy seriously, for some reason. But then we had Fred Thompson as Trudeau, as the guy who’s running the tower.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: And he is incredible.
Joe: He’s perfect because you’re like, yeah, yeah. This move where.
Greg: His response to the things people say to them is he just stares at them. He does that quite a bit of times.
Joe: Is he doing an homage to the what is it, Robert Stack or something like that from airplane? Like every time that they’re in the like, control tower. Yeah. And all I could think about was airplane just there, you know, the someone that comes up. But like, I picked the wrong day to quit sniffing glue or I pet totally.
Joe: Yeah. Stuff.
Greg: Maybe a little bit. Yeah. He was was he in Congress at this point? Was any like a Republican in Congress?
Joe: He was. I don’t know if he was now, I can’t remember, but he was a actual Republican senator for a while.
Greg: He actually went to the screenwriter, Steven E de Souza and said, we have a problem with the amount of f words.
Joe: On.
Greg: Your script. And Stephen, he just you just said, what are you talking about? It was like a random movie. And he goes, no, the like the script is fine. And like, I think it was in the military, maybe for years. And so he was like, I was in the military. Congress isn’t even this bad. Like I’ve been around, you know, some of the dirtiest mouths in the world.
Greg: The problem is there’s so many f words in the script that everyone thinks they can just drop f words into everything they say. And like, everybody’s improvising in this movie, he said. You got to come down to the set and see what I’m talking about. And so Stephenie D’Souza went to the set and realized, oh my gosh, this guy’s right.
Greg: There’s just like so many f bombs being dropped. And so he took out all but eight of the f words in the script. And there’s 64 F words in this movie.
Joe: That’s pretty. Yeah. It’s not bad. That’s awesome because it is everywhere. It’s there’s a lot of swearing and there’s a lot. Sure there is. Yeah.
Greg: Fred Thompson says some pretty hilarious things in this movie. Like he tells Barnes to go get what he needs to be able to communicate with the planes. And he he just says, go get what you need. Borrow, steal, kill. I feel like if you’re gathering materials to talk to planes, killing people might be.
Joe: Like.
Greg: You had me and borrow and steal, but kill was like, what? Let me just get away. By the way, have you ever played that game? Borrow, steal, kill?
Joe: I have not. Sounds a little dangerous, but.
Greg: Yeah. And then there’s another time where he’s telling, the tower, like, what’s going on? You know, we need to keep everybody in, like, a circling pattern. They can’t land. And he says, stack them. Pack them in Rackham.
Joe: Oh, yeah, I have that that, spoiler alert for the back of the box. I use that,
Greg: Have you ever played that game stack and pack and Rackham?
Joe: Sounds like a game you play in a bar or somewhere. So you’re probably totally.
Greg: Okay. Let’s keep moving with the cast. Franco Nero is the Esperanza.
Joe: He was fine. Yeah, I think it’s like. Yeah. Is that Noriega? Or could be Fidel Castro? Sure. Any kind of South American dictator is kind of what you’re what it’s going for, right? Okay. Remember how he gets out of it. Like he smokes cigar and then there’s only, like, two guards on his plane. He’s one of the most wanted man on the planet.
Joe: Sure. In a plane by himself with, like, one guard and two pilots. Yeah. That’s it. And then I think they the two jets that are accompanying them leave. Yeah, because they’re connected to, I’m assuming, the bad guys, but that was never quite clear to me.
Greg: I think it was like their arm that was part of their escort, part of their armed escort. And they were almost to the, to the airport.
Joe: So they yeah, they left or something.
Greg: They entered American airspace or something.
Joe: So again, this is a movie that would have not needed to happen if he could have gotten out of his handcuffs, sure, ten minutes earlier and then just flown to whatever island because he can fly a plane. We find out as well. So it’s.
Greg: Right. I mean, that’s a really good point. I thought he was, first of all, I think he like, shared an agent with somebody. Joel Silver saw his picture on a wall, a poster, and said, oh, I want to get that guy. So Franco Nero, he’s a pretty respected actor. He read the script was like, no, it’s a stupid script.
Joe: I want to be in this movie.
Greg: But then they made it work. And, you know, I don’t know, probably find out his next movie or something like that. So he was in it. I thought he was, just like he fit this role like a glove, you know, like, oh, okay. Perfectly cast guy.
Joe: He’s doing a good job. They’re not asking him to do anything. And that he has ten lines in the movie and that’s about it, you know? Right. Cashing his check and and moving on.
Greg: Speaking of cashing checks, Bonnie Bedelia and William Atherton are in this movie. What was your take on the whole playing subplot of them kind of circling up in the sky?
Joe: So the first few times that I watched it, I would I loved it because William Atherton plays a jerk so well. You just despise him from the first movie. And if you watch the first one and you watch and then he’s in the second one like, oh my God, yeah, skin crawling. Like, I just want to, you know, push him in front of a bus.
Joe: That’s kind of how I feel about him. So and that’s to me the sign of a great actor when you just despise them. Yeah. And he kind of brings some depth to it because it’s not like he’s also got a little bit of a likability to him or like, kind of get him. It’s a little silly and contrived on the plane.
Joe: You know, they kind of set it up. It’s like it’s its own set. So they, you know, sure. They spent what, a week on set in, in a plane in LA. Yeah. You know, and then and the final scene is the only time you see Bonnie Bedelia outside of the plane, right? Yeah. Right. So but for what it does for the movie, I was all in on it, you know.
Joe: Yeah. Raises the stakes. And adds to you know you don’t like him. She’s sitting next to an old lady who brings a taser onto the plane which is good luck doing that these days. Yeah. Using Chekhov’s the you know if you have a gun in a play it better go off. So you know, in the opening scene we have the Taser.
Joe: And then the one of the last scenes, Bonnie Delia uses it on William Atherton 100%. So great job writers there. Yeah, yeah. What did you think of, of that subplot?
Greg: Same thing first time I saw it. So relieved. I do wish more movie had happened with her on the ground, but I suppose that is the central tension of the movie and, you know, so I get it. I wish it had been different, but I’ll take it. The taser is hilarious every time to me. Here’s something interesting. Renny Harlin spoke with CinemaBlend this year, and Sean O’Connell has a podcast, and he also wrote about it and I mean, this is where you just realize how great this world is, and we really can’t have it all because you and I had been talking about Renny Harlin.
Greg: And then after we finished recording, whatever it was probably the Long Kiss Goodnight.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: I walk in my house open to my podcast app, and there’s a brand new episode of Renny Harlin talking about Die Hard two, and I was like, this is a world that is just incredible.
Joe: We can’t have it all.
Greg: But he talked about Bonnie Bedelia, and he talked about two main disagreements that he had with Bruce Willis while they were making this movie, or before they made this movie. The first one was Bruce Willis had just become a movie star. He had done moonlighting for years, and Harlin says now that he was a movie star, he was hell bent on making Die Hard to a serious movie, like a real dramatic, serious action drama.
Greg: And so Renny Harlin spent, he says, he spent countless days just talking to him about replicating the experience of the first movie. The audience loves your blue collar cop. They had problems originally, and now he’s in love with his wife. You just can’t say he doesn’t crack any jokes anymore. He’s just serious. That was. That just can’t be who John McClane is in the second movie.
Greg: That’s what Bruce Willis wanted to do in this movie. And so it’s nice that he kept some of the humor in. I guess there’s still a lot of humor. And, Steven D’Souza is the guy who, like, got the phone call in the middle of the night. Hey, we need a line. And he said him, you know, come out to the coast, I have a few drinks, have a few laughs.
Greg: That was Stephenie D’Souza over the phone, feeding him lines. But the biggest disagreement that he had with Bruce Willis was Bruce Willis was not convinced that this family aspect was important for the second film, and he’s like the whole point of the first movie is he’s saving his wife, and he’s like, the whole point of the second movie should also be that.
Greg: And Bruce Willis didn’t want to do that. He wanted to turn it into like, he’s just a superhero. He’s just saving the world. It’s just.
Joe: You know, him.
Greg: And so they fought and fought and fought. And eventually Bruce Willis was like, all right. But like, what is this movie? If Holly McClane isn’t on the plane.
Joe: The stakes aren’t as high. Yeah. You know, I think they have to be there. I mean, it’s a fine film. It’s just not a die hard film to me. Yeah, without the stakes being raised.
Greg: Yeah, sure.
Joe: It’s probably what’s a little bit missing from the third one, you know, is the agreed family stakes. They’re separated now, and he’s, you know, back in New York and, so it’s a different feel. But yeah, I think you need you need her on the plane. Yeah. Or it doesn’t work. Yeah. Me totally agree with Renny Harlin.
Joe: I think he. Yeah. Nailed it.
Greg: Totally. All right Sheila McCarthy as Samantha Coleman. Basically we cut to Bonnie Bedelia every once in a while. But Samantha Coleman is like the only other woman in the movie.
Joe:
Greg: They were maybe going to write a part for another actress to play a main part in the movie, but they didn’t. So when you look at the IMDb page of this, it’s just all dudes.
Joe:
Greg: Dudes who are yelling at each other. Yeah. And they’re yelling at Sheila McCarthy too.
Joe: Yeah, yeah. Basically she gets yelled at by everybody as well. Yeah. Because she’s the press trying to get a story. And yeah I think both Bruce Willis and the bad guy and maybe someone else basically swear at her and yell at her, but then at the end, she’s instrumental in helping him totally take down the plane. So it’s a low flying helicopter?
