The Expendables

After a run of box office duds in the early Noughties (Get Carter, D-Tox, Driven), Hollywood decided that Sylvester Stallone was himself expendable and consigned him to the movie scrapheap.

Unable to get an acting gig, Sly licked his wounds for a few years before rebooting his career with sequels to the two franchises that had established him as a star in the first place. And while critical reaction to Rocky Balboa and Rambo was lukewarm, both films made handsome returns at the box office.

Counting purely on his own firm resolve – and some industrial-sized injections of human growth hormone – Sly proved, against all expectation, that there was indeed a market for watching pension-age action stars creak arthritically through the butt-kicking moves of their youth.

No surprise then that, for his first venture into ‘original’ material since the great comeback, Stallone opted not to stray too far from the profitable formula. If nothing else, The Expendables (2010) has no shortage of ultra-violence dispensed by doddery old folks.

The token plot (and let‘s be honest, this isn’t a story that invites scrutiny) has Stallone as the leader of a bunch of mercenaries for hire. They’re paid to assassinate a military dictator who is running a massive drug operation. Other than the obligatory rogue CIA agent, that’s about it.

Technically, this is an original work. However, despite his dopey features, Sly is much too sharp to have not recognised that the success of Rambo 4 and Rocky 6 lay in their nostalgic groove. Audiences don’t want him to move with the times, so much as go back in time. Retro, therefore, is the order of the day.

The style, mood and even cast – action stalwarts Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts, and Gary Daniels are exhumed from their DTV careers to co-star – are all classic vintage. The film couldn’t be more Eighties if you permed it’s hair, dressed it a shell suit and made it dance to Kajagoogoo.

Despite all the snapping bones and non-stop fighting, a warm, feel-good vibe permeates the film – one that trades heavily on the audience’s affection for these grizzled old bears going through the motions all over again. After all, besides baddies and grenades, they also now have to contend with lumbago and the possibility of losing a bit of wee mid-action scene.

In many ways, with its familiar cast of ageing reprobates getting up to no good, it’s like a peculiarly violent episode of Last Of The Summer Wine. At any given moment, one almost expects the Stath to slip on a woolly hat and start eulogising about Nora Batty’s saggy tights. (As it is, he instead opts for repeatedly pummelling someone’s face into a scarlet mush, but you get the general idea.)

Cheap bon mots aside, there is a serious point to be made. The Expendables works because Stallone understands why people love Eighties action movies – because they featured larger than life characters who visibly enjoyed their ass-kicking antics.

Compare, let’s say, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Commando (1985) to the po-faced seriousness of the Bourne films, where Matt Damon blankly beats the bejaysus out of everyone with the bored indifference of a supermarket checkout worker. It’s easy to admire the Bourne films, but pretty hard to love them.

The Expendables may be full of genre clichés, but they’re delivered with love and affection rather than being cynically trotted out as a tick-box exercise. As such, it’s no surprise to see the movie delivering on the ultimate genre staple: the exploding helicopter.

At the end of the film, Stallone and his men launch a huge assault on the villain’s HQ. Realising the game is up, Eric Roberts attempts to make a getaway in a helicopter. And with Sly prevented from reaching him by a wall of fire – and the whole base going up like a fireworks display – it’s looking like he’ll succeed.

Fortunately, Old Stroke Features comes up with an inspired piece of improvisation. One of his unfeasibly musclebound cronies throws an artillery shell (that conveniently happens to be lying around) towards the chopper and, as it arcs through the air, Stallone fires his pistol at the shell. Ba-boom! One flambéed helicopter coming right up.

Artistic merit

The explosion is a whopper, big enough to satisfy every red-blooded chopper fireball fan, even if the CGI is a trifle too noticeable.

There’s also a good shot of Stallone diving away from the explosion in classic action movie style as he‘s nearly dismembered by a piece of flying shrapnel.

Exploding helicopter innovation

The ‘MacGyver style’ improvisation with the artillery shell and the pistol is a nice touch. While helicopters have been destroyed in more unusual ways, it’s rare to see a character being so intellectually creative in the execution of his plan. (And of course, having the words ‘Sly Stallone’ and ‘intellectually creative’ in the same sentence is a novelty in itself.)

Still, such ingenuity is not unprecedented. That renowned intellectual heavyweight, Steven Seagal, once used only a knife, paint-stripper and some advanced cub scout skills to blow up a chopper. (The film was Under Siege, fact fans). But then, you can tell Big Steve really clever by the way he almost says his lines.

