Tag: Bruce Willis

Movie Review: A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)

In A Good Day to Die Hard, John McClane emerges from a taxi cab in Moscow as a man finally transformed into an action movie caricature. Sure, the three installments standing between this film and the 1988 original have done their part to dehumanize their hero, but even Live Free or Die Hard, where the boozing, troubled detective launches a cop car into a helicopter like a kid seeking an achievement trophy on the X-Box 360, knows its protagonist well enough to put something of his—a daughter—up as stakes against the megalomaniacal villain of the moment. Not here. As soon as McClane lands in Russia, he’s running and jumping and shooting through a procession of grey, vaguely Russian sets with his son, who has grown up to be a CIA superspy. John McClane in 1988 winces as he walks barefoot across a sea of broken glass. John McClane in 2013 leaps from a tall building and pinballs through chutes and girders, miraculously dodging machine gun fire from a helicopter before landing on the ground, where he pulls a hunk of rusted metal from his son’s abdomen without so much as a hint of concern.

John McClane is minimized in what’s been marketed as a tribute to his legacy, to the point that both his son (Jai Courtney) and daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, in a brief cameo) make light of or treat as a burden their father’s decades-spanning, if incidental, career thwarting large-scale terrorist plots. They seem resigned to the fact that his mere presence in Russia means that cars will be smashed, guns will be fired, and anything combustible will explode. McClane was formerly an interesting protagonist. He drank too much. He was estranged from his wife. He was distant from his children. Even with a machine gun in his face, the worst part of his day was waking up with a hangover. Now he’s been neutered. He’s just an ornery old man, but not in the way of so many Clint Eastwood characters. John McClane is Bruce Willis in The Expendables: an image meant to inspire nostalgia and given one throwaway joke. Here, it’s that he’s on vacation, a sentiment as truthful as it is funny. McClane repeats the phrase so often you wonder if director John Moore had Willis record it once in a soundbooth so it could be played whenever things got too quiet.

Despite every attempt to convolute things, the plot of A Good Day to Die Hard is stupidly simple. John McClane, hearing that his son is in some kind of unspecified trouble in Moscow, hops a plane and ends up making a mess of a years-long sting intended to flip a Russian dissident (Sebastian Koch), who has spent the last few decades in prison due to his connection to the Chernobyl disaster. Things between John and his son are pretty sour, which is reflected upon whenever the McClanes aren’t haphazardly massacring civilians: Jack refuses to call his father “Dad,” instead opting for his Christian name, and both men agree that they don’t come from a “hugging family.” It’d be tragic were not these macho platitudes meant to be celebrated.

Willis is often accused of not trying very hard in vehicles like this, letting his smirk and the accumulated dirt on his wifebeater do the heavy lifting, but movies like RED, Looper, and Moonrise Kingdom either work with or around Willis’ limitations, using him less as a featured attraction than as part of their palette. That’s impossible here, given that Bruce Willis is John McClane, and that a Die Hard movie without him simply isn’t a Die Hard movie at all, but there are ways of accounting for Willis—interesting villains, innovative action sequences, a non-standard plot—that A Good Day to Die Hard has no interest in. Sure, there’s a lot of smoke as to who the bad guy is, but when picking one out from a line-up of uninspired Russian mafia types, does the end result really matter?

No, and that’s exactly why the McClanes make a 12-hour car ride to Chernobyl in 30-minutes: so that the fallen statues and ruined hammers and sickles of the ruined city can once again beat the dead horse of Cold War nostalgia. Here, in the third act, things get implausible—the lightspeed trip to the city, the chemical spray that immediately de-radiates the area it’s sprayed in, the fact that the McClanes walk around Chernobyl wearing regular clothes when every Russian in the city is wearing a biohazard suit—but not in a fun way. There are thirty-something well-trained Eurothugs patrolling the city with an arsenal of guns, explosives, and helicopters. There are two Americans among them, loudly dispatching everything in their crosshairs. A Good Day to Die Hard is just another action movie asking its audience to believe and be invested in this scenario.