Greg: Yeah.
Joe: It’s perfect. She’s not asked to do a lot, but she doesn’t. She does what she needs to do in this.
Greg: So yeah, I don’t know that she’s incredible, but I do need to say, though, that our show, Great Bad Movies has a direct line to Sheila McCarthy. There’s like one degree of separation between the two of us. She was in a Canadian TV show. She had a one episode arc in 2019 on a Canadian TV show called Private Eyes.
Greg: Private eyes theme song was the song Private Eyes by Helen Oates. Because why wouldn’t she do that?
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: But they got a band to cover, Private Eyes by Helen Notes, and it was the same band who has the theme song for our show. Derek.
Joe: Awesome.
Greg: Isn’t that incredible?
Joe: I think credible, thank you, Sheila McCarthy. And actually I’m involved in that.
Greg: And it’s actually really.
Joe: It’s really good.
Greg: I’ve spent a lot of my life ironically listening to all notes, and then at some point it turned into hold up. This is actually.
Joe: Amazing. Yeah. And just Hall and Oates his entire career.
Greg: And I think so I think so, but Dheeraj did an incredible cover of Private Eyes, and we should say that D has a brand new album out right now, came out in September called Lonesome High, and it’s actually really good. So yeah, Go deer is one of my favorite bands, and we’re so lucky to have their song as our, as our theme song.
Greg: Moving on, we have Robert Patrick and John Leguizamo. They have one line each.
Joe: Robert.
Greg: Patrick moves on to be the T-1000 in Terminator two the next year, and John Leguizamo apparently was cast in a larger part. But he claims that when he got there and they realized how short he was, they took all the lines away. Lame. And I think they might have overdubbed his line. So it’s said by somebody else,
Joe: He’s in it for a split second.
Greg: He is.
Joe: It’s just like henchman number 11. Yeah.
Greg: I want to talk about the formula of a Die Hard movie.
Joe: And.
Greg: How I feel like over the course of Die Hard, one through five, they slowly let go of what was amazing about Die Hard movies. And in my mind, they get less good. Yeah. And so in your mind, what’s the Die Hard formula?
Joe: And one and two. It’s an environment playing a key role, basically being a costar in it. So yeah. And the first one at the building and they’re locked in a building and that is really where all the action takes place. So you hear like it’s Die Hard on a and we even say this, I’m playing this Die hard on an island.
Joe: So the island is where they’re they’re stuck. And that’s where all the action needs to take place. Yeah. Then it’s Die Hard in, airport. Then it’s Die hard in New York. It’s kind of the way the first three go. The fourth one. And just as Die hard in a car, I guess it’s.
Greg: Die hard on the East.
Joe: Coast. Yeah, yeah, I mean, the fourth one, it loses the thread. I can go there for Die Hard three because we have John McTiernan coming back to direct that. Yeah, I think we have a better script. We have great chemistry between Bruce Willis and Samuel L Jackson. We have a good bad guy again, kind of bringing the Gruber family back into it.
Joe: And so I can kind of go there. Although Die Hard in New York is a little bit of a stretch, and if it wasn’t a great movie in my mind, I would struggle with it being considered a die hard. Yeah. You know, because you have, you know, like we said, under siege. You have Air Force One passenger 57, executive decision.
Joe: You know, so many movies.
Greg: That die hard in a hockey rink.
Joe: Yeah, exactly. This now becomes almost, a trope unto itself of a kind of movie.
Greg: Which is why Bruce Willis wanted to abandon it.
Joe: Yeah. And and I get it, you know, you’re kind of getting it once it becomes part of the zeitgeist and part of pop culture, it, it starts to lose some of its, heft. I look at like John Wick did. That was the action. And now you kind of see lots of people are copying that style or taking it on.
Joe: And so the original loses a little bit in reflection of that. Even the fast and the furious franchise especially want to kind of hit fast 4 or 5 and six. And then, you know, there was kind of other movies that came along, franchises that copied it, and now it feels a little repetitive and reductive. And yeah, you know, I feel like that with the Marvel movies as well.
Joe: You know, you kind of get yourself locked into a box with what you can do and kind of what the rules of that universe are. And so that becomes limiting. And the stories you can tell and I feel like when we talk about Black Widow, if that’s a one off movie, they could have done more with it.
Joe: But because it’s locked into the Marvel averse, you know, it becomes formulaic. Bish bash is what we call that. So, you know, and this you could probably say that about Die Hard two. It’s done well, it’s done well enough, and it’s new enough that I think it’s okay. But it is a total just let’s copy what we did on the first one.
Joe: But what are your thoughts on on kind of the diehard averse and those sorts of things.
Greg: Well, that’s I mean everything that you just said was what I thought the diehard formula was until I heard a quote this week from the writer Stephenie de Souza, and he blew my mind, you know, and I’ve been, like, trying to decipher what it is about diehard that I love so much. And I think this got me one step closer, he says the diehard formula is someone trapped in in an environment.
Greg: Environment is the word you just used. I mean, it’s the perfect word. Someone trapped in an environment where neither the authorities nor the villains want him there. That’s what made diehard magic. He’s stuck in an environment, and the bad guys don’t want him there, and the cops don’t want him there. And then the cops, you know. And then the FBI comes and one ups the cops.
Joe: I’m being horrible, right?
Greg: That’s a perfect formula. And in this movie, they tried to keep that as well. Nobody wants him around. Although it seems like Fred Thompson seems to kind of get him, you know, he looks at him anyway. Yeah, that’s what I interpreted from the looks. But neither the authorities nor the villains want him there kind of loses shape in the third one.
Greg: And also the vulnerability of John McClane not wanting to jump off a building, not enjoying flying, not knowing how to use any technology. By the fourth one he’s like flying a Harrier jet.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: Just ridiculous you know. And in the first one he just got, he kept getting hurt. And this one it seemed like he was not hurt as much as he got hurt in the first one. At least I didn’t feel it as much.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: And then as they move on, it seems like he’s not hurt as much more and more.
Joe: It just becomes like classic action hero. Nothing can stop him. Nothing can hurt him.
Greg: Superhero. Yeah.
Joe: You get shot and you just kind of keep going. You got shot again and keep going.
Greg: Right. And the whole point of Die Hard in my mind was that he wasn’t a superhero. He was not Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were like hair bands like poison on the radio. And then Die Hard comes out and it’s like, Die Hard was in college and was listening to Sonic Youth and Jane’s Addiction and was about to become Nirvana.
Greg: You know, it was such a disruption. Same way that Nirvana kind of ruined everything for hair bands of the 80s, you know? Yeah, and that was in 1988, and it basically stuck there until 1999 when The Bourne Identity came out.
Joe:
Greg: And did it again.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: And that I feel like The Bourne Identity was a, a better formula for, for sequels. The Bourne Supremacy is a great second movie and The Bourne Ultimatum is a is a pretty great third movie to write. And actually Jason Bourne I think is a pretty great fourth movie.
Joe:
Greg: And then obviously The Bourne Legacy is the greatest movie in history, not.
Joe: Just to.
Greg: Peek behind the curtain to the listeners, that is not just Guy Tucker’s take a.
Joe: Look at see, but I’m all in on Renner. Yeah.
Greg: So anyways, the diehard formula, I feel like this movie follows the Die Hard formula better than all of the other sequels. So I think this is the best sequel. And it’s not as well directed as the third one, but when you look at it holistically, beginning to end at the end of this movie, like you said, I feel like I’ve just watched a Die Hard movie, and at the end of the third one, it’s like, I don’t know, I don’t know what happened there.
Greg: Why were we in Canada?
Joe:
Greg: What if he hadn’t seen that he was like using a matchbook or something. And this guy right here is supposed to go to a border crossing or something.
Joe: It’s just it was it was the headache medicine that is tossed to him while he’s tied up, but magically it ends up in his pocket right after there. Yeah. Right. So it’s, I would say die hard three. Die hard with a vengeance. Is perfect right up until that boat explodes. And it does the classic. It’s like the biggest explosion possible.
Joe: They just dive away from it with bad CGI. Sure. And then the rest of the movie is awful and there’s only like ten minutes left but it almost ruined it. Like if they could have figured out a way to end it on the ship.
Greg: We’ll get to Die Hard three, right?
Joe: I’m sure. Yeah. Okay, okay.
Greg: I have so much to reply, but I will. Let’s save it.
Joe: The I will save it. Save it for the ring. Yeah. Every time I think the Die Hard, the first one will be on this show. Every time that I watch it, I go, no, it’s too good.
Greg: It’s too good. It’s a great, great movie.
Joe: It’s a great, great movie. Yeah.
Greg: Maybe someday.
Joe: Maybe someday when we’ve done every other movie ever.
Greg: There’s a moment when when John Amos shows up. I was pretty excited because I love John Amos. I’m a big West Wing fan, and Bruce Willis just walks right up to him and says, Wasn’t Colonel Stewart one of your men? Why would he know that other than it’s written in the script that he was just reading? And that’s one of his lines?
Greg: Yeah, that’s shoehorned exposition. That doesn’t make any sense.
Joe: I noticed then this one, lots of voiceover line. They actually mention this in plane. Yeah, yeah. If they wish they had thrown in some of these things. Yeah, yeah. So there are some clear scenes where Bruce Willis is in a studio feeding a line, and then they’re showing it behind his head so they don’t have to show I’m talking.