Positives

The plot is commendably simple: kill the baddie and rescue the girl. At some point around the late Nineties, filmmakers started worrying that this formula had become exhausted and started throwing in lots of arsey sub-plots involving double and even triple crosses.

One day, Exploding Helicopter will get its protractor out and draw you the graph showing the inverse relationship between plot complexity and audience interest.

Negatives

As much as we love the ensemble cast it does create a problem: how to squeeze everyone in?

Eric Roberts, ostensibly the main villain, has to share too much screen time with David Zayas’ inferior evil General and his character feels a bit undercooked as a consequence. Roberts’ henchman (played by Gary Daniels and Steve Austin) are also left with little to do other than scowl in the background before becoming human punch-bags in the film’s extended showdown ending.

Still, you can’t say Sly isn’t a learner. In The Expendables 2, which has a similarly sprawling cast, everyone is given a suitably memorable moment in the spotlight.

Favourite quote

In a movie that celebrates action cinema, it’s pleasing to hear Randy Couture utter perhaps the genre’s ultimate cliché: “We got company”.

Interesting fact

Dolph Lundgren’s character was originally killed off, but audience reaction to the blonde lunk in test screenings was so positive that scenes were re-shot to show he hadn’t died.

Review by: Jafo

A Good Day To Die Hard

…aka A Bad Day To Go To The Cinema.

Expectations were never high for the fifth instalment of the Die Hard franchise – Bruce is getting old, and the basic premise was creaking badly even last time round – but this risible tosh is a whole new kind of bad. It’s the cinematic equivalent of being tea-bagged by portly, minor-bothering Liberal MP Cyril Smith for and hour and a half. Only worse.

Given Willis’ age, they’ve inevitably gone for the ‘lost son’ angle. The what, you ask? Basically, this means the producers have employed a young beefcake to do all the ‘action’ stuff that Bruce, as the nominal star of this action movie, is meant to be doing.

(Anyone who saw Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, and witnessed the unedifying sight of Harrison Ford gingerly treading about in the background while the always-punchable Shia Lebouf threw himself under lorries and off cliff ledges, will recognise the form.)

The story, as always, involves our chrome-domed hero blundering unawares into the middle of bullet-strewn bedlam. This time, Bruce goes to Moscow to rescue his son, who’s been arrested as a terrorist but is really a top secret agent. Yippe-ki-CI-Yay, in fact.

Obviously, everything starts blowing up as soon as Willis sets foot at the scene, then the usual terrorists-apparently-wanting-nuclear-armagedon-but-really-just-thieves-after-all plot (copyright: Alan Rickman, 25 years ago) cranks into gear once more.

Exploding Helicopter has no idea who the actor playing the son is, having never seen him in a movie before. And on this evidence, it may well be some time before he troubles our screens again. Indeed, one of the less bearable aspects of the movie is watching the estranged pair’s torturous journey from flinty awkwardness to ‘I love you too, Dad’, delivered on both sides with a copper-bottomed lack of conviction.

But here’s the really troubling thing: the more the son punches and shoots and falls and gets stabbed, the louder grows that nagging, existential question: what does an action hero do when he has next to no action in his own movie?

Bruce Willis: Occasionally acts in his own movie

The answer: stand around uncomfortably while occasionally firing a machine-gun or delivering yet another lame quip. That’s largely why this is such a terrible movie. These days, Brucie chirping ‘Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker’ (yes, he does) has all the grace and novelty of Chesney Hawkes getting up at a pub karaoke night to belt out ‘The One and Only’.

Put it this way: if you showed this film to someone who didn’t know who Bruce Willis was, they’d wonder who that old bald guy was who kept standing around in the middle of all the scenes?

He’s become like one of those drunk fans who run on to the pitch in the middle of a Premiership game – right in the centre of things but not really part of it at all. Aged 57, he’s a spectator in his own movie and it’s painful to watch.

And sadly, no-one else is there to take up the slack. Granted, they probably cast an unknown as the son because the famously prickly and egocentric Willis didn’t want a younger star stealing his fading limelight, but you could always at least count on a colourful baddie in the Die Hard movies. The absence here of a ‘name’ villain speaks volumes about the franchise’s decreasing power. Where Rickman and Irons led, there’s now an assortment of beardy Russians from central casting. Nyet, thanks.

