Tag: Bruce Willis

The Sixth Sense (1999)

Shyamalan’s opus has just enough to reward re-watching after the world learned its secret

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Cast: Bruce Willis (Dr Malcolm Crowe), Haley Joel Osment (Cole Sear), Toni Collette (Lynn Sear), Olivia Williams (Anna Crowe), Donnie Wahlberg (Vincent Grey), Glenn Fitzgerald (Sean), Mischa Barton (Kyra Collins), Trevor Morgan (Tommy), Bruce Norris (Mr Cunningham)

Does this film have the most famous twist of all time? M. Night Shyamalan’s opus is so dominated by its final reveal (look away now) that Bruce Willis was is in fact a ghost, that every single viewing of it afterwards is focused on watching every second and seeing if you can spot the joins. I’m not sure if that has made for a long shelf-life or not for The Sixth Sense, an otherwise surprisingly sweet Stephen King-ish story of a child coming to terms with a miraculous power. Is there much more to The Sixth Sense by a third viewing though – can the magician’s trick land a third time?

I’d say just about. A year on from the shooting of famed child psychologist Dr Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) by a former patient he failed to help, his traumatised wife Anna (Olivia Williams) has stopped speaking to him and Malcolm needs redemption. Could he find it with the case of troubled ten-year-old Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). Cole, despite his obvious good nature, is frequently moody and terrified by curious incidents. His mother Lynn (Toni Collette) despairs as Cole seemingly refuses to talk to her. Can there be truth in Cole’s belief that he can see, and talk with, dead people?

The Sixth Sense has the reputation of a supernatural chiller. But, bar a few jump scares as ghosts walk across screen to sudden, loud musical notes, it’s actually a far more gentle story. In Shyamalan’s world the ghosts are not malevolent or cruel – they are simply confused, lost souls (of course “some of them don’t even know they’re dead”) with unfinished business. They are, in other words, rather like the rest of us – and Cole’s realisation of this is actually rather sweet.

This humanity is the real triumph of the film, helped enormously by the untricksy care Shyamalan unfolds his story with. While almost every film he made since teetered from disappointment to disaster (with ever more desperate attempts to recapture the rug-pull zeitgeist to ever diminishing returns from increasingly savvy audiences), The Sixth Sense is a reminder of the road not taken. If Shyamalan had focused on small-scale, intimate character dramas like this he could have had quite the CV. His camera work is careful, often unobtrusive, gentle in its slow, immersive movement and he backs aware almost entirely from fast cutting. The Sixth Sense is really a spooky fairy tale.

It also creates an environment for four impressive actors to tackle four challenging roles. From Olivia Williams, whose marvellously detailed performance of utterly naturally not reacting goes a huge way to maintaining the film’s delicate tightrope to the (Oscar-nominated) Toni Collette, who superbly channels deep motherly love and pained helplessness under a blowsy exterior.

Bruce Willis (who only took the film on under contractual obligation) gives possibly his finest performance here. Suppressing his natural cocksure confidence into suppressed confusion and guilt, he convinces as an expert plagued with self-doubt. It’s a quiet, expressive performance that’s a tribute to the acting chops Willis had when he was moved beyond smirks.

It’s also a very supportive performance that helps bring the best out of a gifted child actor. Haley Joel Osment carries a large chunk of the film. He’s vulnerable and scared but also older than his years, alternating between the innocent excitement of a child and the weary reflection of a much older man. He creates a character you both want to comfort and also cheer for his growing strength. Shyamalan works with both actors to continually subtly shift the power balance between them without ever showing the film’s hand.

Because, of course, Cole knows the truth from the start – no one is better at spotting these things than him, and his unwillingness to speak to Malcolm within ear shot of others (such as during their first real consultation while his mother prepares dinner in the kitchen) speaks volumes. No wonder he keeps shooting him those looks of pity and concern which we, at first, interpret as fear.

You can’t escape that the film’s pretence, on repeated viewing, demands the viewer to reach some tenuous conclusions on how Ghosts operate. I think there is just enough there to suggest – from the sudden appearance and disappearance of ghosts – that they operate like we do in a dream, suddenly finding themselves in places with no memories of how they got there. They can move some objects, but only if they allow themselves to “see” them. They imagine what their own appearances are (the film implies Malcolm always appears in his blood soaked shirt to Cole, it’s just we see Malcolm’s perception of himself as a suited psychiatrist) and are subconsciously drawn towards people who can see them or who they have unfinished business with. The pretence just about sustains itself.

