Chapter Two: Lethal Weapon 2 vs. Die Hard 2
By Brett Ballard-Beach
November 8, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
This got me to thinking about all the films in general mom (and dad) had endured and enjoyed with me during the era in which I was too young to see them without a parent and/or legal guardian, and wasn’t quite sneaky enough to pull off a switcheroo nor mature enough looking to get in on my own “merits”. Attached at the end of this week’s column is a comprehensive but by no means exhaustive list of films seen theatrically by me with mom and/or dad (though usually both), most R-rated, and seen by us between 1980-1993 when I was between the ages of four and 17. As evidence of my ever-declining faculties, I really had to ponder over some of these, not only wondering whether I saw this with just one or the both of them, but did I see said film on the big screen? (All those years of no notes come back to bite me in the ass.)
As much as I love tangents, I would drift even further from the topic at hand than I normally like to allow myself, if I began even rudimentary reminisces about the nearly 100 films. Best to leave it as an appendix for perusal, featuring many films already lost to the fogs of time (some unfairly, others… perhaps more fairly).
In keeping with a recurring theme of this column and the recurring motif of my forgetfulness, it is highly likely that I had seen neither Lethal Weapon nor Die Hard when I saw their respective sequels on the big screen. It has only been a few years since I last saw Die Hard 2, but approximately 20 since my last viewing of Lethal Weapon 2. I have seen all four installments in each series, each one multiple times with the exception of Lethal Weapon 4 (the latter was perhaps my worst experience ever attempting to watch a film in a theater, with the projector breaking down no fewer than five times. It took about 150 minutes to watch a 127-minute film.)
A flurry of stats and figures to kick things off: Joel Silver produced both films under the microscope in this week’s column. Silver produced the entirety of the Lethal Weapon series and the first two Die Hards, as well as The Matrix trilogy and most of the big budget action flicks that Jerry Bruckheimer hasn’t been involved with. Lethal Weapon 2 is the highest grossing installment of either franchise domestically and pulled off the best improvement on its predecessor grossing more than 2x the take of the original. The Die Hard series has grossed over a billion dollars worldwide. The Lethal Weapon series encompasses four installments spanning 1987-1998 (any talk of a new chapter now involves the word “reboot” and does not seem likely to involve any original cast members.) The Die Hard films stretch from 1988 to the present with a fifth feature due next President’s Day weekend. Both series spawned a wake of imitators and copycats for their respective genres - the buddy cop scenario generally featuring one Caucasian and one African-American (see 1990’s Downtown, 1995’s Money Train or the Rush Hour trilogy for a switch-up in regards to ethnicity), and the lone authority figure up against terrorists in some sort of isolated or compact space (i.e. 1992’s Under Siege was “Die Hard on a boat”).
It is ironic that of the two, Lethal Weapon 2’s strength is that it makes more of an effort to continue the story and relationships from the first film and add new twists, while Die Hard 2 - its awesomely blunt/redundant subtitle Die Harder appears all over promotional materials, posters, and the home video boxes but not in the film itself - aims to run the same scenario as the first film with cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) stumbling into another terrorist plot on Christmas Eve two years later while once again attempting to meet up with his wife. Several characters from the first film who shouldn’t really be part of the action are shoehorned in to such an obvious degree that they bear out McClane’s profane astonishment: “How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?!”
The irony comes with the consideration of the further installments of each series. The Lethal Weapons kept retaining the new additions from previous installments - Joe Pesci, Rene Russo - so that the casts kept getting progressively more stuffed (the poster for Lethal Weapon 4 bears this out). The relationship at the heart of the series between wild-eyed, risk-taking widower Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and slightly more restrained family man Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) wound up becoming as cartoony and cliché as a lot of the violent action, and often as not became shoved to the side to make room for a plethora of other storylines.