Incredibly, Willis has already confirmed there will be a Die Hard 6 – and it won’t necessarily see that it will end there. Mock if you like, but one day you’ll most likely pay good money to see Die Hard 9, where Bruce’s no-name grandson biffs the baddies while a wheelchair-bound Brucie, looking entirely like one of his own octegenerian testicles, pulls off his oxygen mask and yells ‘Yippee-ki-kolostomy-bag!’

The weird thing is, that would probably be more entertaining than this steaming pile of ordure.

Exploding helicopter innovation

So, to the explosion. It might be pertinent to warn there are spoilers ahead, but it’s doubtful anyone could ruin the plot any more than the writer already has, so let’s plough on.

The beardy Russian conscientious objector incredibly turns out to be the baddie, so – in a moment typical of the film – the no-name son gets shot and does the actual legwork of throwing him off the top of a building in Chernobyl (don’t ask) while Bruce skulks off camera somewhere having a fag / phoning his agent / demanding a bigger trailer.

Beardface plummets to a splatty end. Outraged, his sexy villainess daughter gets all Al Quaeda on our heroes’ asses and deliberately rams a huge military helicopter straight into the glass-fronted building where they stand helpless. And misses them. As the chopper smashes in to the building and explodes, Bruce and No-name jump out beside it and naturally land in a swimming pool that happens to be directly below them. The whole scene looks like the computer-generated nonsense it so patently is.

Positives

Do you know this man?

For the first time ever, Exploding Helicopter actually fell asleep for five minutes in a cinema during this movie – and has to report it was the most fulfilling five minutes of the whole enterprise.

Negatives

How long have you got? Let’s just do the script. Exploding Helicopter has seen a lot of bad movies, both blockbusters and small fry, but never one where such a huge budget has been coupled with such a piss-poor script. It makes The Chronicles of Riddick look like Citizen Kane. Every single aspect of the plot is so by-the-numbers, it seems to have been written by a computer programme – possibly an Amstrad home computer, circa 1985.

Special mention goes to the scene where Bruce starts emotionally unloading to a Russian bloke he’s literally only just met about how he wishes he’d been a better dad but still can’t express his paternal love, while the lumpen son listens in round the corner trying to pull off a ‘looking emotional’ expression. I’ve seen school plays with more conviction.

Favourite quote

“You know what I hate about Americans? Everything.”

Interesting fact

In the week of the UK premiere, Bruce put in a notoriously foul-tempered tour of British TV and radio studios, snipping at interviewers and petulantly refusing to answer questions across a variety of formats. It all sounds much more interesting than the film.

Review by: Chopper

Surrogates

Imagine a world where you can sit on your arse all day in the comfort of your own home and get someone else to do your work for you. Sounds great doesn’t it?

In fact you could argue that people living on benefits in this country currently enjoy this luxury (ooh, little bit of politics there). But wouldn’t there be a price to pay for creating a bland and safe facsimile of society? What would happen to our self-esteem and social skills? Wouldn’t we all just end up sitting around in our pants, stuffing our faces with crisps, looking like Elvis circa 1977?

This is the dystopian future envisioned by Jonathan Mostow in the surprisingly cerebral sci-fi actioner Surrogates (2009). In the future people don’t go out in the real world. Instead, they sit at home, remotely controlling idealised robotic versions of themselves, living out their lives vicariously through these “surrogates“.

Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) is one such sluggard. He’s an FBI agent called in to investigate the deaths of two people who mysteriously die when their surrogates are destroyed - something that should be technically impossible.

Greer’s sleuthing leads him to the anti-surrogate movement whose leader The Prophet (a bizarre mix of Bob Marley and Martin Luther King, played by a virtually unrecognisable Ving Rhames) wants to wipe out surrogacy. He wants to get everyone back to experiencing life directly, or at least washing once a month.

Ving Rhames: With a wig dafter than Bruce Willis'

But, just in the same way you can never be sure that the 18-year old underwear model you think you’re talking to in a chat room isn’t a 44-year old truck driver from Burnley, nothing is quite what it seems. Slowly Greer realises the murder is part of a vast and terrible conspiracy.

In a genre dominated by dumbed down studio fare with no intellectual returns, I found Surrogates to be an unexpected pleasure. The film reunites the team behind Terminator 3, writers Michael Ferris and John Brancato, along with director Mostow. They create a fully realised, plausible universe with great touches such as robots “jacking” with electronic “drugs”, beauty salons that resemble garages and roadside surrogate battery chargers.

Willis is not his usual bullet proof self and shows a refreshing vulnerability when dealing with some of the movies philosophical themes. Similarly, his flawed relationship with his wife Maggie (Rosamund Pike) elevates the film above the standard sci-fi action fare that normally relies on fancy effects and a blue tint for its authenticity.