But is there more to the film than that? Pleasingly – and a little to my surprise – there is. While The Sixth Sense is more spooky than terrifying, that’s because it’s a film where helping and caring for people is the answer. No matter how horrific looking the ghosts seem, they are really scared people looking for help. This realisation – and the way Cole seemingly decides to commit his life to helping them – is actually extremely affecting. It’s a basic message of not judging a poltergeist by its cover, that really works.

It’s these beats that really work on a second or third viewing. I would trade the whole “he’s a ghost” twist for that gorgeous final scene between Collette and Osment in a car, where he finally confesses and shares a family secret from the grave to Collette’s initial confusion, anger and then emotional release. It’s a beautiful scene (it surely nailed Collette an Oscar nomination) and is the finest moment of Shyamalan’s career. It also shows the heart of the film – this is a parent-son film (with two parents), that’s about learning to love and accept. Everything else is really just set-dressing.

The magic trick (and Shyamalan hints at the sleight of hand he’s pulling by having Malcolm perform a similar distraction trick) may lose its mystique, but it then allows you to focus on the emotion that made you care about the trick in the first place. And, let’s be honest, the emotional heart is really what made the film a phenomenon. Any film can have a rug-pull twist – but it only really connects if people already cared about what they were watching. The Sixth Sense focuses on making sure we invest and it’s that which makes the film last, when all the glitz of the trick has faded.

12 Monkeys (1995)

A world-ending-virus can only be cured through the power of time-travel in Gilliam’s twisty, paradox time loop

Director: Terry Gilliam

Cast: Bruce Willis (James Cole), Madeleine Stowe (Dr Kathryn Railly), Brad Pitt (Jeffrey Goines), Christopher Plummer (Dr Leland Goines), David Morse (Dr Peters), Jon Seda (Jose), Christopher Meloni (Lt Halperin), Frank Gorshin (Dr Fletcher), Bob Adrian (Geologist), Simon Jones (Zoologist), Carol Florence (Astrophysicist), Bill Raymon (Microbiologist)

2035 and the world is a plastic-coated hell, where what remains of mankind huddle below the Earth in rudimentary, environmentally controlled, airtight refuges. The surface is a dream, now home to a deadly virus that wiped out 99% of the population. That virus was unleashed in Philadelphia in 1996: nothing can stop that. But time travel can help the scientists of 2035 gain a sample of the original pre-mutation virus. They believe it was unleashed by an organisation called “The 12 Monkeys”. Track the organisation in the past and find an original sample of the virus. Easy right?

Wrong. Time travel messes with your mind, making it hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. The travellers are penal “volunteers”. James Cole (Bruce Willis) is selected as he has a photographic memory and a strong memory from 1996 of witnessing a Philadelphia airport shooting, that will help send him back. However, he’s flung back to 1990 and thrown into an asylum, treated by Dr Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe) and sharing a room with environmentalist Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt). Rescued and correctly sent to 1996, can Cole convince Railly he’s telling the truth and track Goines who has become the leader of the 12 Monkeys?

12 Monkeys is one of the most intriguing time-travel films ever made – and its future, ripped apart with plague, seems chillingly closer today. It puts a vulnerable, scared person at its centre – and makes him a dangerous, inarticulate Cassandra who reacts with violence when no-one listens him (which they never do). It repeatedly tells us things cannot end well, but still gets us hoping they might anyway. It presents puzzles that provoke debate and stretch the imagination.

Gilliam’s most main-stream film is an eccentric, unsettling, tricksy film that juggles time travel and paradoxes, as well as mental health and the nature of reality. Shot with a Dutch-angle infused oddness – reflecting its hero’s mental unbalance – and scored with a French-inflected whirly-gig musical theme that is reminiscent of the demented street people that pepper the film (and may, or may not, be other unbalanced time travellers), it constantly puts you on edge and unsettles.

This extends to its casting, which takes two Hollywood superstars – Willis and Pitt – and deglamorises them to a shocking degree. As Cole, Willis is shambling, vulnerable, scared and struggling to distinguish between reality and fantasy. An 8-year-old boy when the virus destroyed the world, in a way he’s never grown up. He looks around the world of the past with a wide-eyed wonder (he adores the sun and the feel of the soil beneath his feet) but has the stroppy impulsiveness of a maladjusted teenager. He’s so twitchy and insecure, you start wondering if he is the mentally disturbed man who imagines he’s from the future, that his doctors think he is. It’s Willis’ least-Willis performance ever and one of his finest.