Die Hard 2 would be the last one in the series to feature McClane battling the bad guys (more or less) solo. Beginning with 1995’s Die Hard with a Vengeance, each installment has been more or less a reboot, sharing some ties and relationships (and in the case of Vengeance a motivation for revenge on the part of the villain that links to the first film) but making McClane more and more of a battered and bruised but still close to indestructible hero and pairing him up with a partner for the mayhem. Willis (and his ever diminishing hairline or awesomely sculpted bald head) is the star of the series and while each of the four films features a solid and deep lineup of supporting performances, they never form an ensemble the way the Lethal Weapon films strive for (to admittedly diminishing returns).
Both Die Hard 2 and Lethal Weapon 2 begin in medias res with a whoop and a holler (Riggs’s in delight with he and Murtaugh in hot pursuit of a speeding car, McClane’s in despair as he attempts to prevent his in-laws’ illegally parked car from being towed by airport security) and both immediately establish the tone for the rest of the film. Gibson’s mania and Glover’s quietly simmering stress captures and reassures that the balance of tension and aggravation (and love) remains the same for the partners. In a rare subversion of clichés, this car chase isn’t simply an unrelated action spectacle to kick off the film in high gear. It sets in motion the rest of the plot - an attempt to nail some South African diplomats engaging in skullduggery while hiding behind “diplomatic immunity.” (In a too neat twist towards the end, a tossed off line by the chief enforcer of the film’s villain reveals a link to events prior to those in the first Lethal Weapon.)
McClane’s skill at somehow being in the wrong place at the wrong time is reaffirmed. The heavy snowfall and Christmas week mayhem at the airport are established as counterpoints to the sunny Christmas Eve in Los Angeles and claustrophobia of the mostly one setting of the first film. McClane battles on conveyor belts, moving walkways, annexes, Butting heads with airport security also indicates that once again McClane will be fighting the good fight while running up against asshats, protective of their space and secure in their (usually incorrect and limited) knowledge. For me, the first Die Hard was undercut by such stupidity displayed by the characters portrayed by Paul Gleason, Hart Bochner, William Atherton, Robert Davi, and Grand L. Bush. Having a whole host of venal and/or stupid characters is a needless exercise in excess to push the audience on to McClane’s side (as if that was necessary).
Die Hard 2 flirts with repeating this mistake (through new characters portrayed by Dennis Franz, Fred Dalton Thompson, and John Amos) but tones down their rhetoric, and brings most of them around in the end. Instead. McClane has to fight against his “celebrity” achieved in the wake of his actions in Die Hard and the suspicions of the ill informed around him that he is into showboating. And in the best nod to the first film, McClane starts out the film in a heavy coat and ungainly winter sweater but by the end is once again the same grimy t-shirted action hero from the first film, snow flurries be damned.
I mentioned that Lethal Weapon 2 is significantly more cartoonish than the first and this is partly because the relationship between Riggs and Murtaugh (which even with 25 years hindsight is still the most compelling aspect of the first film) isn’t unfolding for the first time and there isn’t a lot of additional nuance to be added. The action is no more or less cartoonish but the conviction of the human element added considerable gravitas to the first film. What struck me in re-watching it last week was the one early scene with Glover in the bathtub where he wears a soon-to-be-shorn beard and seems exponentially sexier for having it. There isn’t any way Gibson/Riggs could have competed with that.
With Lethal Weapon 2, the dynamic has slightly shifted so that Riggs is more of a high-energy fly in the ointment than a suicidal wild card. Confirming this are specific references to Looney Tunes and The Three Stooges that begin even before the opening title flash and are more or less complete by the time Pesci becomes an unofficial wisecracking third member of the duo. Still, the best scene in either film is the heart to heart the pair has while Murtaugh sits captive on a toilet seat wired to explode if so much as a butt cheek shifts. Director Richard Donner and screenwriter Jeffrey Boam actually allow a semi-serious conversation to emerge from this and heighten the tension by paradoxically slowing down the action and the obvious audience cues.