Joe: Yeah, many times. And then some of them aren’t even, like germane to the story. They’re just a joke that they throw in there like totally.
Greg: Totally.
Joe: But it was so evident that they were doing this on voiceover. I love every single one of those.
Greg: So and he cleaned up some of his lines for like the commercials or the trailers for this movie, but he did not clean up his lines for the full movie. So they had to bring in somebody else to do the like the edited for television stuff for this movie. And this movie is one of the most classic well known edited for TV movies.
Greg: So let’s see. He’s about to say, oh, s-word.
Joe: Oh, shoot, shoot.
Clip: Oh, we are just up to our neck and tell us to get John.
Joe: It’s totally not for someone.
Greg: This is him yelling at Carmine. Hey, McClane.
Clip: I got a first class unit here. Swat team at all. We don’t need any Monday morning quarterback. Forget Monday morning. My wife saw one of those damn planes these guys are fooling with that put me on the playing field. And if you to move your fat feet when I told you to, we wouldn’t even know right now.
Joe: Oh.
Greg: You’re fat feet. Hip deep in snow.
Joe: Oh, my God, who is that person like?
Greg: I don’t know, but I love him and I just love that Bruce Willis wouldn’t do it. So we have a famous ending to the first meeting with Carmine. Here’s how that goes.
Clip: It. Carmine, let me ask you something. What sets off the metal detectors? First, the lead in your. How did the junk in your brains.
Greg: And then, of course, at the end, he has to say what becomes the tagline of all the movies?
Clip: You think? Yeah, you missed bulk.
Greg: Yippee! Okay, Mr. Falcon unveiled it.
Joe: Nailed it. Absolutely.
Greg: Absolutely nailed it. I really wish you could, like, opt into that version of any movie that you watch on streaming. I think that would be a real feature because it’s so entertaining.
Greg: Okay, I wanted to mention the YubiKey their last because it becomes a tagline. It comes authentically from the first movie. It actually came from. Bruce Willis is from new Jersey. Steven D’Souza, the writer, is also from new Jersey. They grew up about 30 minutes from each other, and they realized they kind of did all the same stuff growing up, had all the same landmarks played under the boardwalk at Atlantic City, and even played like the same game under the boardwalk there.
Greg: And they both loved watching Roy Rogers on TV. And that’s where you beca came from. And so that made it into the script. What’s your take on Eureka becoming the catchphrase for every Die Hard movie? It’s hard. Yeah, I think it cheapens it.
Joe: Yeah. Even in the first one, it’s a little. Yeah, sometimes feels shoehorned in. Yeah, yeah. But because they’re going back and forth over the radio talking to each other and the bad guy and it’s like, oh, you’re a cowboy. And he’s like, yeah. Yep. Okay. And so it works in the first one, right.
Greg: And it doesn’t ever again.
Joe: No. Exactly.
Greg: Not bad. In the fourth one. We’ll get to the fourth one.
Joe: Yeah. Oh for sure.
Greg: I did like what they did in the fourth one. But still I hated that they had to do it. I always thought like why did that become a thing?
Joe: Yeah. Maybe we should.
Greg: Pay attention to the other things that made diehard of.
Joe: Amazing. Yeah. Agreed. It’s rough in this one and I get it. It’s also of the time of this one falls a little victim to it. Where at the end of action scenes, there’s some pithy one liner, that he says, or someone else says, right. So it kind of falls in line with that. So while it’s annoying at the end of it, I’m fine with it in this one.
Joe: That’s all. Only once, right at the end. Sure, when he blows up the bad guys and what I think is one of the better climactic endings of an action movie. Yeah. So yeah, I’ll allow it for this one, even though it’s kind of annoying and, you know, it’s a little bit like it bothers me a little bit, but yeah, yeah, the first time I watched it, I was like, hell yeah.
Joe: Totally continuing. This is, you know, like you the millionth time I’ve seen this. With a little bit more critical. But it’s taken a long time for me to get to this point.
Greg: So yeah, I also really like when he, he lights this gas on fire and it blows up the plane that’s been leaking it. And then he yells to Holly, there’s your landing light. It’s awesome.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: He’s just talking about this. But the whole thing is about his wife.
Joe: Yeah he’s a wife guy. And then they have to repeat that line like three more times. Other people as planes just land right. One after another. Also as police cars and fire trucks are driving in the opposite direction towards the plane’s landing. So not super safe. Everyone.
Greg: Well, I mean, you know, they just they call that dullest style. One of the funniest things that happened in the movie this time when I watched it, is when just out of nowhere, Bruce Willis walks up and says, how are you doing, Telford? How you doing, Telford? And he just goes like a random guy who’s just sitting there at like, some machinery that’s like Telford.
Greg: Yeah, that is very specific. How does Bruce Willis even know this person’s name? And then Telford’s like, no good.
Clip: I call Langley the rig in a portable Dakota lobby here in two hours. My wife doesn’t have two hours. I was only transferred to Grant’s team yesterday. The regular guy got appendicitis.
Greg: And it’s like, what is that? What is going on right now? Just a totally a moment that takes you out of the movie. Just exposition dump for whatever reason, you know, pretty rough.
Joe: And he is only in there that that moment is only in there so that we know that John Amos is bad because he kills that person towards the end. Right?
Greg: Sloppy.
Joe: They did not need either one of those things in there.
Greg: Yeah. When Esperanza is landing and John McClane decides to, he runs through the the the ducts underneath the airport where there’s just steam flying everywhere.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: And he gets to like the grate on the landing strip, and then he’s getting out of the grate, and Esperanza is plane is about to go over the great.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: What was his plan there? I guess we were. He was getting to Esperanza to like, use him as leverage to get his wife’s plane to be able to land or something.
Joe: I guess so.
Greg: But, like, that’s another one of those moments. Just like the the like the moving walkway in the skywalk annex where he is about to get out of the grate and the plane is going towards them and they cut between the plane coming towards him and him in the grate and him going towards him, looking at the plane and the plane going towards him, and him looking.
Greg: And it goes on and on and on and.
Joe: On, and.
Greg: So many times. And the plane is like ten feet away from him for 30s.
Joe: And all he could have done was just close the grate and stay under it, maybe.
Greg: With this plane. Goodbye.
Joe: Yeah, yeah. And then get out. I know they gotta raise the tension, and there was no reason for him to need to climb out at that moment. No. You know, they could have created, like, where his foot gets stuck as he’s already out and he’s trying to pull it, you know, things like that. Like, right. There are better fixes for it.
Joe: But yeah, it would. That was pretty silly.
Greg: So I heard that they filmed that scene in like six different places, because there’s so much snow involved in every way that the camera’s looking that they actually had to be in six different places to pull off that shot.
Joe: It’s very clear that they’re struggling with snow because there’s a lot of like really wet, melted snow everywhere when they’re outside. So totally, totally.
Greg: And one thing they learned, though, the first time they tried to make the landscape look like snow, they used a bunch of like, snow blankets, like white blankets across all of the land. And then right when a plane went by, those blankets, the blankets all flew away.
Joe: Like, all right.
Greg: I guess no blankets,
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: I really liked it when McClain shows up and I think it’s Colonel Stewart discovers them and he says McClain and he goes, I’m assuming you’re McClain.
Joe: Because that’s because he’s never actually.
Greg: Like they met in the terminal for a second.
Joe: Right?
Greg: I just love that he’s like McClain. I’m assuming you’re.
Joe: McClain. Yeah.
Greg: That’s probably those 80 moments. One of the voiceover moments. You’re talking about. How many shots of the snowmobiles in this movie were unneeded. I feel like we got 27. The snowmobiles went by the camera 27 times and I would have been fine. I think eight was enough. Yeah, I think we all can agree that eight eight is enough.
Joe: Yeah, there’s a lot of like they were really proud of the snowmobiles being in the back of that church. And they get on them. They drive not on the path but through the fence. Yeah, yeah. Jumping over stuff that’s you have great bad shots everywhere where there have the machine gun shooting that they can’t hit anything. And that’s where John McClain realizes that there are blanks in one of the guns because he kills, you know, one of the people on the snowmobile, he has a great shot with a handgun.
Joe: Yeah, from, like 300 yards away to shoot someone on a snowmobile. Flying away of driving away from him. Yeah. Then you kind of have a little bit of, like a James Bond esque chase scene. We mentioned that. And then there’s the scene where it flies over the road when a truck is coming by, and then there’s shot and explodes.
Joe: But sure, don’t worry, John McClane is okay, even though his snowmobile just exploded in midair while he was on it. Sure. And that just kind of explodes. But like, full on explodes.
Greg: When he’s jumping over the truck out of nowhere. And again, it cannot be said more explicitly. Where on earth did this truck come from and why was it driving by at that moment?
Joe: Yeah, we should also say that like, it’s not like they have like an edited shot of a truck coming down the road.
Greg: It’s just there is zero set up. Yeah.
Joe: Just jump cut truck out of nowhere.
Greg: And it’s not just out of nowhere. It’s a truck out of nowhere in the middle of nowhere. Like, I don’t really believe that there’s a road right there.
Greg: It’s just unbelievable.
Joe: Yeah, but so perfect.
