Movies That Were Probably Made By a Spasm of Six Year-Olds on Acid: The Top 75 Action Films Poll Results Thread

third one rules

never really got die harder

the third one had its moments (& the fourth launched a police car into a helicopter, which was nice), but overall I feel the pile-on of sequels has diluted the objective thrill of the original - of course this can be said of many series, but is esp. true w/ Die Hard.

saw the beginning of Harder on TV once, was so obviously getting everything wrong/repeated that I turned off

Vengeance does take away from the elegance of the first one but it is v fun so w/e. also benefits hugely from not being written as a Die Hard sequel, with the traps of repetition that Deric identifies above, but buying a thriller called Simon Says and sticking Willis and idk that guy in Pulp Fiction was p good can we get him? lets have some sushi. into it

#4 I watched only bcz I was on a plane, it gets things even wronger by having McClane be a ludicrous action hero with everything exploding all the time and the world is CGI. plus going to Kevin Smith's basement for no good reason for ten minutes.

McTiernan or gtfo is basically how I break it down to an extent

not to mention a decade plus of being the model for every action movie ie "it's Die Hard on a _________"
xpost

dudes there is no ambiguity. he is a replicant. it's not sufficiently redundant i guess, but it is not ambiguous.

xxxx...post

the helicopter craziness was the only thing that made 4 remotely "worthwhile"

and yeah Bladerunner, I always thought Deckard=Replicant was qed

two other points

1) i just pretend the die hard sequels don't exist
2) the robocop sequels are worse, but somehow i don't pretend that they don't exist
3) the blade runner soundtrack is fantastic and so effective R U MAD?

i mean three other points obvs

added a third one for fun

I haven't seen the fourth Die Hard since its theatrical run. It was all spectacle & not so memorable. I liked some of the setpieces, but I can't imagine watching it again & not just laughing at the idea of archgenius cyperterrorist supervillain Timothy Olyphant, now that I've typecast him as his Justified character.

I only like Timothy Olyphant in hats & mustaches, ie Justified & Deadwood. Hate him in most other movies etc

oh yeah, Deadwood too!

2) the robocop sequels are worse, but somehow i don't pretend that they don't exist

I don't remember that there are sequels to Robocop ever, except for the Robocop Vs Terminator comic by Matt Wagner with the greeting-card style pop-up in the middle

(...Wagner and........ Simonson?)

die hard 2 is dope imo but still isn't remotely close to the first film. die hard 3 is pretty awesome, jeremy irons is truly *~magnificent~* in that film.

robocop 2 is nuts. not very good though (save for the robot fight towards the end).

is robocop 2 the one the one that was like New Jack City, but w/ futuristic test-tube drugs?

yeah...it's a weird movie, thematically and tonally. it attempts the social commentary/satire of the first movie but in a much less clever and more reactionary "SOCIETY IS GOING TO HELL!!! KIDS ARE CRIMINAL KINGPINS!" sort of way.

I was not all surprised to learn that Frank Miller had written a draft of the script at one point.

Well, it was written by Frank Miller, so...

xpost!

also lol:

The film was composed and conducted by Leonard Rosenman, who did not use any of Basil Poledouris's themes from the first film; the soundtrack album was released by Varèse Sarabande. It was not well received by fans or film music reviewers, many of whom complained about Rosenman's use of a choir chanting "Robocop."

I do gotta give props to Phil Tippet's stop-motion work in the movie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIAW2ZAfrWo

robocop 2 has some things going for it. its got some nutty ideas rattling around in its head, and a few inspired scenes. definitely doesn't measure up to the original, but it's not an outright abortion like robocop 3 either. btw:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKf7Fd8E2is

i havent seen it in a long time but i always remembered die hard 2 as being really cliche-packed and perfunctory. should probably watch again

die hard 2 is dope imo but still isn't remotely close to the first film. die hard 3 is pretty awesome, jeremy irons is truly *~magnificent~* in that film.

― omar little, Friday, March 2, 2012 1:07 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah he really gets to have some fun in that. not as much as rickman in the first DH, but he has great moments like going 'holy toledo' and shooting sam jackson in the leg while munching on an egg.

i was refraining from engaging in bladerunnertalk because i still protest its presence on this thread, but i'll just come out and say the cold hard truth everyone is afraid to admit: the vangelis score blows shitholes. its oppressive and stupid, especially in quiet scenes with that retarded sax blaring. there's some dope moments too, but the score overall is just way too much

*especially in what should be quiet scenes

i think you've mistaken "cold hard truth everyone is afraid to admit" with "utter falsehood nobody thinks is right"

because they've been fooled~

maybe its a great album to sit down and listen to, i wouldnt know, but it's crappy shit when you're watching the movie.

the score is sublime at the beginning when it meshes with the sounds of the cityscape. you've gotta admit that.

yeah i mean, i am exaggerating my distaste for it - there are moments where it's really effective. i love the end credits music, and i couldn't imagine batty's final scene without the score. i think the movie would've been more effective if there was less of it though (which i think holds true for a ton of movie scores). think how well the voight-kampff test plays with no music. the movie could've used more sonic breathing room like in that scene. i'm also going off the theatrical version, which is the one I've seen most recently, maybe the score's used differently in the final cut which i havent seen yet

Robocop is great because it has the Verhoeven seriousness-as-humor thing going for it. Robocop 2 is entertaining, but also troubling because it's nearly 0% ironic.

Which really codes as "Frank Miller wrote this" because the humor in the film is all based on people trying to repurpose the original Robocop as some sort of consensus-driven nice guy while really nefarious things are still going on.

robocop 2 is nuts. not very good though (save for the robot fight towards the end).

― Cruller, Cobbler, Poffert, Pie (latebloomer), Friday, March 2, 2012 1:35 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

it was in either robocop 2 or robocop 3 (which one features the little punk teenager who gets inducted into the drug trade?) that the corrupt police officer gets vivisected - that gave me nightmares as a kid (and still does!)

Robocop 2.

I must be one of the few people that does NOT take Deckard=replicant as a given, no matter wtf Ridley Scott thinks is going on and in the face of origami unicorns. Whether or not he is a replicant is less important to me than the fact that it's his interactions with replicants, not people, that allows *him* to develop the empathy that is supposed to mark one as "human."

Yeah, whether you believe he's a replicant, human, or anything else doesn't really matter, since the main lines of contemplation are based around "what if" scenarios.

Man, "They Live" could have been written last year.

It's about Obama iirc

Rowdy Obama Piper?

No you put on the glasses and you can detect false birth certificates and non-citizens

I SEE MUSLIM PEOPLE

i always wondered tho, if decky is a reppy, what is his backstory exactly? i guess they set him up as a set a thief to catch a thief kinda jobby?

and doesnt it dilute the idea that batty is so much more of a 'real person' than deckard is, if that is so?

see those are the thoughts you have with the ambiguity. does it dilute the idea? hmm let me write an academic paper here

k im waiting

I dunno, I got sort of the same vibe as I later did with "AI," that everything that happened was in some ways designed as a test. Obviously he's a replicant, or at least there's plenty to support that hypothesis; the ambiguity is why they let him go.

deckard's replicant ambiguity is probably the least interesting thing about blade runner

i figured he was a creation like 'rachael', but put into life maybe decades before. it's probably the reason he was such a good detective, and may have been made exactly for that. but his own batty-esque story of irrepressible humanity happened years before the movie begins, when he had had enough and quit the force. batty knows what he is and knows how little time he has left, while deckard is in a fog of depression and indecision like every other human. so is he more human or less, for not knowing? idk i could go all day about this.

Deckard was created five minutes before the opening of the movie and deposited at the noodle stand