Similarly, Pitt pushes himself as the disturbed, aggressive Goines. Prone to obsessive rambling, that stretches Pitt’s languorous vocal register (he trained for months to improve his vocal range), Pitt’s performance is wide-eyed, unpredictable and unsettlingly dangerous. With a single eye swollen and askew, it’s a performance that plays with being OTT but manages to work because he mostly avoids actorly showing off. Madeline Stowe, by contrast, has the most difficult role as the ‘normal person’, a sceptical psychiatrist becoming more and more convinced Cole is telling the truth.

Of course, despite the film’s efforts to play with reality, the audience are always pretty certain he isn’t wrong about the future. But, with the sight of fellow deranged time travellers, not to mention Willis’ vulnerable performance, that Cole could still be crazy. Even if you are right, doesn’t mean you are sane.

Gilliam’s surrealist future helps with this. Every time Cole is pulled back to 2035, the world becomes ever more deranged. Is his grip on reality eroding, as he is feared it is. Design wise the future is a triumph – but it also seems eerily similar to the 1990 asylum Cole is in. Has the building, and the things in it, been repurposed in 2035? Or, as the scientists of 2035 become ever more surreal (including serenading Cole at one point in a Dennis-Potteresque fantasy), questioning Cole via a circular floating series of TV screens while he sits in a suspended chair, is Cole’s grip on reality gone?

It keeps the tension up in the ‘past’ plotline, even as the things Cole has seen in the future – strange messages on walls, photos, voicemail messages – accumulate. 12 Monkeys is a fascinating time-travel movie, that establishes from the very first moment it is impossible to change the past (something the audience, like the characters, get sucked into forgetting). After all, if the plague was stopped, then time travel would never be invented in the first place. All Cole, and the other travellers, can do is collect information.

But that doesn’t stop the future influencing the past. Goines decides to form the 12 Monkeys based on a conversation with Cole in 1990. Dr Railly becomes fascinated with apocalyptic predictions – writing a book that will influence the man planning viral annihilation in 1996 – only because she meets Cole. And, above all, 2035 Cole’s presence in 1996 leads to that strong childhood memory happening in the first placce. The final reveal of the meaning behind Cole’s recurring memory-dream is the perfect example of a time-loop closing (so much so the scientists in the future bend over backwards, giving Cole a doomed mission, to ensure it happens).

It also explains why he is drawn towards Stowe’s Railly, who resembles (with the exception of her lack of Hitchcock Blonde hair) the woman in his dream. The relationship between Cole and Railly develops into a slightly forced romance (it feels like a script requirement, for all Gilliam’s taking the characters to watch Vertigo to hammer home the obvious contrasts). But when it focuses on two people drawn together for reasons they can’t quite understand (and there are hints of predestination) it just about works. That and the commitment of both actors to the roles.

12 Monkeys is about 15 minutes too long (it’s 1990 section outstays its welcome), especially as the audience is never in doubt that the plague is real (after all this is a movie). But Gilliam keeps us on our toes with how confident we feel in Cole: we’re repeatedly shown he’s violent, inarticulate and impulsive. The final half of the film, where the origins behind events we have been shown or heard in the first half, is fascinating. The tragic turns of the film’s paradoxical temporal loop is brilliantly executed and haunting. Gilliam’s film is quirky, unsettling and a design triumph: but it also tells a fascinating story. It’s his most accessible and crowd-pleasing film.