Greg: So when that happens, he does that like that. Whatever that is. And he kind of feel like he builds his way up to that sound as he gets more and more aggravated in the first one.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: Now in this one, he’s using it when he drops like three feet in that initial fight in the luggage bay. Yeah. Oh he excessively uses that scream. It’s like his action yell I guess it’s his action. Yell. Yeah. But he also employs another noise in this movie where I kind of want to call it, like, grunt acting, but grunt sounds lower.
Greg: His is just like a it’s like a whimper. It’s like.
Clip: Oh, well.
Clip: Yeah, he does that.
Greg: Like when his, snowmobile explodes and he’s like, crawling in the snow to get to the gun to see what the deal is, because he knows he had people in his eye. He’s like, what should we call that noise? Because he does that all the time in this movie.
Joe: I think it’s the, the Marky Mark equivalent of breathe acting for realism. It is.
Greg: But it’s but it’s like a it’s a it’s like a whimper. It’s a whimper. Grunt.
Joe: Yeah. I don’t know what the. Come on. I don’t know what that’s that’s about what it is. It’s everywhere. And this is.
Greg: Everywhere between those two noises we’ve got. That’s that’s all the noise you need in these. Employing it in every possible way.
Joe: Either it’s him or it’s a Foley actor doing all the sound effects for him. So.
Greg: He discovers that there are blanks in the guns, and Johnny Moss and Colonel Stuart are working together. Their teams aren’t actually fighting. They’re using blanks. And he goes back to Carmine and, like, shoves Carmine against a wall and then shoots him with the blanks a bunch.
Joe: Yeah, not.
Greg: One security guard shoots McClane. Well, he’s just unloading this machine gun in the middle of. Unbelievable.
Joe: Yeah. It’s awesome. And a police station where everyone has guns. And he has a, Yeah, it’s it’s great. Nobody shoots him at all or anything. And then it’s the turning point where then Carmine knows. Oh okay. We gotta, we gotta get this. And then we have the dumbest scene in the movie to me is then Carmine and then Carmine.
Joe: Brother. Who’s the person who gave him that parking ticket in the first scene? Yeah. And John McClane are in a police car to go stop the bad guys. Right. And then they drive ten feet and right into a taxi. And then John McClane gets out of the car and runs off to save the day. Yeah. You could have cut that scene.
Joe: You did not need them in the car. No we don’t need that one. So dumb.
Greg: Renny Harlin is so funny in his director’s commentary of this movie. Renny Harlin is really funny in his director’s commentary normally, but with this movie, he didn’t record it for ten years because like, you know, it came out on VHS when it first came out and then when they made the DVD set ten years later, he recorded the thing.
Greg: So he has the perspective of this was ten years ago, and he would do things differently now. But I mentioned that that luggage Bay fight, kind of the first one, they had built this luggage bay because they realized it was going to be too dangerous if they did it in the real place. And so they built it.
Greg: And it’s like the first encounter that John McClane has with the bad guys. Here’s here’s what Renny Harlin says of that set.
Clip: In those days, it was fashionable to have lots of fans and lots of smoke. So there you see one of those kind of trademark of the of the late 80s, early 90s, action film cliches, you could call it now, a spinning fan movie without a fan. It’s just not exciting.
Greg: He does that a lot throughout the commentary. It’s pretty hilarious. He’s pretty great.
Joe: I have a shout out to him in my drinking games of the Randy Harlan fan. Yeah, just gotta have it in there. I’m sure we’ll get into at some point talking about like sequels that are better than the first one. But most sequels never live up to the first movie.
Greg: Can you name one that lives up to the first one?
Joe: It would be like Empire Strikes Back. But those are kind of written in the context of a trilogy. Sure. I would need to look at actual like IMDb page of like sequels should actually answer that. Thor Ragnarok as like a sequel, like the third Thor is to me is my favorite Marvel movie. Way better than the first two.
Greg: Yeah.
Joe: Fast five. Yeah, but we’re gonna have to get to pretty soon because we reference that so much on that. So maybe it’s just me. Yeah.
Greg: I actually forgot to mention how long the fight scene is at the end of this movie. On the plane. It is the longest runway in history.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: Much like Fast and Furious six.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: Oh, I also forgot to mention that when John Amos comes out to fight him on that way to Mark McQueen.
Clip: I kind of like, you.
Joe: Know, and.
Greg: That seems to be a thing that’s in every action movie we watch. I like this guy.
Joe: Yeah, too bad I have to kill him. Yeah, yeah, I just want to save for that fight scene on the wing with John Amos. He dies because he is sucked into the jet, which all of a sudden, as soon as he’s dangling in front of it, is revving up to full speed. But the plane isn’t moving any faster, right?
Joe: It just sucks him in. And then it’s totally fine to take off like nothing happens to the engine. Except for that. A person was just.
Greg: Zero damage.
Joe: Sucked through it, right?
Greg: We have to talk about this final scene. We get to talk about the final scene and they’re having trouble taking off because John McClane takes the news helicopter to take him down to the plane. He’s asking them to get in front of the plane, but the pilot won’t do it. So he’s like, okay, well, then just drop me on the wing.
Greg: And he’s uncomfortable on the helicopter. He doesn’t like to fly, and that’s like a real shot.
Joe: A.
Greg: Helicopter really did fly up to that plane and somebody jumped out. It’s incredible. The light is so bright.
Joe:
Greg: I can’t even imagine the budget of the lighting for this movie.
Joe: Serious to light.
Greg: A plane as it’s moving like that. So then John Amos comes out, they fight. He gets sucked into the engine. Then Colonel Stewart comes out and pulls his jujitsu or whatever it is, is Tai chi. Sorry to everybody who does jujitsu and kicks him off the plane and he grabs the fuel release on the wing.
Joe: As he falls.
Greg: And he falls. Yeah. I literally go on. Is there actually fuel and wings on plane. It turns out that is actually where the fuel is. Kind of amazing. There is not a fuel release right there on the wing okay. However that is an invention but who cares? But anyways, McClane puts his coat in like one of the things on the wing so it can’t take off.
Joe:
Greg: And I just love how specific Esperanza is. Esperanza says there’s something wrong with the ailerons. We can’t take off the ailerons. Is that a real thing? That’s problem. That’s too specific. That has to be a real thing.
Joe: It’s got to be a real thing. And I love that everyone just knew what he was talking about. Like they were pilots too, so.
Greg: They all just sprint straight to the wing.
Joe: Where.
Greg: Yeah, obviously the ailerons are where we keep those.
Joe: I like also that they’re looking out there in the cockpit of a humongous like 747. They’re not looking back. They’re just looking out to the side on the wing like they can see. Yeah, yeah. So there’s just no way that they could see that from where they were.
Greg: Absolutely. You know, William Sadler kind of opens up the door and he’s about to hop out to fight with John McClane. Don’t you think he should have taken, like, 45 seconds and just slowly taken off all his clothes before he jumped out there?
Joe: Yeah. There’s no one wants to fight a naked man.
Greg: It’s by 45 seconds. I mean, like, he’s, like, quickly trying to take his pants off, but, like, his foot gets stuck in the pant leg and he’s, like, hopping around. That’s what I mean. I didn’t mean slowly. Should we also talk about the end when he reunites with Holly? Did you like that moment?
Joe: It was a little much for me. It was a little too rocky. Adrian moment where he’s screaming. Yeah, you know, Holly at the top of his lungs. It’s a man. She’s at the top of the thing, and then she jumps down and, you know, John is that’s you type of thing. I it was a little much for me, but.
Greg: And what do you think of her line?
Clip: Why does this keep happening to us?
Joe: I thought that was fine. That’s a perfect score line to throw in there, you know. Yeah, totally. Totally. He’s got the line. Or it’s like, how does this thing end? And they have it in the trailer for it. Like, how does the same thing happen? You know, there are a few lines that he has where it’s clearly like he’s standing there and he says the line and then he runs off and I can like hear the director saying, all right, action and then run.
Joe: It’s like I could see the production happening in front of me. It’s so.
Greg: So you’re talking about that initial trailer.
Joe:
Greg: That is all like white text on a black screen. We played that earlier in this episode. It’s like just a man reading words on a screen. And then suddenly we see John McClane running down steam everywhere. There’s like emergency lights. That was actually shot before they had written the script for this movie.
Joe:
Greg: The Monday after diehard came out, they decided they were going to make a sequel.
Joe:
Greg: And then before they even had a script for the movie, they went to this like LA Water Treatment plant or something, where they actually also filmed diet for. And he had that one line has the same thing happen to the same guy twice. And that was the teaser trailer that came out the Christmas before this movie came out.
Joe: Perfect. Yeah, it’s perfect in every way. Yeah.
Greg: We don’t know what’s going to happen in the movie.
Joe: We don’t need to know.
Greg: That it’s Christmas Eve. It’s delicious. And Bruce Willis is saying, how does the same thing happen? The same guy twice.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: Joe, it occurs to me that there’s a chance that we’re talking to people who have not seen this movie, despite it being its 34th anniversary this year. Maybe they didn’t watch Die Hard two from 1990. So let’s pretend you’re walking down your local video store before blockbuster even was in your town. You’re looking at different VHS boxes. You’re trying to figure out, what am I going to rent tonight and take home and put in my VCR?
Greg: What does the back of the box description say for Die Hard two? That’s right. It’s time for the back of the box.
Joe: All right. You see a beautiful explosive cover. Die hard to die harder. You turn it over. This is what it says.