Every Die Hard movie, in an effort to somehow be bigger and badder—more Die Harder—than the first, has comicaly exaggerated McClane’s abilities or his wit. A Good Day to Die Hard is guilty of the former and largely abandons the later. Say what you will about any of Die Hard‘s sequels, but none of them have felt this unnecessary. A “Die Hard” movie in name only and a “Bruce Willis movie” insofar as it’s a movie Bruce Willis appears in, A Good Day to Die Hard could have been called anything, could have starred anybody but Willis, and would have been better off, if only for the lack of comparison. Do the movie a favor and cast the albatross around its neck overboard, and you’re still left with a sub par action movie, the kind that’s released early in the year not to grab a larger audience during the late-winter burial period, but because it’s one of the films being buried.

A Good Day to Die Hard. With Bruce Willis (John McClane), Jai Courtney (Jack McClane), Sebastian Koch (Yuri Komarov), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Lucy McClane), Yuliya Snigir (Irina), and Cole Hauser (Mike Collins). Directed by John Moore and produced by Alex Young and Wyck Godfrey. Screenplay by Skip Woods, based on characters created by Roderick Thorp.

February 28, 2013
Movie Review: Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, like many of his films, functions as a nostalgist’s guide to childhood and the weightiness of romance. The difference here is that Anderson focuses on two children, children who, unlike Rushmore‘s Max Fisher, are actually children. They don’t approach love in Fisher’s clinical, precise way, nor do they regard life as a bitter procession of tragic events, as do the man-children of The Life Aquatic, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Darjeeling Limited. Their way is more innocent, one ignorant of societal norm and responsibility, but still couched in the grim truths of reality. Considering how movies now try to appeal to children through the liberal use of rainbow wigs and catchphrases, this attitude, and the intelligence of Moonrise Kingdom, seems reliquary, lost to the past.

In the summer of 1965, Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kora Hayward) run away together, into the secluded New England wilderness of New Penzance, an island Suzy and her family live on which is only accessible by plane or ferry. The pair spent an entire year plotting their escape, beginning with a chance meeting between the two while performing in a school play, and continuing through a series of business-like correspondences. Sam is an orphan and a Khaki Scout. Suzy is the record- and book-collecting daughter of wealthy parents who are strangers to each other. Same brings with him camping equipment and the ability to read maps. Suzy has her records, her books, her binoculars, and her cat. They are decidedly ill-prepared for the coming journey.

Their plot discovered, Sam and Suzy’s flight brings together the disparate members of the small community. Walt (Bill Murray) and Laura Bishop (Frances McDormand)—Suzy’s parents—Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis)—the island’s lone police officer—and Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton)—the meticulous leader of New Penzance’s pack of Khaki Scouts—spread out and go looking for the kids. The remaining Khaki Scouts, having long considered Sam a weirdo, hunt for him like he’s an animal they want to mount on the treehouse wall. When they’re found, it’s in a beachfront kingdom they’ve made for themselves. It’s just them, the cat, her records and books, a campfire, and the moon. It’s a perfect kingdom—an idyllic place right out of the books Suzy carries—but, like all utopias, Sam and Suzy’s piece of land is doomed from the start.

Walt and Laura Bishop, ever the reactionary, mostly absent parents, expressly forbid their daughter from seeing that strange boy again. Sam’s foster parents decided they can’t handle the responsibility anymore, so Captain Sharp takes him in while Social Services (here represented by Tilda Swinton) flies to the island so Sam can be shipped off to a juvenile refuge. The Khaki Scouts, meanwhile, having learned a valuable lesson about friendship and impressed with Sam’s resiliency decide to spring the couple and get them to the mainland, that wild, unspoiled stretch of earth to large and secretive for even the most obsessive parents and public servants to uncover them.

That the relationship between Sam and Suzy never wears thin is Moonrise Kingdom‘s most considerable accomplishment. The threat of precociousness looms large over every story about a couple of crazy kids, but Anderson manages to exercise restraint, stopping just short of letting his children run amok in the woods. Again, there’s something to be said here about the difference between Anderson and Roman Coppola’s script in comparison that of any other recent children’s entertainment: say what you will about Anderson’s appreciation for and liberal application of whimsy and hipster quirk, but his characters don’t abandon their parents so they can gulp soda, gobble candy, and have endless and endlessly merchandisable fun. Nobody sits Suzy down for some big, lame speech about morals, and halfway through the one he delivers to Sam, Captain Sharp realizes how stupid, futile, and condescending he’s being and pours out a little beer for the sad kid whose dreams have been wrecked. The adults at the corners of this film are more than vacuous governors of joy. They bring their own problems to the island. They’re as ill-prepared to face them as their runaways.