Mostow keeps the action moving and at an economical 90 minutes the film doesn’t outstay its welcome either. Fortunately, amidst all the futuristic fun there’s still time for the retro thrills of a helicopter explosion.

Willis is in a police chopper tracking the murder suspect. The police on the ground move in and corner the suspect not knowing he is in possession of a developmental weapon which has the ability to kill people through their surrogates. After using it to wipe out the pursuing police the weapon is unleashed on chopper, overloading the pilot’s circuits and blowing his eyes out.

The out of control chopper spins wildly for what seems an eternity, clips the top of a building, before crashing down, flipping over like a child’s toy until it explodes.

Artistic merit

Whilst you have to appreciate the way Mostow’s prolongs the suspense, the helicopter was only ever heading one way - and that was down.

The crash itself looks surprisingly cheap and CGI’d compared to some of his previous efforts. The washed out yellows looked uncannily like the old Amiga game Persian Gulf Inferno.

Exploding helicopter innovation

None

Do passengers survive?

Survive is perhaps not the most apt verb in the scene is a robot. The chopper pilot does not surface after the fireball but Willis escapes with his arm torn off seeping some sort of green fluid which may or may not be absinthe.

Positives

The fact that in this fantasy world everyone has flawlessly beautiful surrogates to hide the fact that in the real world they are so ugly they couldn’t get a date from a calendar is a concept anyone familiar with Second Life will well appreciate.

Negatives

As with most sci-fi you can pick holes in the minutiae until the cows come home. Why, for example, have coffee shops for robots that don’t need to drink coffee? Don’t be a smart arse, its called artistic licence.

I won’t spoil it for you but the dénouement is too farfetched to be plausible for such a massive company with undoubtedly hundreds of fail safes to prevent their units from malfunctioning on a monumental scale.

Favourite quote

(Willis questioning an attractive female surrogate lawyer)

Female Lawyer: Agent Greer, we're not doctors. Tom Greer: Honey, I don't know what you are. I mean, for all I know, you could be some big, fat dude sitting in his arm chair with his dick hanging out.

Interesting fact

Oddly, Disney did not hold any press screenings for Surrogates. This is normally the sign of a studio in full damage limitation mode with an absolute turkey on their hands that they don’t want universally panned before it’s had a chance to see the light of day.

Perhaps Disney should have had more faith as subsequent reviews have been, at worst, “mixed”. Disney’s failure to back a sci-fi film with brains does the film and the movie industry in general a disservice.

The future isn’t particularly dangerous, in fact crime is virtually non-existent, but there is no underestimating mankind’s desire to do as little as possible. First came the remote control and now this.

Review by: Neon Messiah

The Expendables 2

If The Dirty Dozen and Cocoon had ever had a drunken one-night stand, this is what the baby would have looked like.

The Expendables 2 (2012) is such a bizarre mash-up of styles and demographics – oh-my-aching-sides oldie gags and uber-violence – that it frequently leaves the viewer perplexed: “Aw, look at all the old people, still so sprightly and full of zest. Wait no, what’s he doing? Oh god no, he just shot somebody in the face!”

Following the respectable box office of The Expendables (which proved the adage: it’s never too late to put old dogs through exactly the same tricks), old stroke-features Stallone here rounds up the boys again.

Eschewing a state pension, the 66-year-old has gathered Schwarzeneger (65), Willis (57), Lundgren (55), Van Damme (52) and junior partner the Stath for another medley of tongue-in-cheek heroics and stomach-churning blood spillage.

(To fully appreciate just how downright weird all this is, just consider that cameo assassin Chuck Norris, at a coffin-brushing 72-years-old, is a full 20 years older than Cocoon actor Wilford Brimley was when he starred as a pensioner in that film.)

The ‘plot’, in which the team rescues some plutonium, blasts the baddies and saves the obligatory village, is so by-the-numbers we need not go into detail here. What really impresses is the gusto with which the screenplay (co-written by Sly) embraces every possible action movie cliché.

What, the team has to do an impossible mission or GO TO JAIL? You mean, the young buck who’s doing ‘one last job’ to raise enough money to marry his sweetheart ACTUALLY DIES? You’re kidding me: the glamorous female who’s foisted on the reluctant team turns out to be so kick ass and gutsy she eventually WINS THEIR RESPECT?