Joe: It’s the back of the box. It’s Christmas. And all the maclaine’s want to do is enjoy the holiday with family. Unfortunately, terrorists have a different idea as they shut down the DC airport as the snowstorm bears down on the airport, John McClane, Bruce Lois must navigate untrustworthy allies and a platoon of terrorists to save his wife’s plane as it runs out of fuel stack, unpack them and rock them in this must see, action packed sequel, Die Harder will make your heart grow three times its size and what will be an instant Christmas classic.
Greg: Instant classic. The second best Christmas movie.
Joe: Yeah, exactly.
Greg: Because it can’t be the first best Christmas movie because that’s Die Hard one.
Joe: Yeah, exactly.
Greg: Absolutely. This is such a good movie that when Bruce Willis gets to the Skywalk Annex, he is a sitting duck. He should have been shot 700 times in the scene, and he pulls the incredible move of rolling on the ground and shooting. This is the thing that, I first became aware of in, like, Lethal Weapon. Or maybe Lethal Weapon two is something Mel Gibson did, and it’s.
Greg: He should have been shot every time he rolled. Yeah, but apparently this just looks cool. And you got a roll. It’s like I got to do that rolling thing. Yeah, he doesn’t get hit once and he kills everybody. And it’s just amazing.
Joe: It’s hilarious. Do you want the real back of the box.
Greg: Oh my gosh.
Greg: Okay. So that was the back of the box.
Greg: But Joe you know it’s 34 years later. People have lived lives. We have a modern take on Die Hard two. Yeah 34 years later. What is the Joe guy Tucker real back at the box.
Joe: All right. Okay. Boy, action movies in the late 80s and early 90s were a different kind of masculine. The men all screaming each other. They also scream at the women. If there were children in this movie, they would have screamed at them as well. This is a decent sequel to the near perfect Die Hard, if a bit humorless.
Joe: Bruce Willis is in his element as the everyman hero, thrust into an extreme situation. Renny Harlin amps up the action and the explosions for a two hour, snow filled romp. So that’s my real back of the box.
Greg: Love it, love it. Yeah, and it’s true. It would just be different now.
Joe:
Greg: And I think it would be better but okay. Let me ask you this question. I was think about this today if this movie came out this week you know with obviously 2024 production and whatever, what would you think of this movie?
Joe: I think with a few minor tweaks, it would fit right in.
Greg: Totally.
Joe: Yeah. Like jumping ahead to our important questions. It’s still holds up. There are pieces to it that, you know, obviously don’t, but for the most part, this movie holds up.
Greg: I think, you know, our last episode playing was a really good example of this movie can come out now and it can just absolutely work.
Joe: I mean, there’s a reason there are a million diehard in, yeah, fill in the blank. Yeah. That kind of the environment as part of the a key part of the script is works. It just isn’t. It’s perfect. Bullet train is die hard on a bullet train, you know. Yeah. And that I love that movie. And that came out two years ago.
Joe: Three years ago. Yeah.
Greg: Bruce Willis had a really bad attitude about how everybody was copying Die Hard and he wanted to move on. But I don’t think he understood that. The rest of us did. Not all of those other movies, we wished he was in them. We wished it was John McClane, and we all would have shown up for the real thing, I think.
Joe: Yeah, I think there’s a magical thing that happens when you have, like, the perfect actor and the perfect character and John McClane, Bruce Willis is just perfect. He was that kind of blue collar. Every man sure. Kind of in real life, too. Kind of. Before he became a star. Yeah. Seagram’s I just. Yeah, I agree, I don’t think he realized how much people love that character.
Joe: Yeah, it’s it’s him. And that’s why we love that movie. And it’s you can make them and you can make really good kind of facsimiles of it, but they’ll never be, to me, as good as the first Die Hard and probably even this one, you know, there are some close seconds in there. But it’s because Bruce Willis is so perfect for this character.
Greg: I think the Bruce Willis learned the wrong lessons from what went right in his movies. And the more he was enabled and empowered, the worse the movies got.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: And I think like major directors kind of didn’t want to work with him. You know, amazing writers kind of stopped working with him. And he was kind of his own boss. And movies kind of started to go downhill once they realized that Bruce was running the show.
Joe:
Greg: The lesson that he learned incorrectly, I’m saying is like Die Hard came together because of a miracle. The fact that they were able to tie everything together, they were seven days done with production on the first Die Hard, and they didn’t know how the bad guys were going to get away. They still didn’t know. They didn’t have the ambulance idea yet, seven days away from finishing production and they didn’t have that, you know, and so they had to like, figure out it could they retro on what they had already shot and they, they kept one shot in that showed that the truck that the ambulance came out of was empty.
Greg: You know, but nobody knew to look for that at that point in the movie. But yeah they were like all right well if the ambulance comes out then Argyle is down there. I guess I’ll take care of them. So suddenly Argyle has a has an all right in the movie, you know. So anyways it’s a miracle that it came together and I’m sure Bruce Willis was like, well, you just do whatever you want and then it turns into a good movie.
Greg: That’s not the lesson there. It’s Steven D’Souza, Joel Silver, and most of all, John McTiernan. Is really fighting for something. Anyways, let’s talk a little bit about the critical reception of this movie at the box office, and then we can get to, some drinking games.
Joe: Perfect. Sound good? Yep. Okay.
Greg: What do you think the percentages on Rotten Tomatoes for Die Hard two? Joe.
Joe: It feels like a 70.
Greg: It feels like a 70. I agree.
Joe: But I feel like it’s going to be higher. I think probably critics score is going to be if I’m actually giving my actual gas, it’s probably like a 60. And then audience scores like an 80. That’s my guess.
Greg: Diehard itself, I think, has a 94 and a 94.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: That tracks diehard to critic scores 69%.
Joe: Oh 70 all right.
Greg: Yeah, almost a 70. The audience score with over 250,000 ratings 70%.
Joe: Nailed it. All right. So it is a 70.
Greg: Great bad movie.
Joe: It’s a great bad movie.
Greg: I think that the reviews of this movie, despite the fact that we’re saying if it came out today, would still be great. I think the reviews of this movie were kind to it. Not entirely because of what this movie is. I think they were kind to it because of what it wasn’t. You know, diehard was such a, correction in the macho Schwarzenegger Stallone movies.
Greg: That they were still kind of excited that this kind of movie and like the everyman movie was still going on. That’s my take on it anyways. So the box office real quick. This movie was the most expensive movie ever made up until this point. Estimates are somewhere around 62 million, but some people say up to 70 million.
Greg: The total box office worldwide for this, maybe it was $240 million.
Joe: So it did.
Greg: Wow. Which is way more than Die Hard. Yeah. So let’s talk about what the critics said. John Hartl from the Seattle Times in 1990 said the summer’s best sequel and most satisfying blockbuster has finally arrived. Die hard two is a blast.
Joe: I’ll allow it.
Greg: I would write that after walking into the theater, for sure. Sheila Benson from the Los Angeles Times says this is the most cheerfully preposterous film of a jaw dropping summer. Which is not to say it’s not fun, it’s simply orchestrated Looney Tunes.
Joe: What else is coming out? That summer, 1990.
Greg: Days of Thunder came out the next week. Okay, Dick Tracy had already come out. Let’s see. Biggest movies of this year were like ghost, Pretty Woman, Teenage Mutant Ninja.
Joe: Turtles.
Greg: Kindergarten Cop. So I’m not quite sure what they’re talking about. Right. But at this moment in the 4th of July, when when this movie came out, the critics were ready for something that wasn’t so dark. So I’m not quite sure what it is that they’re referencing there. Jay Boyer from the Orlando Sentinel said the filmmakers seem to be operating under the assumption that the way you top a successful movie is by making one that’s louder, cruder and more violent.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: That’s true. Yeah.
Joe: That’s every sequel.
Greg: There is a scene where the bad guys are loading their machine guns, and it is the loudest machine gun noises I have ever heard in my life. You mention Renny Harlan’s movies have the loudest guns, even loading the guns is preposterous.
Joe: Gentlemen.
Clip: You know what to do.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: It’s orchestrated Looney Tunes, which would also be a great name for this show. If we ever get tired of very bad movies, let’s get to Janet Maslin from The New York Times, who is basically the best reviewer of the century. It will surprise no one who saw the first Die Hard. That the heart and soul of the new film is Bruce Willis, who this time is even better.
Greg: Do you think he was better in this movie than he was in the first one?
Joe: No, no, I don’t think he was.
Greg: But I think it’s just, you know, he didn’t have as many moments, like he’s not talking to al over the radio and pulling glass out of his feet.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: It’s close. Yeah. I have one more clip of audio to play. Now that we’re done with reading the reviews. And that is. I still can’t believe this happened. Siskel and Ebert loved this movie. They were like the way to find out if a movie was good or not. They did like the thumbs up. Thumbs down. I edited a little bit of their review.
Greg: We’ll put their full review on our website. Great Bad movies.com, but I listen to just a little bit of their review here.
Clip: Our first film is Die Hard two. And Why Beat Around the Bush? I think Die Hard two is the best movie of this early summer season. We’ve had a lot of mindlessly violent action pictures this summer, a lot of brainless sequels. Die hard two obviously could have fallen into both of those traps. However, instead, it is a tremendous piece of commercial American movie making.
Clip: The magic of this movie is that Willis is quite convincing as the lone soldier, triumphing over stupid bureaucrats and tracking down the bad guys. Die hard two combines big scale special effects and also quiet moments with its hero and a solid sense of humor. I was mightily impressed by every aspect of this movie. All I can say, after having thought that this summer was not that special is thank you to all involved.