The most obvious problem is that Laura is cheating on Walt with Captain Sharp. Beneath the unhappiness of this particular damaged relationship, there’s a subcontinent of grief. The Bishops, of course, remain together for their children. Captain Sharp, living alone in a trailer on the island, is by no means a bad person. Neither, for that matter, is Laura. He is driven to her by loneliness, she to him because he represents something wholly different—and thus more exciting—than the family she knows. Theirs is a relationship running parallel to Sam and Suzy’s. Where the Bishops would seek to end it, Sharp comes to see himself in the orphan, seeking a way to keep him out of the system.

The outlier here is Scout Master Ward. As tempting as it is to lump him in with Anderson’s stable of man-children, few of his characters live as meticulously or selflessly. He, like many adults, is oblivious to the inner-workings of the children he looks after. When he realizes this, he becomes Moonrise Kingdom‘s most vulnerable character. He considers himself a failed scout master when Sam runs away, is depressed when Sam tenders his resignation from the troop, and is largely helpless before Social Services. He begins the film as a man as well-manicured as any number of Anderson’s dollhouse sets. Like New Penzance, the Belafonte, Rushmore, and the Darjeeling Limited, Ward’s put-togetherness is a facade, something that’s beginning to crack and fissure.

Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson’s eighth film, and hardly the first to deal with dysfunction and longing. He’s no chameleon—even the claymation of The Fantastic Mr. Fox looked, felt, and sounded like something distinctly of his brand—but Anderson continues finding subtle ways to express his themes differently. Here, it’s the intersection of Sam and Suzy’s dream with the reality of the adults who watch over them. The lives led by the Bishops, Captain Sharp, and Scout Master Ward are fractured and sometimes terrible. However well they think they’re hiding this, however much they assume their children remain oblivious, the two understand the problems of the real world, perhaps better than their wards. That the unknown holds so much potential is why they run away. But potential is often not realized, and is rarely perfect. Their utopia, the Moonrise Kingdom, lies at the edge of the sea. Storm clouds are gathering. Look at their empire. How easily the ocean could sweep it away.

Moonrise Kingdom. With Jared Gilman (Sam), Kara Hayward (Suzy), Bruce Willis (Captain Sharp), Edward Norton (Scout Master Ward), Bill Murray (Walt Bishop), Frances McDormand (Laura Bishop), Tilda Swinton (Social Services), Jason Schwartzman (Cousin Ben), and Harvey Keitel (Commander Pierce). Directed by Wes Anderson from a screenplay by Anderson and Roman Coppola.

November 1, 2012
Movie Review: Looper (2012)

Looper contains elements of time-traveling science fiction, neo-noir, and pained romance, but, as a chase film, nothing is as complicated as it seems. Yes, there is time travel. There’s also a mob conspiracy, copious drug usage, and the perception and memories of the people involved in these rackets are framed with fuzzy edges, but the elements that play into Looper and the characters involve are there to ground the viewer in an unbelievably plausible, fully-realized United States of America, which, in 2044, is almost irreparably broken—a patchwork quilt of vagrant gangs, men and women with retrograde telekinetic powers, and mafia-run cities ruled by weathered men from the future. If certain aspects of Rian Johnson‘s film seem familiar, it’s because Looper wants to ease the viewer into a film that’s altogether different than anything that’s come before.

Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a looper, a man hired to take care of mafia hits that come from the future. Though time travel hasn’t been invented in 2044, in 2072 it’s illegal and used as a means to bury bodies. The target is captured and tied, has a bag placed on his head, and is zapped back in time. Once he appears in the past, the looper shoots him, receives his payment, and disposes of the body. When the mafia runs out of uses for a looper, they send the aged version back for the young man to kill. Most loopers are surprisingly fine with this: having been paid a bounty of silver and gold for their work, they’re free to go about lives of reckless hedonism. Sometimes, a future self isn’t quite ready to die. This, of course, presents problems.

Joe (Bruce Willis) is an eventuality, a man from the future who is the result of a lifetime of bad choices and the grace of a woman he meets after hitting rock bottom. Where most of these eventualities seem resigned to the termination of their contract, Old Joe is different because his wife is a casualty. Unseen in this future is a mysterious mafioso known only as “The Rainmaker,” who, as legend has it, took control of the mob by himself. Why he’s taken to closing extant looper contracts is unknown, but Joe has some crucial information about The Rainmaker’s past: as a boy, he lived around the area where he worked as a young man.