It sounds awful, but it actually works. The whole movie is essentially one gigantic wink to the audience, a cinematic karaoke of old action movie favourites. This can become wearing when the action pensioners repeatedly blurt out self-reverential soundbites (‘I’m back’, ‘Yippee-ki-yay’ etc) but it’s mostly cartoonish good fun.

In fact, the film only really falters when it tries to up the drama and get serious. Chief villain Jean Claude Van Damme’s opening soliloquy – a rambling, four-minute homily to ‘respect’ – is literally incomprehensible, and there’s a palpable sense of relief when he finally shuts up and kung-fu kicks a dagger into someone’s chest. (Yes, he really does.)

Despite all the guns, bombs and crashing planes, the most fascinating view on display – especially on the big screen – is the cast themselves. Stallone, arrested several years ago for smuggling his personal supply of human growth hormone into Australia, scarcely even looks human anymore.

He alternately wears a thick, black woollen beret and his own hair, but you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference. The bulging veins on his forearms are just terrifying, and those HGH injections haven’t quite reached down to his legs, which are now comically old man skinny. It’s like there’s two different bodies waddling across the screen – Tom Hardy on top and Steptoe at the bottom.

Arnie, meanwhile, looks like a semi-melted waxwork of his younger self, his face tight and surgical-shiny in places, but hanging off his jowls at the sides. Van Damme wears sunglasses for 95 per cent of the time – even while underground – presumably because there are bags under his eyes you could carry your shopping in.

Of the others, Bruce Willis merely looks even more like a smug testicle, while septuagenarian Chuck Norris – with his magnificently white teeth and lustrous brown beard/hairdo combo looks like a human beaver. It’s like he’s accidentally strayed into the action from an Island of Dr Moreau set next door.

At a sprightly 45-years-old, it’s left exclusively to the Stath to provide all the actual action in this action movie. Director Simon West shows a good sense of the ridiculous for the most part with this movie (he made Con Air, after all), but his choreography of the fight scenes is lamentable. The clunky edits make abundantly clear that the baddies are obediently queuing to get biffed one at a time; I’ve seen queues in Lidl’s with more sense of danger.

Still, that’s a minor gripe about a largely entertaining yarn which, in its eagerness to please, throws us an exploding helicopter in the very first scene. Our crew, armed with all kinds of armoured vehicles, bust into a walled compound to rescue Arnie.

Before you can say human growth hormone injections, Sly’s somehow on a low rooftop with his tanky vehicle, which has a motorbike strapped to the back. A chopper swings low, ready to fire, so Sly revs up the bike and sends it blasting into the helicopter cockpit, causing an inevitable crash and, yes, explosion.

Exploding helicopter innovation

The driving-a-moving-automobile-into-a-chopper gambit has been used before (Willis in Die Hard 4 provides a worthy demonstration of the form) but the good thing about this example is that it doesn’t make a meal out of things. There’s no Michael Bay multiple-cut, slo-mo, shite CGI business going on: it just happens. One minute Sly’s shooting someone repeatedly in the chest, then he throws a motorbike at a helicopter, then he punches someone else to death. Simple.

Positives

I love how, with each movie, less and less of what Sly says is comprehensible, especially when he’s angry. There’s a whole scene where he castigates Bruce Willis down a walkie talkie that I didn’t catch a word of.

You can picture the director asking him to go through it seven times before just throwing his hands into the air. In the latest Batman film, Tom Hardy often can’t be understood because he’s wearing a big mask: Sly now achieves much the same effect with just the burden of his own slopey mouth.

Negatives

The gutsy woman character is – probably deliberately – neither that young nor that glamorous, presumably to avoid providing too sharp a contrast with her doddering co-stars. However, she is one cack actress. When you’re in a scene with Sly where he’s stutteringly growling out some half-baked ‘backstory’ and YOU’RE the one whose acting is noticeably bad, it’s time to start worrying.

Favourite quote

Van Damme’s colossally nonsensical: “Without respect, we are just people.” What?

Interesting fact

The collective age of the main cast a very high figure indeed that would have impressed you if I could have been bothered to work it out.

Review by: Chopper

Still want more? Then check out the Exploding Helicopter podcast episode on The Expendables 2. Listen via iTunes, Stitcher, Acast, Spotify or right here.

Die Hard With A Vengeance

The first thing you notice is that this movie is explicitly not called Die Hard 3. It’s as if everyone has just collectively ‘ahemed’, looked the other way and tried to pretend Renny Harlin’s piece of shit airplane yawn-fest (Die Hard 2) never happened. Certainly, I’ve tried.