McClane is still as much of a badass (although whether born a badass or having badassery thrust upon him remains open to debate) as the first time around, but he also shows more dimensions than the standard action hero, whether it’s recoiling in disgust upon realizing that he did indeed dispatch a lackey with an icicle to the brain, crying in defeat when unable to prevent a plane from safely landing, or settling for getting his ass kicked during a climatic flight on a plane’s wing, all so that he can serendipitously deliver a fiery retribution accompanied by his signature “urban cowboy” Bartlett’s quote: “Yippie-ki-yay motherfucker!” Both Willis and Gibson have long made a career out of standing tough while getting the shit kicked out of them. The difference is in the Christ-like martyr pose Gibson often adopts (typified by his death on the rack in Braveheart) vs. the existential ennui Willis conveys (any number of scenes in The Last Boy Scout, the entirety of his great performance in 12 Monkeys).
From the standpoint of the action sequences, Lethal Weapon 2 delivers the most bodacious incidental kill (flying surfboard through driver’s side windshield=no bad guy to interrogate) and the most over-the-top sequence (Riggs using his 4x4 and a rope to bring down a house on stilts.) Die Hard 2 delivers the most enjoyably visceral and kinetic moment as a cornered McClane ejects out of a grounded plane and is propelled by a massive explosion up, up, up towards the camera, the sort of lovably over-the-top moment that defined director Renny Harlin’s early career and that enables me to defend such critically scuttled features as Nightmare on Elm Street 4, Adventures of Ford Fairlane, Cliffhanger, Cutthroat Island, and The Long Kiss Goodnight. Lethal Weapon 2 may break the rules with it opening scene, but sticks strictly to the book in its finale by offing the previously referenced chief enforcer in a ridiculously violent manner while the smooth operator at the top of it all (silver-haired and tongued Joss Ackland) is dispatched with a bullet to the head. I give the edge to Die Hard 2 if only for the bad taste left in my mouth by Lethal Weapon 2’s Murtaugh willfully and maliciously shooting an unarmed man. It suggests how far his moral compass has been tweaked.
The last commonality I would cite in returning to the pair is the significant depreciation in enjoyment for both in regards to high-octane violent action. Neither one invigorates me as much as they once did which leaves me to settle on the characters and as finely sketched as Riggs and Murtaugh may be, my soft spot always mushes for McClane. Wary of technology, fairly terrible at relationships, fighting for relevance and often just to stay alive, he is the everyman of the larger than life action hero division. And as he settles in with a cigarette and coffee at the beginning of the film, weighed down by that clunky sweater, trying to shake the feeling that something isn’t right and that he is the only one to notice, it seems utterly understandable how the same shit can happen to the same guy twice.
APPENDIX: Theatrical movies watched with one or both parents 1980-1993
Mom and Dad (59):
The Empire Strikes Back, Blue Thunder, Never Say Never Again, Octopussy, Return of the Jedi, The Fly, The Princess Bride, A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon, Backdraft, Dances With Wolves, JFK, Platoon, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Fatal Attraction, Alien Nation, The War of the Roses, Baby Boom, Good Morning Vietnam, Edward Scissorhands, Gorillas in the Mist, Memories of Me, Punchline, The Naked Gun, The Bear, Dad, Driving Miss Daisy, Born on the 4th of July, Major League, The January Man, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, E.T., Flashback, Hunt for Red October, Pretty Woman, I Love You to Death, Narrow Margin, Pacific Heights, Memphis Belle, Home Alone, The Silence of the Lambs, Mortal Thoughts, Dead Again, Shattered, Other People’s Money, Little Man Tate, Cape Fear, Bugsy, Fried Green Tomatoes, Grand Canyon, Thunderheart, Unforgiven, Under Siege, River Runs Through It, Consenting Adults, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, A Few Good Men, Scent of a Woman, The Fugitive.
Mom (14):
Fox and the Hound, Lethal Weapon 2, Die Hard 2, Darkman, The Falls, Hardboiled, The Killer, Stand by Me, The Fisher King, Orlando, Boyz n the Hood, A League of their Own, Toys, Alive
Dad (18):
Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, The Last of the Mohicans, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, Flatliners, Basic Instinct, Point of No Return, Hamlet, Stephen King’s Graveyard Shift, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, They Live, Shocker, Aliens, Blind Date, Total Recall, Days of Thunder, Misery, V.I. Warshawski, The People Under the Stairs