In short: Die Hard 2 (1990)

Clearly, the only way to top an instant classic like the first Die Hard is to make a film that is basically the same but just a little different than the original, and definitely louder and bigger. However, Renny Harlin’s sequel still features a relatively constrained place for John McClane (who else but Bruce Willis again?) to get increasingly beat up in.

If you squint a little, you can see hints about the wrong direction the series will head towards in the future, but even though this one softens the class politics of the first film quite a bit – not so much discerning between working class and bosses anymore but more aiming for people willing to do their actual jobs versus those there only to play politics – and doesn’t really feature any of the random moments of veracity I loved particularly in the first one, there’s still quite a bit of humanity in here to ground the action. After all, how many other big loud US action movies are there whose hero breaks down crying after not managing to save an airplane full of people? Or how many of them realize that, if you want to make a guy’s wife (a returning Bonnie Bedelia with slightly less frightening hair than in the first film) a part of the film’s emotional and very real stake, you really need to show her coping with her own duress, too, which also turns her from a price to be won into a person an audience wants to see saved?

While it is completely outrageous and far-fetched, the sequel’s plot is still also well-constructed in its unfolding, playing fair with its plot twists, and not so much aiming to provide an excuse for the action sequences but making them an organic part of a flow. Things need to move in an action movie, is what I’m saying (alas too late for the writers of the next Die Hard film to hear), and it’s even better when they move in interesting and fun directions even when nothing explodes.


Speaking of explosions, I believe Harlin was at the time the second best director of big US action movies (after Die Hard’s John McTiernan, obviously), and it shows here. There’s an appropriate heft to many of the action sequences but also a sense of good fun that turns the potentially annoying smart-ass moments of the film into something enjoyable, like a corny joke told by a good friend.

Buried Alive (1990)

Clint (Tim Matheson) and Joanna (Jennifer Jason Leigh) Goodman are the kind of incompatible couple careers in marriage counselling are built on. He’s a country boy construction businessman who takes the first opportunity to drag his wife out of the city and return to his hometown even though he knows that she’s a city gal with some rather unrealistic ideas of a luxury life by heart and inclination. He wants a baby, she really rather doers not  - though he doesn’t know that. He clearly loves her, but doesn’t know her at all.

To nobody’s surprise but Tim’s, Joanna has an affair. Her lover is the sleazy physician Cort van Owen (William Atherton). Cort is rather keen on Joanna murdering her husband so they can sell his company and found a clinic for the rich and famous in LA with the gains. Or so he says. Cort’s rather pushy about the whole thing too, providing Joanna with pep talks and poison like the ugliest femme fatale you ever put eyes on. Joanna, neither the brightest nor the most stable of persons, dithers a bit, but then decides to go through with the murder. Clint goes down in an unpleasant and obviously painful manner, and things seem to go well for Joanna and Cort. Alas, during her dithering, Joanna has lost enough of the poison to not actually kill Clint but only put him into suspended animation, so Clint can make his way out of his coffin to take vengeance. A vengeance that becomes decidedly cruel once he overhears that Joanna secretly had an abortion, too.

Frank Darabont’s Buried Alive is a surprisingly nasty little film, particularly if you keep in mind it is actually a TV movie. However, if not for the very harmless sexual content and lack of blood, it’d be hard to actually realize this watching it. While the film takes place in only a handful of sets and locations, this doesn’t feel like a film not being as epic in its approach as it wants to be but rather like the sharp focus it is.

The film also doesn’t look like a TV movie, with neither film stock nor visual style of the sort you’d expect. It’s just a tight, focused and nice looking film. Sure, the plot is pretty simple and straightforward (and if you think too much about it, not terribly plausible) but Darabont treats it with so much concentration and clarity this doesn’t feel like a weakness but rather a strength, more as if we were watching an archetypal tale than a clichéd one.

The film does play a bit with its tropes too: a man, Atherton’s van Owen, has the femme (homme) fatale role in the plot, while Leigh’s Joanna is more the patsy usually played by guys like Robert Mitchum who lets herself control by him and doesn’t even stop at murder. There’s also an interesting shift in sympathy going on, with Clint’s revenge going so far it’s difficult not to sympathize with Joanna, particularly since Clint isn’t exactly innocent in the whole situation, though I’m not completely convinced the film is doing this shift on purpose. It might just be pretty damn reactionary towards abortion.

The acting’s as strong as the film deserves, with Leigh providing her role with considerably more weight than you’d expect in this set-up and Matheson unexpectedly shining when he comes back as the rather monstrous avenger, instead of just when he’s doing his usual nice (if stupid) guy bit at the start.

It’s all rather wonderful, really.