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John McTiernan (USA, 1951) debuted with the horror movie
Nomads (1986).
Predator (1987) begins as a conventional war movie but turns into a horror/scifi movie with the philosophical message that "the enemy is us".
The film opens with an alien spacecraft flying above the Earth.
Dutch, a legendary Vietnam War veteran, is summoned by the CIA for a top secret mission and brings his own team. CIA agent Al, a good friend of Dutch, escorts them to a Latin American country where they have to rescue a kidnapped politician who is held by guerrillas somewhere in the jungle.
Dutch's scout is Billy who leads them to the guerrilla camp.
They find the wreckage of a helicopter and three corpses hanging from a tree.
Dutch recognizes them as soldiers that he knew.
The camera makes us realize that someone is watching and following them.
Billy finds the camp. They attack and kill all the guerrillas and take a woman
hostage, Anna.
However, they find no kidnapped politician: the CIA tricked Al into disrupting
a Soviet-funded guerrilla plot to overthrow the government of the country.
Dutch angrily confronts Al, who justifies lying to his old friend saying that
they are all "expendable".
The helicopter crew had sent before them but never returned.
We realize that someone is watching them because we see his silhouette as seen from the eyes of a robot.
Anna doesn't speak English.
They begin marching back towards their base. The
woman tries to escape when they stop because the scout senses something in the trees.
A soldier chases her and is suddenly devoured alive by a jungle creature.
the woman is traumatized and cannot describe the monster to the others when they arrive.
They can't even find the body of the dead man (they don't see that it is hanging high on a tree).
They keep searching the jungle.
Another one is attacked and this time Al sees the attacker run away: it looks
like a piece of the jungle with arms and legs.
Anna gathers some of the green phosphorescent liquid that leaked out from a wound of the monster.
Finally we see the monster: a reptilian cyborg who is busy repairing his leg.
They hear his scream of pain.
All calls the base for help and they promise to send a helicopter.
Billy senses that there is no man out there.
They realize that the hostage is not trying to run away anymore: she is too scared.
Suddenly, the girl speaks English and tells them that the creature is like a chamaleo, blending with the trees.
She tells Dutch that she found the green substance so the creature must be wounded.
Al would like to head straight for the chopper but Dutch decides to confront the monster.
Anna now cooperates.
They build a trap and then they wait. The creature
falls into the trap but then easily frees himself. He
jumps from tree to tree like a gorilla but changing form
and throwing bombs at them.
One of Dutch's team finds him/it but is killed.
Al also sees him and shoots but is also killed.
The others hear the scream.
Billy throws the gun and pulls out the knife and
cuts his chest in a ritual ceremony before
waiting alone for the beast.
Dutch and Anna, the only survivors, hear his scream.
Then the monster attacks Dutch but only gets his gun.
Dutch, having figured out that the cyborg does not attack unarmed people, tells Anna to run to the helicopter.
The monster chases Dutch but keeps missing his shots.
Dutch slips and falls down into a river.
He survives the fall but is carried by the waters into a waterfall.
He survives again and
swims to shore, but the monster is still chasing him.
Dutch is covered in mud and realizes that the monster cannot detect him because of the mud.
We get the first good look of the cyborg.
Dutch has lost his gun but has bullets.
Covered in mud to avoid detection,
Dutch makes an arrow and a bow. He
lights a fire and shouts to attract the cyborg.
The cyborg cannot see him, his vision only detects bodies.
Dutch shoots his arrow and hurts the cyborg, who responds by shooting bombs
randomly. Then Dutch throws his spear and again causes another wound.
Dutch follows the blood stains which are green phosphorescent.
But Dutch falls into the river again and loses his mud cover.
The cyborg finds him, examines his skull, removes his own helmet and armor.
He then gestures that he wants to challenge Dutch to a hand-to-hand duel.
The cyborg is ten times stronger and beats up Dutch but Dutch outsmarts him
by luring him into the trap. The cyborg surives but is trapped.
Dutch asks him "what the hell are you?"
The cyborg programs self-destruction and laughs.
The helicopter sees an atomic mushroom and finds Dutch.
Dutch is rescued.
Die Hard (1988), an adaptation of Roderick Thorp's novel "Nothing Lasts Forever" (1979), was another popular movie.
This action film is critical and sarcastic toward the police and the media, and it celebrates the anarchic individualist—detested by the system—who nonetheless embodies positive values of courage, love, and loyalty. It is both a great action film and a great disaster film. Many scenes are shot amid total devastation.
It's Christmas Eve.
John (Bruce Willis) lands at the airport and is picked up by a limo driver who is at his first job. John asks the driver to take him to a skyscraper,
unsure if he will find a place to sleep. And so the driver offers to wait for him in the underground parking garage. John's wife is the boss of an office that is celebrating Christmas. She divorced him but they still have feelings for each other. She is happy to see him. She works for the Japanese corporation that owns the building.
