John McTiernan’s direction pulls no punches, and there are sequences here-like the oft-imitated, never-bettered swinging-through-a-window-on-a-firehose moment-that achieve something close to visual poetry. That said, even the highest of concepts will only work if all the elements are right, and Die Hard is a textbook case of everything falling into place. It’s little accident that, in the wake of the film’s success, clones sprouted up like toadstools almost overnight, from Die Hard on a boat ( Under Siege) to Die Hard on a bus ( Speed) and this year’s Die Hard on a musical instrument ( Grand Piano). Admittedly, there are precedents- Assault on Precinct 13 must have been an on-set favorite-but no one had told this tale with such streamlined precision before.
#Rad racing shirt from mivie free#
Their only hope is a man locked in with them, yet free to roam, a lone hero who must pick off the bad guys one by one, arcade-game–style, until he reaches the Big Boss. The story is so ingenious, it’s incredible no one had thought of it before: A group of terrorists invades a state-of-the-art skyscraper and takes the inhabitants hostage. We want speed and intensity, wit and wisecracks, cartoon violence and things going boom.
We don’t want to see ourselves reflected, we don’t want understanding or honesty or intellectual insight. If cinema is the perfect escapist medium-and until someone invents a virtual-reality device that works, it will be-then action movies are its purest expression, the best way we know of for humanity to shake itself loose from the trappings of humdrum reality and take to the ether. It isn’t exactly what pseuds would call High Art.Īll of which is precisely the point. It doesn’t offer much insight into the human condition (though the image of Bruce Willis walking on broken glass could be taken as a poignant metaphor for life’s little brutalities). But does Die Hard really fit the bill? It doesn’t have anything to say about the state of the world. The killer scene: Alan Rickman’s final tumble: iconic, nostalgic, slightly-shoddy-effects–based glory. 🥋 The 25 best martial arts movies of all-timeĬast: Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Bonnie Bedeliaīest quote: “Now I have a machine gun. 🪖 The 18 greatest stunts in cinema (as picked by the greatest stunt people) 🌊 33 great disaster movies that’ll have you running for cover Written by Eddy Frankel, Eddy Frankel, Yu An Su, Joshua Rothkopf, Trevor Johnston, Ashley Clark, Grady Hendrix, Tom Huddleston, Keith Uhlich, Dave Calhoun, Phil de Semlyen, Dave Calhoun and Matthew Singer
Get ready, because we’re about to bring the boom. The results reveal a genre as elastic and versatile as any – and in many cases, way more fun. To put together this list we polled over 50 experts in the field, from Die Hard director John McTiernan to Machete himself, Danny Trejo, along with our Time Out writers. But even when they’re just dumb fun, they do what films are meant to do best: to entertain and astonish. Some of our 100 Greatest Action Movies deliver subtext in abundance others, weighty political undertones. Brilliantly choreographed, well-scripted action can make you think, think and feel as much as any drama or thriller, and a flawlessly orchestrated set-piece can conjure up emotions that even romances or horrors struggle to match. As an escape from the nine-to-five routine of life, action movies are always there for us.īut reducing them solely to brawn-over-brains entertainment shortchanges the entire genre. It’s okay to want to take in the odd scrappy, bare-knuckle brawl or a high-speed car chase through the back streets of some crowded European city on the biggest screen possible. Because, as provocative as a chewy three-hour character study can be, sometimes you just want to watch some stuff blow up – and there’s absolutely no shame in that. Some film buffs may scoff at their explosions, overblown stakes and corny dialogue, but action movies offer some of the most visceral filmgoing experiences out there.
0 kommentar(er)