Armageddon (1998)

Bruce Willis leads a group of Big Damn Heroes in Michael Bay’s abysmal Armageddon

Director: Michael Bay

Cast: Bruce Willis (Harry Stamper), Billy Bob Thornton (Dan Truman), Ben Affleck (AJ Frost), Liv Tyler (Grace Stamper), Will Patton (Chick Chapple), Steve Buscemi (Rockhound), William Fichtner (Colonel Sharp), Owen Wilson (Oscar Choice), Michael Clarke Duncan (Bear), Peter Stormare (Lev Andropov)

In Michael Bay’s space, no-one can hear you scream. But that’s only because it’s so damn loud up there. It’s 1998’s other “asteroid is going to wipe out humanity” film, the one that came out after Deep Impact but grossed more. NASA recruits ace driller Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) and his team (including Will Patton, Steve Buscemi, Michael Clarke Duncan and Owen Wilson) to fly up to an asteroid the size of Texas, drill a hole in it, drop a massive nuke in and blow it into two bits that will bypass the Earth. Will humanity be saved? And will the tensions ever be resolved between Harry, his protégé AJ (Ben Affleck), and Harry’s daughter Grace (Liv Tyler) who, much against her dad’s will, wants to marry AJ? Houston, we have a problem.

Armageddon is the ultimate expression of Michael Bay’s style. With the camera swooping and rotating wildly around characters on the move, the fast-editing, the assault on the ears, the green-yellow-blue hue, every shot and line of dialogue in Armageddon feels like it was made to be inserted into a trailer. It’s an overlong onslaught (nearly two and a half hours) which rarely goes ten minutes without a sequence that features explosions, furious shouting and frantic camera movements. Most of the action in Armageddon is incoherent and the film rather neatly replicates the experience of being actually hit by a meteor.

For many people this is a guilty pleasure. But there is very little pleasure to be had here. By trying so hard to top Deep Impact – a film he hadn’t even seen at this point – Bay dials everything beyond 11. So much so it becomes exhausting. Half the action sequences (of which there are many) are impossible to understand, such is the fast editing and the way all the dialogue is screamed by the actors at each other, all at once, drowned out by bangs and crashes. The only dialogue you can actually make out in the film is of the “The United States government asked us to save the world. Anybody wanna say no?” variety, built for slotting into a trailer before some more bangs.

In fact the whole film is basically a massive trailer for itself. It’s unrelenting and after a while not a lot of fun. I guess if you catch it in the right mood it might just work. Bay gives it everything he has in his arsenal. But even he can’t overcome performances from his actors that range from bored and unengaged (Willis and Buscemi both fall into this category) to over-played grasping at epic-status (Affleck and Tyler fall into this one). Billy Bob Thornton comes out best with a wry shrug, knowing the whole film is bonkers but going with the ride.

Anyway, it all charges about a great deal, even while it never knows when to stop. In every situation one crisis is never enough – it’s best to have three at once. Not only does someone need to stay behind, but the asteroid is breaking up and the shuttle won’t take off! What a to-do! The film is desperate to excite you, like a 7 year old who wants to share the BEST-THING-EVER with you and doesn’t draw breath while telling you every single detail.

Of course, scientifically the film is nonsense, but that hardly matters. How NASA can know the comet being blown in two will create two bits that will miss the Earth (rather than two impacts or a whole load of debris) is unclear. Timeline wise – particularly early on – the film makes no sense. But then who goes to Bay looking for a science lecture? It even opens with a ponderous Charlton Heston voiceover, all part of the straining for grandeur.

It’s not even the best Bay film (that would surely be the far more enjoyable but equally overblown The Rock closely followed by the first Transformers film, the only one that doesn’t make you feel soiled after watching it). Armageddon could be a guilty pleasure. But really it’s terrible. You should just feel guilty.

Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)

Samuel L Jackson and Bruce Willis Die Hard with a Vengeance

Director: John McTiernan

Cast: Bruce Willis (John McClane), Jeremy Irons (Simon Gruber), Samuel L Jackson (Zeus Carver), Graham Greene (Detective Joe Lambert), Colleen Camp (Detective Connie Kowalski), Larry Bryggman (Inspector Walter Cobb), Anthony Peck (Detective Ricky Walsh), Nick Wyman (Mathias Targo), Sam Phillips (Katya)

The Die Hard franchise has spawned multiple imitators, all with the signature format of a hero taking on villains in a confined space: everything from a boat, to a train, to a plane to a bus. Of course the franchise itself had already started to head away from this in Die Hard 2, which takes place across an entire airport. Die Hard with a Vengeance pumps it up even further by setting the action in an entire city. Sure it loses some of the magic claustrophobia of the original, but then it’s got to do something different right?

