The killer scene: Ripley straps into a Power Loader suit to destroy the alien queen. ![]() Yippie-ki-ay, indeed.- Tom HuddlestonĬast: Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton But of course, the blue-ribbon winner in all this has to be Bruce Willis, who crashed from nowhere (well, from TV’s Moonlighting) onto the world’s stage, thanks to a combination of antiheroic self-mockery, battered but unbowed machismo and one very grubby T-shirt. The script is crammed with humor and invention, and whoever came up with the idea of setting it at Christmas deserves a big medal. 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. 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, Joshua Rothkopf, Trevor Johnston, Ashley Clark, Grady Hendrix, Tom Huddleston, Keith Uhlich, Dave Calhoun, Phil de Semlyen, Dave Calhoun & Matthew Singer ![]() We polled over 50 experts in the field, from Die Hard director John McTiernan to Machete himself, Danny Trejo, along with Time Out ’s writers, and the results show just how awesome and unique the best action movies can be when done correctly. This list of the greatest action films ever made is proof that the genre is more versatile than it appears. The right director can choreograph violence with almost balletic grace, while the right actors actually make you care about the person trying to outrun the bullets and the bombs. But anyone who’s ever allowed their senses to get shattered by the booms, blasts and breaking bones of a truly great action movie knows that there are few moviegoing experiences that can compare.Īlso, not all action movies need be loud and dumb. In a lot of cases – maybe even most of them – that characterisation is certainly true. Among highfalutin cineastes, action movies are too often considered trashy, low-brow junk food, replacing all story and substance with eardrum-shattering explosions and mindless violence. Not that it ever hurts them at the box office – the general public loves them, of course. Action is one of cinema’s most misunderstood genres.
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