Clip: It is a very good movie, and I agree with you that the movie from beginning to end for my money, is way superior to the original Die Hard, which. Oh, I like that too. But this is. It’s good, but it’s fun. You know, this is really something special. I sat there aghast when I. When I saw the first shot outside the control tower.
Clip: And their special effects are involved there, too. This is a terrific achievement.
Greg: Better than the first one.
Joe: Wow. I remember the Siskel and Ebert review of the first one. Because I remember watching them talk about the attention to detail of like his bloody footprints on the, on the window and his arm dangling down and. You know. And how much they love that. So I’m sure I watch this because at the movies. Yeah. Was must watch.
Joe: Two thumbs up. Meant the world to a movie if they got that. Yeah. You know Siskel and Ebert were the biggest movie reviewers of that time.
Greg: Yeah. Like in a world without the internet. Yeah. And they would show clips from movies that you couldn’t see anywhere else.
Joe:
Greg: It was incredible. Yeah. They were sitting in the theater like watching the clips with you.
Joe: Yeah. So that is wild that they thought this was better. And it’s one of those movies I think where I don’t know how many times you’ve seen this movie and Die Hard, but I’m assuming like me, you’ve seen them dozens. Yeah. So, like, taking it from the first time I saw Die Hard. To Die Hard. This one.
Joe: I can get there and just like think that you know. Yeah. There. I don’t think that I thought that Die Hard two was better than Die Hard one. But they were very close. Yeah. Like one day one be in my mind.
Greg: Yeah.
Joe: Especially the first time I watched it, so I’m not. It kind of blows me away a little bit. But also now that it’s easily more than ten times I’ve watched both of these movies. Sure. Yeah. To me, it’s laughable that the second one would be better than the first, but.
Greg: I just I love it. Yeah. I love how much the critics love this. I think maybe another 48 hours had come out, maybe earlier in the summer. I think.
Joe: Yeah. So I have the like we have ghost, Total Recall, Dick Tracy, back to the future, Three Days of Thunder, Pretty Woman, another 48 hours, Bird on a wire. Presumed innocent. Arachnophobia. RoboCop two.
Greg: Oh, that was really violent.
Joe: Yeah. And terrible. Yeah. The first one is hard and it’s.
Greg: But it’s with Paul Grove and.
Joe: Yeah. Flatliners. Teenage mutant ninja turtles, young guns to Cadillac man, Navy Seals, Air America, ghost dad, hunt for red October. Wow. That was a crazy year. Ford Fairlane Exorcist three. My blue heaven. Dark man, the crazy year. That’s a lot of. I could go on, but there’s the two Jakes.
Greg: You mentioned the hunt for Red October. John McTiernan read this script and decided he didn’t want to do it because he didn’t like the way the character was going. I think he even said, like, it seems like he’s turning into a superhero.
Joe: Right.
Greg: And so he went to make The hunt for Red October instead.
Joe: I think it’s the best Tom Clancy movie. Of all the books.
Greg: Agreed.
Joe: And Alec Baldwin is the best Jeff Ryan. Yeah. And I read all those books. Yeah. That was at a time when I like, discovered that. And I read all of Tom Clancy’s books up for a while, so, yeah.
Greg: James Earl Jones. Incredible in that.
Joe: Movie. Yeah.
Greg: Fred Thompson also in that movie playing Fred Thompson, basically.
Joe: Yeah. If you see Fred Thompson in a movie, it’s the same character and every single movie. It’s like third eyelid person who knows everything behind the scenes character. You have instant confidence in him as a person.
Greg: That’s so funny. Do you remember the scene in Red October when James Earl Jones is about to go into that briefing room and he says, if they ask you questions, tell them what you think. And then.
Joe: And then.
Greg: Alec Baldwin says you might be defecting and like, kind of puts down somebody in the room, the guy running the meeting. And when he walks out, James Earl Jones guests goes,
Joe: I say, speak your.
Clip: Mind, Jack. That Jesus.
Greg: Whenever somebody texts me something like.
Joe: Harsh, I send them that clip.
Greg: All right, Joe, should we get two drinking games?
Joe: Let’s do it. I have lots. Okay. Let’s go into our stock drinking games to start. Okay. So silent or low flying helicopter. Check at the end. Right at the end.
Greg: Is it silent?
Joe: It’s not silent, but it’s a low flying helicopter. And he jumped off of it. So I gave you that one.
Greg: So when there is a helicopter, take a drink. I’m going to assign to that person. Also, when there is a truck out of nowhere that a snowmobile is exploding over, take a drink. That same person has to do that. Yeah.
Joe: Perfect. We do not have a push in it and enhance, nor do we have an explosion or a silent suffering. Or when two people kind of share a look in the middle of chaos. Unfortunately, we do have the opening credit where the title locks in with the sound.
Greg: Actually, the best one.
Joe: The best one.
Joe: I don’t think that we’ve had a better one yet. And all the movies we’ve done, you can watch 10s of this movie and you’ll get it. Like it’s the there’s not even like the producers or the director or anything. It’s only that. And then we’re right into the movie, which I.
Greg: And then parking ticket.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: Which is a slippery slope. We’ve covered that.
Joe: Yes, absolutely. It does not flash back to dialog. Could have, but they don’t. I did give a few. So we kind of have bad CGI. There are few moments, especially on an ejector seat. Yeah. Ejector seat is a little rough in spots, but okay it’s not bad. There are some movies that are way worse, especially in the kind of early 2000 when they really went crazy with CGI.
Joe: Yeah, I think Die Hard four actually is the classic of like, they just threw so much CGI crap at it, and it it’s like in the theater you don’t notice it as much, but when you watch it on your TV at home, it just does not hold up. Totally great bad shots everywhere.
Greg: Oh my gosh.
Joe: Just everywhere.
Greg: Skywalk connects.
Joe:
Greg: Snowmobiles I guess they’re using blanks in the snowmobiles.
Joe: But whenever I gave are the streets inextricably way. But I have. Why is the basement inextricably wet. That’s exactly right. So when there’s not a give us the room many opportunities for that. I feel like but we do have an inner Paul reference. So I was very happy about that work. So those are our stock. All right. Greg, sweetheart, why don’t you give us one of your drinking games?
Greg: Okay. Any time someone says Esperanza, Esperanza.
Joe: Awesome.
Greg: Take a.
Joe: Drink. My first one is every time they use an earphone.
Greg: I think that’s a good one. Yeah. He calls Holly on the plane. Yeah. And then, Dick Thornburgh calls his studio. Yeah. Anytime someone says the annex skywalk, take a drink.
Joe: I have any time. The sound effects on gunshots killing people are really too loud. Take a drink. So basically, anytime a gun goes off in this movie, you’re totally healthy.
Greg: But especially Bruce Willis is gone.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: So maybe we should say every time Bruce Willis shoots his gun.
Joe: Yeah. Pretty much.
Greg: I want to why am I correcting your.
Greg: Let your drinking games be. You’re drinking games. And anytime Fred Thompson’s response to somebody is just staring at them.
Joe: I love it. I have anytime you see someone smoking indoors. Oh, take a drink of that one.
Greg: That’s so true. The Windsor one one for was very smoky. Was there a smoking section in that plane?
Joe: There might have been. I remember flying and when there was a smoking section, but it was an early 80s. Oh for me. But. So.
Greg: Yeah, well, maybe this plane had been time traveling from both Britain and the ATC. They probably were British so that they weren’t Americans dying?
Joe: I think so. Yeah. Yeah.
Greg: Crazy. Side note I have to say this, the studio really didn’t want them to kill that many people. If you don’t count when Darth Vader blows up Princess Leia’s planet, this was the most deaths on screen that had ever happened.
Joe:
Greg: It’s like 230 on the flight and then 30 more people that Bruce Willis kills. So they actually paid money for them to crash a UPS plane.
Joe: Wow.
Greg: So like the response was the pilots died and as did most of the kids Christmas gifts for this area or something like that. But then they they tested it with the winds or 114, and the crowd bought into it and were not horrified.
Joe: Yeah. So anyways.
Greg: Any time the camera pushes into someone’s face, that’s a classic Renny Harlin move.
Joe: Yeah, I have every time there’s a shot of a watch because I have the bad guys, especially synchronizing their watches. And then Bruce Willis is looking at his watch a lot, especially when he’s like told there’s 90 minutes of fuel and right.
Greg: So okay, so the watches were a thing from the first movie that was kind of cut out. There was a whole they synchronize their watches thing from the first movie that they cut out. And so that was what they brought. And then the shot where they show them synchronize their watches. That was the shot where they showed the truck that they had just walked out of, was empty, and didn’t have an ambulance in it.
Greg: So that’s why they had to lose the shot. And so they brought that back into this movie. And it’s amazing you just said that because my next one is any time they do something that is the same thing as Die Hard. So like they’re using a chainsaw to cut through the power, right? They’re tapping on a screen to do things just like when Bruce Willis first got to the office, and he’s like tapping on a screen, a fake screen.
Greg: Yeah. So anytime they replicate something from the first movie, take a drink.
Joe: Awesome. I have, anytime you see a pipe spewing steam, take a drink. I totally have that one, too. It is so over the top. I cannot believe it.
Greg: There is so much steam going on everywhere. Okay, any time Bruce Willis does the yell that.
