Inevitably, it also gets remade with enough variance that people don't need to pay for rights or royalties. Speed was legendarily pitched to Hollywood execs as "Die Hard on a bus."
The latest in this particular mantrain is Olympus Has Fallen, which as I pointed out recently is part of a trend that makes me think our national psyche is taking a royal beating from having a rather sterling military-industrial complex at the expense of the rest of our infrastructure. What I didn't mention is that it's kind of awful, despite being semi-decent violence. In brief: About forty Koreans wipe out the entire secret service, a large chunk of the metropolitan police department, drop the hood of the Washington Monument on a group of tourists like the cartoon foot from the Monty Python intro, and then get taken out by a single disgraced agent, here played by former actor and current scream queen Gerard Butler, whose breasts are now so big he should be required by law to wear a bra.
What follows is a comparison and involves a lot me playing amateur film theorist. I'm likely to nail down a few things, might make a few wild miscalls, but it's more to get thoughts down right now than really set down rules.
The big thing that defines Die Hard and successful imitators, to me, is this; It is the worst night of the main character's life. There's a lot that adds up to this:
Our man has history: We meet John McClane as his plane sets down in Los Angeles. The guy sitting next to him notices our hero is white-knuckling it and offers him some crazy advice, to go barefoot on a carpet and make fists with his toes. "I've been doing it for eight years and I'm just fine." he says. McClane gets up to retrieve his luggage and his new friend spots his gun. "It's okay, I'm a cop. I've been doing this for eleven years." (I may be completely screwing up the exact words as I'm bare-backing this off a not-completely-fresh viewing.)
He's here in LA to see his family for Christmas, but the relationship with his wife is rocky. The limo driver taking him to the office building she works at manages to guess some information even though McClane won't readily talk; she came out here for the job and he thought it wouldn't work out. It did. When he gets to the office and looks her up, he realizes she's using her maiden name.
He meets up with her, her surprisingly kind boss, and the office cokehead who is clearly hitting on her. Things are tense between them, but they also obviously still love each other despite her 80s hair and his unemployed-in-the-40s fashion sense. She has to do a few work-related things despite this being the office Christmas party, so she leaves him to get cleaned up. As he's doing so, he makes fists with his toes on the carpet and smiles. Apparently it works.
Pretty rounded out, pretty human, just a touch of authentic quirk.
Our man is isolated: A very careful balance was struck here. From the moment the terrorists show up and everything goes south, McClane is truly on his own. He's given contact with the terrorist leader and a nearby cop via a radio, but since the bad guys know nothing about him and he doesn't have a private line to his friend, he can't really reveal anything about himself, especially where he is or what he knows about the terrorists that gives him an advantage. Not only is it a chance to make your hero and villain intelligent (and brother, do they), it gives McClane a chance to interact with others without giving him easy access to solutions.
It also gives the movie a chance to give human qualities to supporting roles, kind of a lost art form even in dramatic films these days, as Carl from Family Matters (that's such a lazy joke but I honestly had to look up the actor, Reginald VelJohnson, and realized I never knew his name in the first place) has to coax McClane through the rough times by revealing more and more about himself. The conversations are well-paced and feel relevant.
Though I have to point out that this character's constant chagrin at his boss's obligatory bull-headed attempts to control the situation to the peril of McClane and the hostages is a bit too obvious as an attempt to control our perception.
Not an intro that inspires confidence, but It Gets Better.
Our man is clever: One or two slip-ups, but as mentioned, McClane goes well above the usual doofiness of film protagonists, action or otherwise. His plans are decent to brilliant, his improvisations sound (as far as that goes), and the only reason he doesn't rule the situation is that he's up against a similar mind with superior resources. Tell me, how often do you see a film where the entire dramatic situation could have been avoided by the protagonist just NOT being a bozo?
The scene we'll pick apart here involves McClane actually running into his arch-enemy, who he hasn't seen yet. The guy acts like an escaped hostage and fools McClane just long enough for the two to get some important information out of each other, but when he thinks he's got the drop on our hero... nope. McClane figured it out just in time to dodge a bullet.
Action takes many forms: This would require another viewing, but I'm pretty sure at least half the time he doesn't even end up shooting his opponents. Gunfights are depicted as wild, dangerous, and difficult to get a handle on. The feeling is that if McClane came out of cover long enough to actually line up a shot, his head would pop off half a second later.
We see the toll the evening is taking: In a very physical way. Lots of jokes still get thrown around about Bruce Willis' filthy wife beater, but the film does an excellent job of punctuating that McClane is going through hell by continually degrading his appearance, both through wear and tear, and injury. This probably also helps deflect the reality that at least three events in the movie would have really killed a man, even at peak fitness.
His injuries are similarly severe, and not as thoroughly shrugged off as they usually are in action cinema. Going barefoot over glass late in the story serves to really punch home the savage evening of buggery this guy's morale must be going through. It also helps control the tempo and naturally segue into another conversation as he fixes up the wound.
The wife serves a purpose: Sure, she's a hostage, and eventually she'll wind up with a gun to her head in a stand-off, but McClane's wife is also allowed her strengths and what background they can fit in around the narrative. She's the one the other hostages look to, and she makes the case for what they need to make things go smoothly to the terrorists. She even gets her own licks in at the end. So half a point here, I'd say.
