 Starring: Bruce Willis, Bonnie Bedelia, William Atherton, William Sadler
Director: Renny Harlin
Year Of Release: 1990
Plot: John McClane is at Dulles International Airport, waiting for his wife’s plane to land. However his uncanny knack for finding himself in the middle of precarious situations strikes again when terrorists take over the airport’s communications system, stopping any planes from landing, other than one carrying a South American drug lord and dictator who the bad guys want to free. With McClane’s wife’s plane running low on fuel, John takes it upon himself to find the terrorists and restore the airport’s communications. |
In the last
Movie A Day article I looked at why the first two Die Hard movies aren’t really Die Hard movies, so if you didn’t read it, I’d suggest you go back and take a look at that, before we continue on with why Die Hard With A Vengeance and Die Hard 4.0 (known as Live Free Or Die Hard in the US) aren’t Die Hard flicks either.
CLICK HERE for Part 1 of why the Die Hard franchise doesn't exist.
However it you did read yesterday’s article and are intrigued to know the rest of the story, here we go...
Die Hard With A Vengeance (1995)
Technically, Die Hard With A Vengeance is the closest Die Hard has ever got to a true Die Hard movie, as it’s the only one based on an original screenplay. However, as always with John McClane, that’s not the whole story. Screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh has said that the idea for the film's plot came to him when he imagined what would happen if one of his childhood friends, who was injured after Hensleigh threw a rock at him, decided to seek revenge on him as an adult. That eventually became Hans Gruber’s (from the first film’s) brother, Simon, who decides to destroy John McClane’s life for what happened to Hans.
However things aren’t quite as simple as that, as Hensleigh didn’t initially write it as a Die Hard movie. The screenplay was originally created to be a stand-alone movie called Simon Says, and was supposed to be made completely separately from the Die Hard franchise as a starring vehicle for Brandon Lee. However when that didn’t work out, it was briefly considered as the basis for a Lethal Weapon movie before it was decided to use it for another Die Hard flick.
The movie apparently sticks very close to Hensleigh’s original screenplay, with the screenwriter having said that the only changes in the first hour are the names of the characters. Even after that the alterations are minimal, with the only major additions being the robbery, which was included to bring it in line with the other movies, and that the villain became the brother of Alan Rickman’s character from the first Die Hard movie. It just shows what an everyman character John McClane is, as he can simply be slotted into situations that weren’t originally designed to have anything to do with him, but when you watch the movie it doesn’t seem out of place.
Slightly bizarrely, while Die Hard was based on a book that had nothing to do with John McClane and only came about after a sequel to another film fell through, something similar happened in reverse with Die Hard With A Vengeance. When they were first developing a third Die Hard movie in the early 90s, they were going to base it on an original screenplay called Troubleshooter, which would have been adapted to feature McClane fighting terrorists on a Caribbean cruise ship. However when Under Siege came out, the producers changed their mind and decided to look elsewhere. That wasn’t the end though, as a few years later when Fox decided to make a sequel to Speed, they resurrected the Troubleshooter screenplay, and it suddenly became the basis for Speed 2: Cruise Control.
Die Hard 4.0 (AKA Live Free Or Die Hard) (2007)
The fourth Die Hard movie had a rather tortuous journey to the big screen. The idea of making another Die Hard movie had been in the works since shortly after the release of Die Hard With A Vengeance, but they couldn’t come up with a script everyone was happy with.
Indeed it took so long that an early idea was based on a screenplay that was subtitled Tears Of The Sun. While the plot was completely discarded for a John McClane movie, Willis formally agreed to make Die Hard 4 on the proviso he could take the Tears Of The Sun name and apply it to another movie. However the Die Hard sequel stayed in development for so many years that it didn’t actually arrive in cinemas until four years after Willis had released his film bearing the title Tears Of The Sun.
Slightly bizarrely the ideas the maker of Die Hard 4 eventually settled on was a script based on a non-fiction magazine article called A Farewell to Arms, which had been published by Wired magazine (you can read it here). The article is about war games played in Washington DC that now take into account how vulnerable the US is to cyber attack. It looks at how war is now fought using computer data and how a country could potentially be crippled if it isn’t well defended enough from hackers.
The article was turned into a script by David Marconi, screenwriter of Enemy Of The State, and was called WW3.com. The screenplay envisioned a scenario known as a "fire sale", depicting a co-ordinated attack on a country’s infrastructure from its transportation to its utilities.
As always with Die Hard sequels, the screenplay was originally written as a stand-alone film. Then Fox briefly considered turning it into a sequel to Marconi’s Enemy Of The State, as it shared that movie’s interest in surveillance and technology. However the September 11th attacks stalled all development on the script, with Fox feeling it couldn’t go ahead at that time with a script about America coming under attack.
However a few years later, in 2005, having tried and failed to find a script for Die Hard 4 that everyone was satisfied with, they decided to take WW3.com and adapt it into a John McClane movie, with Doug Richardson and Mark Bomback taking Marconi’s script and amping it up into a Die Hard flick. As a result we got yet another Die Hard movie based on a script that originally had nothing to do with Die Hard.
So there you have it, Die Hard is not a movie franchise. The first is technically Nothing Lasts Forever (or at push Commando 2), the second is Walter Wager’s 58 Minutes, the third is a movie called Simon Says, with the fourth is WW3.com or possibly a magazine article. So far we’ve yet to have a Die Hard movie which is genuinely, 100% a Die Hard flick.
However with Fox gearing up for a fifth film, perhaps they’ll actually manage to give us an original John McClane film this time. Skip Woods (Hitman, The A-Team) is the man currently charged with writing the screenplay. However looking at the history of the film series, we’ll probably end up with a Die Hard 5 based on a book that has nothing to do with Die Hard, with a screenplay that was initially written as a sequel to Kung Fu Panda.
TIM ISAAC
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