Joe: Okay. Some I have anytime Fred Thompson says stack, pack up and rock. You got to take a drink.
Joe: Just one time, though. You gotta. You gotta finish your drink. Guess what that is.
Greg: Can I add one to that one? Any time. He says borrow, steal, kill.
Greg: Okay, my next one is anytime Bruce Willis does the whimper. Grunt?
Joe: That is. Oh, awesome. Yeah. I have, anytime you see old technology. So there’s a lot of maps in this, and, like, blueprints, blueprint, and then a shot of them mapping things out on a map with, like, a compass and, like, the two pointy things.
Greg: So what does record player count?
Joe: Sure. Okay. Throw it in there.
Greg: Walkie talkie.
Joe: Yeah. We can have a walkie talkie in there, too. Okay. If you’re if you’re if you’re thirsty, make a drink.
Greg: Church is church. Old technology.
Joe: I do have every time they have a shot of the church, I want them. I.
Greg: Any time a taser is turned on.
Joe: Oh, that’s a good one. Anytime someone yells at a woman reporter, take a drink.
Greg: Oh, that’s really good. Yeah. Justice for Sam.
Joe:
Greg: Any time you see a fan.
Joe: Oh, I have that one. I have. Every time you see a shot of a spinning fan as well. Yeah.
Joe: Renny Harlin special right there.
Greg: Absolutely. I’m out. What do you have.
Joe: I have a few more I have. Okay. Every time someone dies while crashing backwards through something so they get shot, and then they just kind of fly backwards. Sure, sure. I’ve. Every time Dennis Franz yells, take a drink. So every scene he is and you’re taking a drink trough. Yeah. Every time he meets the janitor in the basement, take a drink.
Greg: Yeah. It’s good.
Joe: I have kind of the the Adrian Holly Adrian moment at the end, like Rocky. And then my last one is also. Every time there’s a clear voice over for exposition or joke sake, take it. Totally.
Greg: Yeah, 100%. All right, Joe, should we get to Joe’s trope lightning round, aka signs? You might be watching a great bad movie.
Joe: Yes, absolutely. Let’s do it. So. Oh, I love that. We kind of have the honorable man trope or the everyman trope for him. Kind of a reluctant hero, but also this one. He’s got a little bit more of a revenge as the driver of him, because he’s trying to save his wife. We have a little bit of the henchman who’s allowed to hurt the good guy.
Joe: We have explosion on impact with the flying snowmobile. And then action movie trope of no women except for love, interest or mother. So I’m really just two women in this. Yeah, I’ve added a new trope. They mention it, but when they’re tracing a call and they talk about how much time it takes. Yeah, they mentioned that in the first that only the time they mention it and then they talk on the phone constantly with each other.
Joe: I never mentioned it again, but it’s meant there.
Greg: No more terrorizing. Yeah, yeah.
Joe: When you dive away from an explosion, you will be safe. So we have that as a trope. But that one, when he.
Greg: Dives in the snow just needlessly, like one foot back human, is like a whole explosion happening.
Joe: Exactly. It’s so funny. And then I have I’ve added another new one, which is when you end on a crane or a helicopter shot. So this movie zooms out from them very clearly animated. So it’s not an actual crane shot. It’s like a faux crane shot, but a crane or a helicopter shot and a movie.
Greg: It’s a few shots stitched together in the spots where there weren’t people walking. They painted in planes.
Joe: Interesting. Yeah, it looks like it.
Greg: It was like the largest painting that’s ever been used. Yeah, I think that was is old school special effects. Yeah.
Joe: So? So. All right, let’s get to the important questions that need to be answered.
Greg: Are you even ready? I cannot wait, but let’s get to important questions.
Joe: Let’s do it.
Greg: All right. Joe did die. Hard to hold up then in 1990.
Joe: Oh, yeah. Definitely held up then.
Greg: Doesn’t hold up now.
Joe: It does. Not quite as much as it did when it first came out, but it still holds up.
Greg: Still totally agree. Less so, but sure. Yeah. How hard do they sell the good guy?
Joe: More in this one than they do in the first one. Because there’s talk of, like, John McClane is kind of,
Greg: He’s famous.
Joe: Now. Slightly famous. Yeah. So, like, I saw you on Nightline type of thing. Yeah. So, yeah, they sell him a little bit.
Greg: It’s like a modified selling. Yeah. It’s the way that they’re kind of pulling out like he is, just a regular guy. And he doesn’t like being famous. He didn’t like that he was on TV, that kind of stuff. How do they sell the bad guy?
Joe: Pretty hard. And this one, the first 5 to 10 minutes of this. Everybody apparently is just watching the same news channel talking about this General Esperon being extradited. So that’s pretty awesome.
Greg: Okay. Why is there romance in this movie?
Joe: Because they have patched up their marriage. And, you know, you need to raise the stakes. And I’m okay with it in this movie, so.
Greg: Yeah. Okay. Are we bad people for loving this movie?
Joe: I mean, probably, but yeah, obviously.
Greg: Man, we’re getting in the weeds. But the next couple questions. Are you ready? I’m ready. Does this movie deserve a sequel?
Joe: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely deserves a sequel. Okay. Probably not three. Well, the next one I think is much better than you do. So we’re gonna have to do Die Hard with a vengeance pretty soon here so we can have an out about that. Yeah. Okay. Okay.
Greg: I think it deserves a sequel.
Greg: Does it get the sequel it deserves? Maybe not.
Joe: All right. Fair.
Greg: Does it deserve a prequel now?
Joe: Absolutely not. Get out of here. Really? No way. No.
Greg: You know, I had trouble thinking of the. Does it deserve a prequel? There’s no prequel to it. Has a prequel?
Joe: I heard one, yeah.
Greg: So I kind of went, like my brain immediately went into the series. Does the series deserve a prequel? There actually was a graphic novel called Year One, and it was going to be the sixth Die Hard movie that they made, like they were working on it. And Year One was a graphic novel that would split between John McClane when he was a rookie, and John McClane later in life.
Greg: I’m not sure how much later, maybe like after Live Free or Die Hard or something, right? So it bounced between those two things, and I think it’s pretty well regarded.
Joe:
Greg: Okay, Joe, how can die hard to be fixed.
Joe: So it’s two things or three, really. You bring Gary Oldman in as the bad guy. I’ll, air force one.
Greg: Where is Gary Oldman from?
Joe: Since he’s, like, Captain Crazy.
Greg: Yeah. Accent.
Joe: It doesn’t matter wherever he’s from.
Greg: Okay, okay.
Joe: That’s a.
Greg: Very oldman. Is Gary literally playing Gary Oldman?
Joe: Yeah. Just do what you got to do. Yeah, I’ll switch it around if it’s like, made today. And if I’m remaking Die Hard two.
Greg: Oh, I’m sorry, I should have said how can this be fixed also aka who should be in the remake? We always kind of mix.
Joe: We mix things up.
Greg: I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
Joe: All righty. I have, Regina King as the hero. I’m just in the tank for her. Yeah, and I want Mike Leach to direct this David Leach. David leach. Yeah. David.
Greg: David leach. Okay.
Joe: How do you fix this? Or who should be in the remake?
Greg: Okay, so I actually did kind of separate these two questions for the first time in my life. I think this movie can be fixed by simplifying a little bit. It gets a little bit too complex. This movie was based on a book just like the first one, and the book that this was based on was not from the diehard universe at all.
Greg: It was just like a literally an airport novel called 58 minutes, when William Sadler calls and he says, there’s a plane landing at your airport in 50 minutes. He said that because that’s the name of the book that this was based on. It’s a very like slight book, apparently. But so much of this movie and so much of any movie is creating story reasons for things to happen.
Greg: And so many things happen in this movie where it’s like, why is this happening?
Joe: Right?
Greg: Why is John McClane the only person running out to try and save this plane that we have all just discovered is about to crash right into, you know, the runway because it’s a die hard movie, is the answer.
Joe: But yeah, it’s.
Greg: Kind of dumb. So I think I think they should have simplified this movie. There should have been more authorities, like, we should have been able to get more army people here faster. I guess they couldn’t get there because of the storm, but whatever. I kind of think this movie could be fixed if they took over the airport.
Greg: And the whole movie is locked down into the airport.
Joe: Oh, I like that.
Greg: And we’re not going outside, we’re inside the airport and like planes are crashing into the airport, you know like things are invading from the outside but we’re not like it solves the snow problem. It’s basically the heart. And then all.
Joe: Of a sudden, yeah, no, I like that.
Greg: But I think we need to enclose this one a little bit. One of the reviews that I didn’t read was like, the air kind of gets led out of it. The tension kind of dispenses. And so we needed more compression. We needed someone in an environment. Right. Okay. So I don’t know what I was thinking when I answer this question, but who should be in the remake?
Greg: I just started thinking of what would we do to reboot the Die Hard series? Not how would we remake Die Hard two?
Joe: Right?
Greg: So I apologize for not truly adopting this question that once I was done with the answer, I was like, what am I doing?
Joe: This isn’t a bad idea. It’s all right. It’s our podcast. We can do whatever hell we want.
Greg: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But since we can’t make year one because so sad, I didn’t. I wasn’t sure if we should talk about this more or not, but, you know, Bruce Willis has, brain illness.
Joe: Aphasia. Yeah. Basically, he has dementia. Yeah.
Greg: And we’ve been losing him for a long.