Out of the blue, a truck parks in the garage and a car pulls over in front of the building. A group of terrorists kills the security guard and sets in motion a plan to disable the alarm system, shut down all exits and cut all communications. The limo driver doesn't realize what is happening because he is listening to loud music. The gangsters then enter the floor where the Christmas Party is going on. They are mostly German and highly organized.
Their boss Hans behaves like a gentleman. However he is just a thief: he orders the Japanese boss to open the safe that contains a huge sum.
The boss refuses and Hans coldly kills him. He then orders his high-tech guru to hack his way into the safe, a process that will take hours.
Meanwhile, the employees are held hostages. The terrorists didn't find John, who was relaxing barefoot in his wife's office. And John begins to wreak havoc. He kills one of them, steals his weapons and starts talking to Hans via the walkie talkie taken from this victim. John hopes in vain that the limo driver will notice that something is wrong. John manages to communicate with the security service, which is skeptic but does send one cop.
That one cop doesn't find anything wrong in the building and is about to drive away when the corpse of the dead terrorist drops onto his car.
John just got his attention. At the same time the terrorists start shooting
at him because they don't want the entire police to be involved.
The cop calls the city police, but the chief turns out to be a complete idiot. The bandits chase John but can't find him, and he keeps to wreak havoc.
While the bureaucracy and the media pedantically spring into action outside, inside Wills continues to unleash hell. The bandits try in vain to capture him and keep him from giving the police details about their location, but every time Wills massacres anyone who comes near him.
The boss remains unfazed, waiting with cold determination for his commandos to break into the vault. Meanwhile the police surround the building with great fanfare. Nonetheless, the police prove utterly ineffective—slow and somewhat stupid, bound to their textbook procedures. The only one inflicting any damage on the terrorists is Wills with his shoot-and-run tactics. The only police officer he trusts is the Black one, with whom he establishes direct contact. The Black officer senses from Wills’s jargon and mentality that he must be a cop. The police chief, on the other hand, simply wants Wills to stop and let the terrorists negotiate with him.
What gets Wills into trouble is his friend—the cynical cocaine addict who invited him—and who now wants to strike a deal with the criminals and wouldn’t hesitate to betray him. But Wills doesn’t fall for it, and the boss kills the cocaine addict. Wills keeps sowing panic and at one point even comes face-to-face with the German, a master at pretending to be a fleeing hostage. Wills survives the ambush, carries on his heroic-comic conversations with the Black officer, and shows no sign of giving up.
Meanwhile, the German’s team of specialists manages to seize the loot, bypassing all the technological barriers.
Thanks to a cynical, sleazy reporter who digs around and broadcasts the story on television, the German boss discovers that among the hostages is Wills’s ex-wife, and he takes her as a hostage into the basement, while the others are abandoned on the roof that is about to explode. The woman then realizes that they are simply thieves, not real political terrorists.
Wills saves the hostages (and is machine-gunned by the police, who mistake him for a terrorist), then throws himself off the roof to save his wife and kill the last surviving terrorists, including the villainous leader. Only then does he, too, learn that they are just common thieves. Covered in blood, he manages just in time to send the boss plummeting into the void a second before the man can shoot him in the face (unconcerned by the fact that he would have died anyway).
Wills can finally embrace the Black police officer, who earns the honor of finishing off the last terrorist—who suddenly reappears like a phantom with a submachine gun in hand. The police chief, meanwhile, is ready to charge Wills for the material damage to the skyscraper. Wills’s wife also takes the satisfaction of landing a punch on the TV reporter. The chauffeur is ready to drive the limo with Wills and his wife.
The follow-up was filmed by
Harlin.
Then came
the spy thriller The Hunt for Red October (1990),
adapted from from the 1984 Tom Clancy novel,
the drama Medicine Man (1992),
the parodistic Last Action Hero (1993),
Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), the third installment of the series.
The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) was a remake of the Norman Jewison film, one of the great puzzle thrillers, this time with a James Bond-ian sort of style, focusing on the cat-and-mouse game between the two protagonists. The script is generally an improvement over the original but the film has a typical Hollywood-ian pathetic ending.
An elegant businessman has the habit of going to the same room in the same museum to stare at a minor painting in a room that also displays an invaluable Monet.
The superintendent of the museum knows him well, but doesn't notice that this time Thomas leaves a briefcase under the bench.
Thomas is a super-wealthy man who owns an entire skyscraper and loves to conduct difficult deals in which his rivals think they prevailed over him when in fact he cheated them.
Meanwhile, a truck delivers an ancient marble horse to the museum instead of the sarcophagus that the museum was expecting, but it's a friday and the museum's personnel just wants to go home, so the horse is accepted and stored in the basement of the museum.
Three men come out of the horse, disable the security devices, wear the uniform of the museum's attendants, and show the public out of a gallery.
Just then Thomas reenters the museum carrying a briefcase identical to the one he left before and leaves it at the entrance of his favorite room.
He then alerts the superintendent that someone is closing down that gallery.
The superintendent that someone is closing down that gallery.