John McClane (Bruce Willis) is on suspension, with his marriage in ruins and his life on the skids. No change there then. But he’s dragged out of retirement when terrorist Simon (Jeremy Irons) detonates a bomb in New York and makes it clear he’ll keep doing so until McClane agrees to take on a series of games and challenges across New York – each with deadly penalties. In the first of these, with McClane wearing a very unfortunate sign in the middle of Harlem, he is saved by Zeus (Samuel L Jackson), a shop owner with his own problems with white people, who is forced to join McClane on Simon’s deadly game. After a bomb detonates in Wall Street, McClane starts to wonder: does Simon have an ulterior motive?

Die Hard with a Vengeance is probably most people’s second favourite Die Hard film, and it’s easy to see why. It’s got scale, bangs, loads of action and jokes. It largely takes the best things from the two previous movies and tries to replicate them: so we’ve got the bigger scale and stakes of Die Hard 2, matched with the battle of wits that powered Die Hard. At the same time, it avoids Die Hard 2’s habit of squeezing in as many references and characters from the first film as possible, and tries to make something fresher.

But yet, as I get older, I’m actually getting less keen on it. Guiltily, I think I prefer both entries 2 and 4. I just feel there is something a bit mean about Die Hard 3, something a bit brutal and vicious. Now I am no shrinking violet, but there is a lot (and I mean a lot) of angry swearing in Die Hard 3 – which actually makes it feel rather dated. Everything is “f this” and “f that”. But it’s symptomatic of a particularly 1990s action vibe about the film.Anyway it’s all angry – everyone in the film is angry most of the time. I mean sure they are stressed, but McClane was stressed in the last two films but it didn’t just project itself through fury.

McClane himself, in the first two films, may be hard as nails but he’s also a regular guy doing his best to save lives. But in this film he’s just extremely angry – probably because the character is hungover – and feels less like a police officer interested in preserving life than a vigilante acting above the law. Twice in this movie he executes people (one of whom is trying to surrender (in German)!) with no real warning. The blood and guts count seems a lot higher. The camera lingers on corpses and spurting blood. The character just feels harder to relate to.

It’s no great surprise that the original intention of the script was for McClane to become actually more and more unhinged by events. It gets lost at the end, when the film settles for a more generic and triumphant ending rather than the unsettling, low-key one originally filmed (which feels like a much better thematic fit for the film you’ve just watched). It would have been interesting to make a film where the hero becomes as damaged and ruthless as the villain – but the studio didn’t want that, so we don’t get it.

McTiernan’s attempt to recapture the vibe of the first Die Hard film also doesn’t quite click. Simon is an odd character, who utilises brute force one minute and then inexplicably spares lives the next. His eventual heist on Wall Street is partly blood-free, partly a brutal slaughter of any resistance. McTiernan is obviously aiming for a battle of wits, but the original concept of Simon setting McClane a series of children’s riddles to solve gets lost half way through the film. Like Die Hard there is an attempt to get a sense of gleeful enjoyment from Simon’s actions, but Jeremy Iron’s character (despite his best efforts) isn’t devilishly charming enough for this to work.

But then things in the film do work. The chemistry between Willis and Jackson is very good, and Jackson really nails a character who is part cocksure, angry radical and half squeamishly out of his depth. The film’s at its most involving when it gets wrapped up in cat-and-mouse games. The first half of the film, which focuses on this, is by far the most interesting and offers the best twist on the action – from riddles about the man going to St Ives, to having to cross New York in a fraction of the time needed, or trying to defuse a bomb by putting four gallons into a five-gallon jug. The more these riddles die away in the second half and the film goes for more generic shooting and killing, the less interesting it becomes.

Not that this sort of stuff isn’t good fun. Although McClane seems more bad tempered and ruthless – and the baddies are mostly faceless goons rather than people – it’s still fun to see him take on the odds so successfully, and to see him being underestimated by the villains (the character is always smarter than he appears). McTiernan, with a huge budget, throws everything at the screen from bombs to fist fights to car chases. He doesn’t manage to create the magic sense of heroism that the first film has in such abundance, or that sense of one man doing what he must to save others, but the film still broadly works.

There is something very 1990s about this film, from its swearing to its violence to its general atmosphere of gritty comic book thrills. It is fun to hear jokes about Hillary Clinton (jokingly named as the next President – oops) and Donald Trump. But it’s that lack of moral purpose to McClane that proves the biggest problem – he’s motivated less by saving lives than by revenge. It’s a crueller film, sharper and meaner, which means for all the enjoyment it can bring, I can’t love it like I do the first film. It takes McClane to dark places, and presents a bad tempered hero it would be hard to like without the first two films. He’s already starting to feel less like a regular put-upon guy and more like an angry maverick dealer in violence. There is less to build on in this film, and perhaps that’s why we had to wait a while until nostalgia made John McClane a character we wanted to see again.

