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 Entertainment | May 2007 
An Action Hero Breaks Summer’s Fantasy Spell
 Michael Cieply - NYTimes
| | Bruce Willis in “Live Free or Die Hard,” to be released on June 27. (Frank Masi/20th Century Fox) |
Los Angeles, CA - When last seen, in 1995, the New York super-cop John McClane, alter ego of the actor Bruce Willis, was performing barehanded bomb disposal on a downtown train and parrying racist attitude from his partner, Samuel L. Jackson, as he put away a batch of Germanic baddies led by the distinctly British Jeremy Irons.
Next month Lieutenant McClane will try to hurdle a new kind of obstacle. He’s about to find out if the summer movie audience still has a taste for cinematic red meat.
“Live Free or Die Hard,” the fourth installment of 20th Century Fox’s long-running “Die Hard” series, has emerged as the only straight-ahead, major studio action film set for the year’s prime moviegoing weeks. Not long ago the same period, from early May to mid-July, routinely brought flesh-and-bone hits like “The Bourne Identity” (2002), “The Fast and the Furious” (2001), “Con Air” (1997) and, of course, that last McClane romp, “Die Hard With a Vengeance.”
In late spring and early summer, studio schedules are now dominated by effects-driven fantasies (“Transformers” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End”); comedies (“Knocked Up” and “Evan Almighty”); and the occasional caper (“Ocean’s Thirteen”).
Studios, for box office reasons, have pushed real-life action films, even when rated PG-13, toward late summer or fall and away from what is becoming a 10-week summertime fun zone. This year, for example, “The Bourne Ultimatum,” with Matt Damon as the amnesiac spy, is scheduled for release on August 3, while “The Brave One,” in which Jodie Foster does a vigilante turn, is set for Sept. 14.
Tom Rothman, a co-chairman of Fox, said the studio “consciously took advantage” of the summertime action-movie gap in its decision to release its fourth “Die Hard” on June 27, five days after Universal’s “Evan Almighty” and a week before “Transformers,” from Paramount and DreamWorks. A surfeit of “fantasy and computer-generated visual effects has left a hunger in the audience for real things,” Mr. Rothman added. Over the next few weeks Fox will tease that perceived appetite with a marketing campaign that promotes John McClane with the words: “No mask. No cape. No problem.”
Mr. Rothman’s studio isn’t alone in bringing part of its early summer slate back down to earth. Paramount Vantage has scheduled “A Mighty Heart,” in which Angelina Jolie plays the wife of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, for June 22. And MGM will open “Mr. Brooks,” a thriller starring Kevin Costner, on June 1. But “Live Free or Die Hard,” with a budget in the $100 million range, is the most ambitious attempt to challenge the summer drift to family-friendly fantasy and cartoons.
The new film’s screenwriter, Mark Bomback, says that McClane, in his latest incarnation, finds himself detailed to an anti-terror task force that works with the Department of Homeland Security. The twist adds a touch of political striation to a picture that will carry the decidedly neutral title “Die Hard 4.0” in foreign markets. But the writer and others say its deepest thinking involves McClane’s low-tech approach to high-tech cyber-terror. “He’s an analog guy faced with this digital problem,” Mr. Bomback said.
The movie’s makers also take pride in having used few computer-generated effects, choosing instead, for instance, to shoot a real car at a real helicopter. “The stitches Bruce Willis got in his head weren’t virtual,” Mr. Rothman said.
Mr. Willis is also an older guy. He was 33 when the first “Die Hard” was released in 1988, and is now 52. Still, a 60-year-old Sylvester Stallone revived a much older franchise when he pulled off a surprise hit with “Rocky Balboa” last year.
In the dozen years since the last “Die Hard” — which had $361 million in worldwide ticket sales, by far the best box office performance of the three — studio executives have tinkered with possible plots while wooing Mr. Willis. Ron Bass, best known for writing dramas like “The Joy Luck Club,” said he was surprised recently to find himself identified as an initial writer of “Live Free” in documents submitted by the studio to the Writers Guild of America, West. Years ago, Mr. Bass learned, Fox had considered turning a Latin American adventure he had written into the next McClane vehicle.
Eventually the company landed on a script that had been written by David Marconi as a follow-up to his 1998 action hit, “Enemy of the State.” That script, which had terrorists flying a jumbo jet into Manhattan by remote control, had been shelved after the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Marconi now shares story credit with Mr. Bomback, who retooled the premise, working with Mr. Willis, who is a producer of the new film, and Len Wiseman (“Underworld”), its director.
By the time that work was done, however, hard action movies were fading from the big-ticket season. Studios have discovered that computer animation and effects can attract the widest number of moviegoers, even while fretting that too real on-screen violence might somehow narrow the audience.
“You could argue that we’re in a war, and people hate this kind of stuff,” suggested the film historian David Thomson, who nonetheless cautioned that patterns in film release schedules were often more apparent than real.
Studios have also clearly been reluctant to shut out young viewers with the restrictive R ratings that were traditional for action films, including all three in the “Die Hard” series. “Things seem to get by in visual effects films that do not get by in live action,” said Lawrence Gordon, who was a producer of the first two “Die Hard” films. This time around “Live Free or Die Hard” may yet come up with a PG-13 rating, much like the first two “Bourne” films and the latest James Bond adventure, “Casino Royale.”
To get that rating, the occasionally foul-mouthed McClane will have to watch his language. But he won’t be deprived of his signature line, if posters on the buses driving through Manhattan and elsewhere are any indication. “Yippee kai yay,” they begin, adding a couple of letters that suggest that things will get at least a bit gritty this summer. |
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