The superintendent confronts the fake attendants, realizes that they are impostors, and activates the alarm. While everybody is trying to catch the thieves,
a massive railing automatically lowers from the ceiling to close the room.
However, Thomas' second briefcase blocks it and Thomas has enough space to
sneak under the railing, steal the Monet, put it in the other briefcase, and leave undisturbed the museum.
The detective in charge of the investigation is Michael, a humble ordinary man.
He comes up with a theory of what happened, but a mysterious sexy woman appears,
Catherine, who proves that his theory doesn't work.
Catherine works for the insurance company.
They find Thomas' second briefcase full of titanium, a strong metal that kept the railing from sealing the room.
The surveillance cameras too didn't work in that room. The technicians realize
that the temperature of the room reached a level that disabled them, but Catherine is puzzled that the temperature was not so high in the nearby rooms, and eventually realizes that the briefcase under the bench contained a heater that increased the temperature.
Meanwhile, Thomas, who is the main witness, is called to identify the apprehended suspects, who are foreigners from Romania.
They don't recognize him (but we suspect that they were hired by him as they were part of his strategy).
Catherine, however, interrogations the Romanians and concludes that they were
just a distraction and that they real thief is someone who didn't steal the Monet to sell it but to enjoy it.
She asks Michael to check who has been trying to buy Monet paintings at auctions and Thomas' name comes up.
She becomes suspicious of Thomas.
She confronts him and tells him openly that she thinks he is the thief.
She tells Michael that Thomas implicitly confessed to her and Michael shows up
at Thomas' mansion with a search warrant but Thomas' lawyer is there to send the cops away.
While at home Thomas enjoys his Monet, a few days later in public he donates a Pissarro to the museum as a temporary replacement for the stolen Monet.
Catherine proceeds to seduce Thomas and, while they are out on a date, steals his house keys and has someone make duplicates. She and a cleaning crew enter the mansion and find the Monet. She proudly deliver the Monet to Michael but an expert easily identifies it as a fake: Thomas fooled her.
While this is going on, we see Thomas meeting a few times with his therapist (Faye Dunaway), who predicts that Thomas has found a worthy adversary, and Thomas loves it.
Furious, Catherine approaches Thomas again at a dance and this time they have sex. He seems to truly like her and takes her on a plane ride and then on an
exotic vacation.
He offers her money to stop the investigation.
Back in town, Michael shows her pictures of Thomas with a sexy young woman.
Catherine looks sincerely hurt that Michael has been seeing another woman while
pretending to be in love with her.
Catherine finds the "borders" of the paintings: the parts of the painting that are hidden by the frame. She compares them with the forged painting and confirms that they are identical: clearly, the forger copied the original.
That proves that Thomas has the stolen Monet but only the forger can prove it.
So they look for the forger interviewing the most famous one, but he is in prison. Catherine however suspects that he has a son,
Tyrol,
who may also be a forger.
Catherine confronts Thomas who still pretends he loves her. Thomas claims that
he let the police take pictures of him with Anna to find out whether she was
jealous, i.e. whether she really loves him.
He claims that the girl, Anna, works for him but he refuses to reveal her job.
To prove that he truly loves Catherine, Thomas promises to Catherine to return
the Monet and tells her a specific day and time, and tells her to meet him
afterwards, once she's satisfied that he kept his promise, to leave town with him.
Catherine doesn't know whether Thomas is telling the truth or playing with her,
but decides to tell Michael, who knows that she's truly in love.
However, she finds out that Anna is the forger: she is Tyrol.
That's why Thomas couldn't reveal Anna's job.
Michael prepares a trap at the museum.
Another favorite painting of Thomas is Magritte's "Man in a Bowler Hat".
Thomas shows up at the museum wearing a bowler hat and carrying a briefcase.
He makes himself very visible.
Michael and the many cops waiting for him assume that it will be easy to follow
the only man wearing a bowler hat, but soon a myriad men wearing the same hat
and carrying similar briefcases appear all over the museum.
The police soon lose sight of Thomas who causes the sprinkler system to spray qater on the Pissarro that he donated: the water washes away the surface paint to reveal that the Money had been there all the time, hidden behind Thomas' "gift".
On the other hand, another painting has disappeared: Thomas has stolen Catherine's favorite painting.
Catherine tells Michael that her job is done. Michael tells her that now he has to investigate the new theft but in reality he doesn't care for these high-level crimes and is more concerned with the crimes that affect ordinary people.
Catherine realizes that Michael is a good man but still ignores him as a possible romantic interest and runs to the appointment with Thomas, who proved that he truly loves her. A man wearing a bowler hat hands her a gift: the stolen painting. Thomas is not there.
She is heartbroken. She returns the stolen painting to the police and boards a plane back home. She cries. But Thomas is right behind her on the same plane.
The 13th Warrior (1999) is based on the medieval epic "Beowulf".
Rollerball (2002) was a terrible remake of the
Norman Jewison film, and
Basic (2003) was a confused thriller.
His career ended when he was imprisoned in 2013.
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