GI Joe: Retaliation (2013)

Channing Tatum and Dwayne Johnson wonder how they landed in this mess in GI Joe: Retaliation

Director: Jon M. Chu

Cast: Dwayne Johnson (Roadblock), Bruce Willis (General Joe Colton), Channing Tatum (Duke), Jonathan Pryce (President of the US), Adrianne Palicki (Lady Jaye), DJ Controne (Flint), Ray Park (Snake Eyes), Byung-hun Lee (Storm Shadow), Ray Stevenson (Firefly), Arnold Vosloo (Zartan), Walton Goggins (Warden James), RZA (Blind master)

Back in 2009, Hasbro (flushed with success from its Transformers franchise) released GI Joe: a humble, straightforward nonsense actioner (almost exactly the sort of film spoofed by Team America) in which gung-ho American action heroes save the world, destroying major cities on the way. It was harmless, Stephen Sommers-directed fun. Critics hated it. Audiences saw it, but were basically meh. It left us on a cliff-hanger. The cliff-hanger led to this joyless, “by-contractual-obligation” reboot.

The villainous Zartan (Arnold Vosloo) has changed his entire DNA to make him an exact physical match for the President of the United States (Jonathan Pryce) and taken his place. Using his powers, he orders a surprise attack on the GI Joe force, wiping out their base. All the Joes, including Duke (Channing Tatum) are killed, except for Roadblock (Dwayne Johnson), Lady Jaye (Adrianne Palicki) and Flint (DJ Controne). Now they need to form a team to take revenge, defeat Zartan and prevent the plans of the newly escaped Cobra Commander.

Oh dear God this is an awful film: a truly dire comic book disaster, terribly written and practically incoherent in its plot and storyline, peopled from top to bottom with bored looking actors. It’s barely a sequel at all to the original film. In fact, it disregards most of the plot of GI Joe: Rise of Cobra altogether, barely acknowledging its existence. None of the plot threads of the first film are carried across at all, with the exception of the replacement of the President. On top of that, all the characters the first film spent time establishing as our heroes are unceremoniously dispatched (mostly off-screen) to be replaced with a trio of new heroes, none of whom make any real impact. Is it just me who feels cheated that all the characters the first film tried to build up just get wiped out like so many wasps when a pest controller comes calling?

Was it really necessary to totally dump the previous film? It wasn’t that bad. And if they were going to do that, could they not have come up with a fresher reboot than this? Who on earth thought the way to make the series fresher was to introduce Bruce Willis (at his most breezily, contemptuously disengaged) as a new hero? The film barely has time to introduce its new heroes: Lady Jaye has Daddy issues and is looking for approval (her Daddy, by the way, sounds like a sexist asshole with his “women shouldn’t serve in the military” attitudes and I was waiting for another character to point this out – they don’t of course), while Flint barely has a character beyond being a cheeky-chappie. When even Dwayne Johnson can barely be bothered to bring his C-game to a role, you know you’re in trouble: this film turns the most engaging action star of our age into a dull rent-a-muscle.

Then the plot. Yawn. Oh dear God yawn. Is there a plot? Not really. Events happen. They keep happening. Occasionally characters (like the “Blind Master”) pop up to essentially blurt out a load of plot, in between rushed character introductions. Turgid fight scenes are given extended screentime – but since they usually involve people we don’t really know fighting people we’ve barely been introduced to, it’s pretty hard to get engaged in them. Nothing really links together or carries any meaning. In fact, the film is about so little – and what plot there is, so clumsily and irritatingly spoonfed to the audience while our heroes take a frustratingly long time to catch-up – that you’ll be surprised the run time is as long as it is. I’ve already forgotten most of it and I watched it two days ago.

I say watched it, because I’m not sure “letting it pass before my eyes” on a Saturday morning over breakfast really counts. Certainly the final battle scenes – involving the storming of a bunker, something blowing up in space, world leaders in peril, and embarrassingly trite “personal rivalry” stories coming to a head – are so unimaginatively filmed, so dully predictable in their execution, that I fast forwarded through them. I just wanted the fucking thing to end. In fact I bemoaned the failure of Cobra to knock off all the Joes to start with. Not that the villains are much better themselves.