Joe: Time and was taken advantage of by his managers at the time. So he’s basically the last ten years of his movies. He’s been basically taken advantage of. And it’s.
Greg: So heartbreaking.
Joe: Yeah.
Greg: What was the family doing. Yeah. So this explains why he was making like seven movies a year there for a while. And they were all movies that you didn’t want to see in as because he was working two days on them. He was making like $1 million a day. And he had an earpiece in his ear and people were feeding him the lines.
Greg: Yeah, it’s so sad. It seems like he was kind of really taken advantage of. So we can’t have your one. So here’s what I think we should do. And I think we shouldn’t do this until Bruce Willis is so sad. And I don’t think Bruce Willis should be alive when, when the reboot happens. And I think that would be a bad idea.
Greg: But when the time is appropriate, I think we make a movie. I think we should either call it Nothing Lasts Forever, which is the name of the book Die Hard was based on. Or we just call it Lucy McLean. And Mary Elizabeth Winstead comes back as Lucy McClane. I mean, maybe Bonnie Bedelia is in this movie too.
Greg: Yeah. So Bonnie Bedelia, Mary Elizabeth Winstead come back. I don’t Bonnie Bedelia, I don’t know how much she’s in it. It seems like she might be a hard get, but, you know, we’ll give it a shot. Okay, so Lucy is now focused on her career similar to Holly Janeiro, and her mom is worried she was a cop, but it didn’t work out for some plot reason.
Greg: You know, maybe she shot a kid like Al Powell.
Joe:
Greg: And she took a job at some bougie international finance company and learns that the company is a front for a terrorist organization.
Joe: Or her old.
Greg: Cop. People reach out to her and convince her that she should help trap these people in some sort of environment. I think it’s like a corporate meet up. All of the employees of this company meet up in a hotel in New York. So Lucy agrees to work with her old colleagues to do some sort of sting operation.
Greg: When this whole company descends and they lock down the hotel. What? Lucy realizes as the cops are coming close is that the cops are corrupt and are trying to steal from the terrorists, and the terrorists are some sort of evil organization. I don’t know what they’re doing. So Lucy realizes both the bad guys and the authorities are against her, and she’s ruining the whole plan of both of them.
Greg: So Lucy is now in a position where she’s up against both of them to save someone she cares about who’s also in the building. And so maybe Lucy is married to Justin Long from diet for right? Maybe this is happening long enough from now that she has a daughter or a son that’s like an intern at the company and is at this corporate meeting or something.
Greg: There’s some family member that is in trouble, and Lucy has to both draw on her experiences of being John McLean’s daughter and die hard, for she was awesome in that movie, and she’s been awesome in every action. Maybe she’s been in since then and she’s drawing on her like beat cop smarts and just genetics are real. She’s a McClane and she saves the day.
Greg: So that’s that’s my remake.
Joe: All right, I’m in. I watch that every day. Okay.
Greg: All right, Joe, two more questions here. I’m so curious what you have to say about this one. What album is Die Hard to Die Harder?
Joe: So I spent a lot of time thinking about this. I looked up albums that people thought were better than the first, and I couldn’t go there because I just don’t think it’s better than the first one. Where I landed was of its time. And just like being a really masculine movie, kind of toxic masculinity kind of flowing through it in a lot of ways.
Joe: This is Limp Bizkit Significant Other, it’s their second album. It’s the second movie, second album. Limp Bizkit, probably one of like the most toxic masculine, like a rock rap group ever. Yeah, right. So that’s what I came up with.
Greg: What’s the song on that album that you made that you want to.
Joe: Put on our playlist? That’s probably like nookie or something stupid like that. Oh my gosh. Okay. And I apologize to everyone who is listening to this, because I am embarrassed that I have had to put this album out there because this is a band that I should say I hate. Yeah. It’s not. And then and enjoyment, but I have I got there was due to the toxic masculinity that feeds into this movie.
Joe: So okay, okay. What is your album for this one?
Greg: I can’t believe I have already put a Limp Bizkit song on this playlist. Great Bad Movies music on Spotify is where you can listen to all of our songs that we picked throughout 2024. At the show, I was going for a bloated, successful, but not as well-regarded follow up album that is still pretty good. That was what I was looking for.
Greg: Okay. And so I think this movie is Be Here Now by Oasis.
Joe: Okay, I’ll allow it.
Greg: All the songs are longer than they should be. Oasis is just not entirely with us. While they’re recording this. They’re out of their heads on drugs and just kind of entirely full of themselves. After. What’s the story of Morning Glory? And they go full oh, wait, there’s like helicopters everywhere. Speaking of.
Joe: Helicopters.
Greg: There are just helicopters everywhere. Yet you know what, man, when I listen to that record, it is so solid in so many places that when I’m done listening to it, it’s like, I’m really glad I listen to that album. Like when it came out, didn’t really like it actually, but it did really well because it was their follow up album, much like how Die Hard two did way better than Die Hard one, which just feels ridiculous.
Greg: Now that.
Joe: Is out.
Greg: So be here now by Oasis.
Joe: All right.
Greg: All right, Joe, it has finally come down to our rating. Die hard two. Is it a great bad movie? A good, bad movie. Okay, bad movie, bad, bad movie. Worst case scenario. Awful bad movie.
Joe: I had at one point written good bad movie. I can’t do it. It’s a great bad movie. Yeah, there are problems with it that we’ve discussed, but I cannot get away from the fact of 16 year old me watching this multiple times when I was on HBO, 100% loving every second of it. This was a great bad movie.
Greg: The nostalgia factor is real in this one.
Joe: Yeah, the nostalgia factor is real. Yeah, I could be talked into a good bad movie if, like, I can make the case, but I’m not. I’m not trying to make the case. This is a great book. Yeah. Me. Sure. So how do you have it rated?
Greg: I had that exact same journey. Good bad movie after I finished watching it. And then before I walked in here, I was like, what am I talking about? Yeah, this is Die Hard two. It’s a great bad movie. So I had that exact same journey. It’s a nostalgic, great bad movie.
Joe: Absolutely.
Greg: Well, Joe, we did it.
Joe: We did it. Nobody else needs to really talk about it. This is the conversation that needed to happen about Die Hard two.
Greg: Yeah, absolutely.
Joe: I don’t know why anyone else would need to talk about it. They just listen to this podcast on repeat. Done. And then.
Greg: It’s such a great bad movie that they were like, let’s have a conversation about this for 34 years, and then and then we’ll be.
Joe: Done. Yeah.
Greg: And we have officially concluded that conversation.
Joe: Absolutely playing. It was two years die hard, 234 years.
Greg: So a gentleman’s two. Yeah. And I mean, we should say, as always, spoilers for Die Hard two.
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Spoilers for Die Hard two.
Greg: If you haven’t seen the movie, you should pause right here, go watch the movie, and then come back and listen to the rest of our episode.
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. The next 30s or so. That’s absolutely.
Greg: Oh, and now that you actually say that I should mention this has been great, but, I’ve got to go. I think my wing might be leaking gas out there, so I should go.
Joe: Oh, that’s that’s too bad. That’s dangerous. Sounds like, Anyway, I’ve got to go to my basement and fix my pipes. Apparently, they’re just constantly spewing steam, so.
Greg: Is Marvin still renting.
Joe: Down there? You might be.
Greg: Yeah, I blame Marvin.
Joe: Lives there now. Rent free.
Greg: Absolutely. Okay. I’m glad you have to do that, actually, because I need to go. I’m going to go watch some Roy Rogers movies with my best friend, Mr. Falcon.
Joe: Oh, that’s cool, that’s cool. Anyway, is weird. I’m. Someone just shot a thousand rounds in the cockpit where I am now. I’m fine, I’m fine. Really? They all missed. Oh, but now 12 grenades are in here. I should be fine, though. I just got to eject out of the cockpit. I’ll strap in, though. I’ve got nothing but time.
Greg: Perfect. You’re all good. You’re all good. Well, that works for me, because I’m going to go write a book about closet organization when it’s called stack and pack them in Rackham.
Joe: I wish I had something better than that. I don’t I have to go off and get yelled at by Dennis Franz, though.
Greg: That makes sense. That’s all that guy does, actually. Oh, I can’t write that book. I’m actually late for my weekly game of borrow, steal, kill. Oh, hard on the road.
Joe: So. Yeah. Nice. I’ve got to go practice martial arts naked. So it’s. I thought that. That makes sense.
Greg: You know what? I’m glad. I’m actually glad you have to go do that. Because I should go check in with Telford. A guy I’ve never met, but whose name I totally know.
Joe: Yeah, totally. Though I’m sure that’ll come in handy somewhere later on in the movie. So anyway, I’m going to try to bring my Taser through TSA just in case a reporter who has a restraining order against me is on the plane and is reporting from the bathroom, putting everyone’s lives in danger. So sure.
Greg: Listen. Well, I need an Emmy reporter. What does it say? Pulitzer feel.
Joe: It’s her.
Greg: Amazing. Oh, that totally works for me, because, I got this book for my birthday earlier this year. I really want to sit down here is by this guy named Colonel Stewart, and it’s called Canned by Congress. So I’m going to.
Joe: Check that out. Anyway, I’m going to the airport to pick up my wife. I’m going to bring my gun and 8000 rounds of ammunition just for my handgun. In case there’s any funny business going on there. So.
Greg: All right. Well, that works for me. I’ll see you soon.
Joe: Soon.