Well, maybe more. The movie isn't pedantic enough to spell it out, but it's hard to imagine a scenario where her influence is removed and McClane survives the finale.
The UK poster for Olympus Has Fallen, which could
double as the entire experience if you were hit with a
stun grenade while looking at it.
So, Olympus Has Fallen, the Red Dawn for the yuppie set. Man, it wants to be Die Hard. It really, really does. For the sake of argument, I'll go so far as to call it a film.
Speed forward to Banning now a burnt-out desk jockey at the treasury, upsetting his girlfriend by not going to barbeques with her, and oh god whatever the fucking Koreans attack. They just attack, okay? NORAD and everything else designed to stop far technologically superior threats from doing this? Whatever. It's time to smack the audience in the face repeatedly with a two hundred million dollar plank and get to our Die Hard.
So how's it stack up on my arbitrary scale?
Our man has history, or at least we assume so: Pretty much what you saw in the opening. He gets along with the president and his son. He has a girlfriend. Other than that, he's apparently his job. An entirely passable scene in a cafe has Banning running into his former Secret Service pals and us realizing how much he misses it. Awww.
Our man is isolated, mostly because he just gets down like that: Well, mostly. Getting him inside the White House before it went on lockdown was clumsy enough, but got the job done. Isolating him by slaughtering virtually everybody with a gun in the course of thirty seconds was ham-handed, but whatever. Having him able to bring in the cavalry at the end but leaving this plot hole open to go do the obligatory cinematics himself was just Caligula crazy, though.
Idiots forgetting academy training about cover or a
very special episode of Cop Rock?
In addition, his radio banter (mirroring Die Hard rather directly over multiple sources) serves less of a purpose. They could have replaced most of his dialog with the big bad with "Fuck you!" "No, fuck you!" and been just as well. In fact, there is a one-liner that ups the clever factor on this suggestion by... virtually nothing. "Let's play a game of fuck off. You go first."
That quiet munching sound you hear is my backbrain eating my forebrain.
Our man isn't that clever: Only thing that pops out to me is that he knows what secret passage the president's son is hiding in, which is telegraphed by this conversation he has before the incident: "Is the president's son still sneaking around the White House, making everybody crazy?" "I wonder who taught him that." Which is about as subtle as an exploding sledgehammer rammed up the backside. It ranks up there with seeing the Korean ambassador with Rick Yune at his shoulder and instantly knowing who's going to kill who in a huge surprise reveal when the shit hits the fan.
The fact is, Banning will veer wildly from one end of the spectrum to the other. He'll expertly kill the White House's security system and then have an intense mental struggle with simple devices. Like most fiction, he generally thinks at the speed of plot.
The direct comparison with Die Hard, of course, is that he meets somebody he assumes is friendly who really wants to kill him. It plays out with striking similarity to the scene from that movie, except A) it's not his arch-nemesis and so B) he's free to kill the guy at the end of the scene.
Did I fail to mention Die Hard had only twelve villains to dispatch? I believe the Banning body count here is more like twenty-eight, twelve terrorists dying beforehand, countless civilians and military personnel, and of course pride.
The action is samey: One scene has Banning whack a guy to death with a bronze bust of Lincoln. Other than that, the answer to any situation is always more bullets. It's a fucking video game, okay?
Our demi-god wears clothing made out of tanks: Banning gets one gash on his forehead, a mild abrasion on his cheek, and his vest is pretty much just dirty. Was he stabbed at one point? Shot? Doesn't matter, he found a glowing green health kit or something when we weren't looking.
Also, those two injuries are going to vanish by the end.
The girlfriend stares at news reports: Yes, the same framing device that stretches the acting abilities of many a woman in action films past the breaking point, the marathon television viewing at work. Like a bored twentysomething Netflix binging on Orange is the New Black, whatshername has little to do beyond stand on a line of tape somewhere and radiate enough concern to make her skull pop out of her skin. Bonus points for having her work at a hospital in a desperate bid to make her the least bit relevant, but then that just creates the problem that she's probably the busiest doctor/nurse/medical fetishist since Pearl Harbor and mostly she's just staring past us and hoping her boyfriend is okay.
Oh, the hell with what little objectivity I have; up yours, movie. Like most of my dates, this will go a lot more easily if you just get in that hole I dug in the basement and do it quietly.
There are some other connecting points I steamrolled over, like those oh so stupid superior officers being out to get everybody killed through sheer bullheadedness, the quality of the one-liners (Die Hard mixes the absolute best with some groaners, Olympus... mostly the latter), and some other themes. These aren't quite as important to the formula, but again that's my own opinion.
This isn't to say that Olympus Has Fallen is completely without merit, because it's not. You can watch it, and those of a certain patriotic bent who can shrug off the accidental self-satirizing elements will take something away from it... even if that something is the cinematic equivalent of "look out for the snakes on level five." But if you want something that really takes it to the next level or even just matches the existing high notes we have, this movie doesn't work. It's completely flip attitude toward extinguishing life wholesale in the opening attack makes any attempt at gravity through threatening individual lives cartoonish (save for one well-acted White House staffer played by Melissa Leo, who also happens to be the only one aside from the president who survives).
But considering it really wants to be something that it clearly doesn't understand, it must be held up to that standard and in this, it also clearly comes short.
Next time I'll compare another, more favorable Die Hard influence that happens to be a video game. No, really.
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