Pity poor Channing Tatum. Actually on reflection don’t: he’s well out of it. Tatum and Johnson’s double bill is the most likeable thing in the movie, the only thing that feels remotely real. Tatum was called back for reshoots (as he became more famous in between finishing filming and the planned release date, after the success of Magic Mike) and it’s a neat reminder of what an engaging, off-the-cuff performer he can be: when he kicks the bucket, the film’s most likeable, interesting character goes with it. The other actors just seem interested in picking up a cheque.

GI Joe: Retaliation isn’t a reboot. It’s an execution. It’s not even an execution you can get worked up about. In fact, I would have happily knocked off some of its characters myself. Did we create the language of cinema to come up with something as stodgy and insipid as this? Where is the magic and inspiration, where is the fun? What looking glass did we fall through, that anyone thought this pile of crapparoo was the way to restart a franchise?

Die Hard (1988)

Alan Rickman sets the bar for all Hollywood villains in Die Hard

Director: John McTiernan

Cast: Bruce Willis (John McClane), Alan Rickman (Hans Gruber), Alexander Gudonov (Karl), Bonnie Bedelia (Holly Gennaro McClane), Reginal VelJohnson (Sgt Al Powell), Paul Gleason (Dwayne T. Robinson), De’Voreaux White (Argyle), William Atherton (Richard Thornburg), Clarence Gilyard (Theo), Hart Bochner (Harry Ellis), James Shigeta (Joseph Yoshinobu Takagi)

Is there a better action film ever made than Die Hard? In fact, I’m almost tempted to say: has a more influential film emerged from 1980s Hollywood than this masterpiece of tension, action, thrills and wry humour? Die Hard set the template for action: the structure of the hero and villain locked in a battle of wits, claustrophobic locations, one man (sometimes now a woman) against overwhelming odds… There is a reason so many films now have their plot explained as Die Hard on a [insert eccentric location or method of transportation here].

The plot is brilliantly simple and streamlined – so compellingly is the whole enterprise put together that you don’t notice that it was all being made up in the spot (the main hint of that being there is clearly no ambulance in the baddies’ arrival truck). If you don’t know the plot, where have you been since 1988? John McClane (Bruce Willis) is a cop who’s in LA to spend Christmas with his estranged wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia). Joining her office party at Nakatomi Plaza, a massive skyscraper still partly under construction, their marital discord is interrupted by the building being seized by a group of European terrorists (or are they?) led by urbane sophisticate Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman). Now it’s all down to John, dressed in nothing more than a vest and trousers, without even any shoes to take on a dozen heavily armed baddies single-handed.

Die Hard is a perfect storm – everyone involved was in the right place, at the right time of their careers, with material they were perfectly able to bend to their skills. There have been so many wonky thematic rip-offs of this film that a lot of credit should go to John McTiernan for setting such a brilliant template that proved irresistible to adapt. It goes without saying that the film is whip-sharp and rattling with tension, and that its action moments are brilliantly shot and choreographed. What makes Die Hardwork so well is that it puts character and performance at its heart. McClane is a character we can root for, a regular guy as far away from an Arnie or Sly superman as you can get; similarly Gruber is so charming and charismatic, part of you wants him to win.

Although there is plenty of blood and violence, McTiernan doesn’t dwell on it (watch the far more brutal Die Hard 2 for contrast), and there is no sadism in the editing. Instead, McTiernan invests the film with a lot of sly humour and wit – and he is not afraid to acknowledge that there is an illicit thrill in watching intelligent people like Gruber put detailed plans into place, executing them perfectly while running rings around the law. The use of Ode to Joy as Gruber’s personal theme tune is incredibly playful, and the film successfully positions itself in its narrative with Gruber as the protagonist and McClane the antagonist (with the difference that McClane is the character we root for) – as such, McClane’s reactive role in the plot constantly stresses his isolation and vulnerability, while Gruber’s control of the narrative positions him as a truly daunting opponent. A modern film would have kept the reveal of Gruber’s plan until the third or fourth reel – here Gruber tells us within five minutes of arriving that he’s there to rob the place; immediately we are connected with him and understand his aims, and understand the structure of the film coming up from the start.