Though its plot bears some similarity to The Terminator, nobody in Looper is a cold-blooded killing machine. Blood-stained as it is, Johnson’s film doesn’t place an emphasis on gore, and its characters’ decisions are tinged with regret. The focus here is on destiny, if such a thing exists and if it can be changed. In an early sequence, Johnson teases that yes, the events of the future can be altered by those with knowledge of the past, but despite that scene’s grotesquery, the time travel paradox is mostly backgrounded. It’s an odd comparison, but Looper is so compelling for the same reason Safety Not Guaranteed was: faith in its narrative and refusal to bow to its central gimmick. Personal taste will dictate whether or not you’re satisfied with the way Looper plays with genre conventions, but Johnson is a director who regularly subverts expectation, trading mostly in well-drawn characters and good dialog.

That’s true here, as the world Looper inhabits is replete with characters outside of the Joe/Old Joe binary, whose fates are inextricably linked to the actions of those two men. The most important such people are Sara (Emily Blunt) and Cid (Pierce Gagnon), who live in the farmhouse that’s circled on Old Joe’s map. Sara is Cid’s mother, and Cid, Old Joe suspects, is one of three children who turn out to be The Rainmaker. Though the movie slows down considerably when the present’s Joe decides to camp out at the farmhouse and wait for his future self, it allows the movie to pause and consider its three main characters: the old man who’d do anything to save his wife, the mother who would do anything to save her child, and the young man with a murky sense of his destiny.

At the fringes, Looper‘s mob elements threaten to un-do Joe before he or his future self can do anything to prevent or protect what’s coming. They’re led by Abe (Jeff Daniels), a man who’s been sent back in time specifically to take charge of the loopers. He’s kind of a surrogate father to that lot, though he’s very clearly bored in his role (the film notes that he took over organized crime in Kansas City in his spare time), sighing his way through field reports,his lackeys assurances that they’ll catch Joe, and torture because, as he says, he’s from the future. If there’s a point of contention to be had with the logistics of Looper, Abe is it. But Daniels—as part of a supporting cast that includes Piper Perabo as a hooker with connections to Joe and Paul Dano as a looper who can’t pull the trigger on himself—is so slick, so convincing in the role that you take Abe at “I’m from the future” and stop asking questions.

“Slick” and “convincing” are two words that best sum Looper, and few science fiction movies emerge as tightly conceptualized as this. There’s The Matrix and there’s Blade Runner, and, watching Looper, I felt pangs of admiration for Rian Johnson’s film much the same way I did when I first saw those two fore-bearers. This is sci-fi at its most entertaining and most assured. In the coming weeks, there will be a plethora of posts picking apart how its time travel works or doesn’t, how its inconsistencies boggle the mind or don’t, how a repeat viewing or two will clear away confusion or won’t. Right now, none of that matters. Genre filmmaking, for all the talk of its resurgence, has grown unbelievably stagnant. Looper represents a vital breath of fresh air, something beyond caped crusaders and extraterrestrial invasions. In its otherness, Looper is worthy of merit. It opens a door to something new. Thrillingly, when the film ends, that door is still open.

Rating: Looper. Directed by Rian Johnson. With Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Joe), Bruce Willis (Old Joe), Emily Blunt (Sara), Paul Dano (Seth), Piper Perabo (Suzie), Pierce Gagnon (Cid), and Jeff Daniels (Abe). Released September 28, 2012 by FilmDistrict.

October 2, 2012
Movie Review: The Expendables 2 (2012)

Two years ago, I called The Expendables “the official movie of the 13-year-old boy.” With The Expendables 2, star/screenwriter Sylvester Stallone doubles down, ramping up the violence while making an action movie for the Chuck Norris Facts crowd. Personally, I don’t think the whole Chuck Norris Facts thing has improved much with age. Neither has the core concept of Stallone’s budding franchise, which is to gather the elder statesmen of dumb action movies together with the titans of straight-to-DVD sport-to-actor crossovers and set their combined unstoppable juggernaut against some exaggerated, outdated kind of villainy. In the first movie, The Expendables visited the isle of Villena. Here, they take on a dude named Villain (Jean-Claude Van Damme), emphasis on whichever syllable you like. Here’s a guy so evil he only takes off his sunglasses before an intended kill. (more…)

September 4, 2012