The humour of the film is never heavy handed, and it’s perfectly balanced with the threat – Gruber and McClane are witty and dry but their characters are never undermined. The film never forgets its Christmas setting, which makes for a number of humourous contrasts (altogether now “Now I have a machine gun. Ho-Ho-Ho”). There is no comic relief as such, and every character serves a clear role in the plot – no fat on the bones here. I also really like the fact that the film at many points subtly undercuts machismo: the gung-ho FBI agents Johnson and Johnson are cocksure morons; as the SWAT team storms the building one of them stops to shriek “ow” after pricking his hand on a thorn. Sly comedy runs throughout – preparing to defend the building from the same SWAT attack, one of the terrorists glances around nervously before helping himself to some candy from behind a shop counter (because kidnap and murder are not a problem, but stealing sweets is really naughty). The film is packed with rich incidental moments like this that charm the viewer, even while bodies piles up and parts of the building go up in smoke.

Bruce Willis was also the perfect choice as McClane. Not only does he have the physical capability, but he has the acting skills. Long before he succumbed to the smirk or the grimace as his default settings when bored (watch Die Hard 5 – or rather don’t – to see the comparison between then and now), he makes McClane very real. Yes he’s confident and arrogant, but McClane is also laced with self-loathing (watch him beat himself up after his conversation with Holly) and under the surface he has a deep humanity, which dedicates him to saving lives (twice in this film he lambasts himself for not doing enough to save people). Willis not only takes a physical battering over the course of the film – don’t we all wince at the idea of running barefoot over a floor of glass? – but he’s also half the time desperately scared under the adrenaline, using wit and defiance as a defence mechanism. McClane does things in this film we could never do in real life (jump off an exploding building using a fire hose as rope – yup you’re dead) but Willis always feels like a regular guy – someone we can understand, relate too. He’s as far away from Arnie in, say, Predator as you can get.

Of course we’ve come all this way without mentioning arguably the film’s MVP, the incomparable Alan Rickman. Astonishingly, this was his first ever film, but Rickman is so perfectly brilliant in this film that I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say every Hollywood villain since has been weighed against his performance here and found wanting. Rickman taps into a truth: wouldn’t we all love to be the baddie? Despite it all, Gruber is clearly enjoying himself throughout: to borrow a phrase, he’s an exceptional thief and since he’s moved up to kidnapping we should all be more polite. He’s also sharply intelligent, his invention and arrogant confidence that he has thought of everythingare actually rather thrilling – while his exasperation at both McClane and the inadequacies of his underlings are oddly charming. Rickman’s arch and clipped delivery turns lines into endlessly quotable bon-mots – he has a perfect sense of timing and says more with an arched eyebrow than other actors could with a page of dialogue.

The film’s master touch is to recognise early the strength of these two characters and to make the main duel not so much a physical fight as a battle of wits. Skilfully navigating the viewer around the building, Gruber and McClane execute move and counter move, both thinking fast on their feet while never losing sight of their main goals. The film also brilliantly allows them to engage in a running verbal battle via walkie-talkie, making their clash increasingly personal – and also allowing both characters to demonstrate their ingenuity. It also allows us to invest in the clash between them – and to make the sense of one-upmanship that runs through the film feel very alive.

The focus here has been on those two characters, who really drive the film – but every member of the rich supporting cast contributes hugely. Bonnie Bedelia is very effective in a difficult part as Holly – assertive, independent but never trying or tiresome (we see her point on McClane as well, who can be a jackass). Alexander Gudonov is perfect as the Han’s macho-but-short-sighted Number Two. William Atherton is gloriously vile as an exploitative reporter. Hart Bochner embodies the shallow, coke-fuelled, Masters of the Universe 80s as Ellis. Reginald VelJohnson adds a lot of humanity as the thoughtful Al Powell.

Okay there are one or two things wrong with the film (I’ve always found Al’s final use of his gun at the film’s end a bit uncomfortable, and I suspect from the conflicted messages of the soaring music and VelJohnson’s sad-faced acting that this was a tricky moment for the producers to get right). But this is an explosion of filmic joy that constantly rewards multiple viewings (god knows how many times I’ve seen this film). The action sequences never tire, the characters never lose their interest. I don’t think it’s a stretch to call it a masterpiece as well as a landmark piece of film-making.