After his tough-cop-on-the-edge character John McClane was confined to a high-rise building and airplane for the first two movies, Bruce Willis clearly decided his mammoth ego needed a slightly broader canvas this time round.

Still, it’s hard to pin-point exactly where the movie is set, because Bruce – entertainingly accompanied by Samuel L Jackson in full sass-mode as an angry shopkeeper – pretty much gets everywhere. First he zooms all over New York (Harlem, the subway, Central Park, Federal Reserve Bank). Then he almost drowns in a big tunnel, jumps off a suspension bridge and gets blown off an exploding container ship. Finally – god help us – he ends up in Quebec.

The real revelation is Jeremy Irons playing Simon Gruber, the revenge-seeking brother of Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) who, you’ll remember, our Bruce yippee-kiyayed out a high-rise window in the first movie. While Rickman’s performance – oily and eloquent – has stood the test of time, in retrospect Irons here gave a display of mackerel-stinking proportions.

It’s a classic look-at-me turn, at once shouty and unconvincing (copyright: Al Pacino). The Allo, Allo accent is all over the shop, his tight powder-blue vest (Irons ‘bulked up’ for the role) looks camp as knickers and at no point did I not think: Oh look, there’s Jeremy Irons doing a funny, stilted voice. Terrible, terrible stuff.

Irons: As camp as knickers

There’s also a surreal moment where, to fool a cop, Irons affects a good ole boy accent. That means we have an English actor doing a not very good Euro accent trying to fake a drawling American accent. There may be words to describe what that actually sounds like but they’re beyond this writer.

The action finally swings to a port in Quebec, where our Jezza is whizzing about in an invincible attack helicopter and shooting merrily at everything. But doesn’t he realise it’s the last ten minutes of an action movie, and nothing’s exploded for a good 15 minutes? The fool!

Exploding helicopter innovation

Pretty standard fare here, with Irons following the time-honoured baddie tradition of throwing away a huge, seemingly unassailable advantage. Poised above pistol-wielding Bruce in a machine-gun helicopter and holding a huge shotgun, he naturally – instead of just shooting the prone figure on the tarmac below – smiles at him smugly for eleven seconds (I counted).

This gives our hero time to notice the chopper is idly whirring under some power cables. D’oh!. Being Bruce, he manages to sever a thick power cable with two quick pistol shots from half a mile away, which sends the chopper spinning into a telegraph pole. Ka-boom.



Do the passengers survive?

No. Jeremy, his evil girlfriend and his powder-blue vest are no more.

Positives

Spectacular and innovative the explosion ain’t, but it at least looks like there is a real helicopter on fire. There’s a nice back-shot of Bruce walking towards the blazing shell, which looks pretty authentic.

Negatives

It’s done professionally enough but the explosion lacks any real ambition, which is also the movie’s main problem. The grubby vest; the ‘Gruber’ villain; the trusty Afro-American side-kick. There’s a distinct sense of laurels being rested on here. (Bruce even says ‘Yippee-kiyay, motherfucker’ when the chopper explodes.) It wouldn’t have hurt to throw in a couple of new ideas.

Favourite quote

While being shot at by a helicopter machine gun, Bruce quips: “I had no idea Canada could be this much fun.” Well, I laughed.

Interesting fact

According to Richard E Grant’s entertaining memoir, With Nails, Bruce is a right tosser.

Review by: Chopper

Die Hard 4.0

Bruce Willis banks another pay cheque as the Die Hard franchise is given a techno-thriller reboot.

Hollywood’s finest vest wearing action hero crashes through a series of increasingly improbable sequences in a bid to prevent criminals bringing down the US’s computer systems. Oh, and he needs to rescue his daughter as well.

Naturally, the action provides Willis with another opportunity to explode a helicopter. Whilst escorting Justin Long - the irritating comic foil who accompanies Bruno throughout the film - the car they’re travelling in is attacked by a helicopter. Our heroes flee into a tunnel, however, Timothy Olyphant’s dastardly villain uses his internet mastery to create traffic havoc in the tunnel.

After several near death experiences, a riled Willis climbs into a police car and guns it towards the tunnel entrance outside which the helicopter is conveniently hovering. As the car approaches the entrance, Willis jumps clear of the vehicle. Moments later it hits the road’s central reservation causing it to fly into the air and crash into the helicopter destroying it.

A breathless Justin Long surveys the carnage and tells Willis: “You just killed a helicopter with a car.”

“I was out of bullets.” Quips Willis.

Verdict

An unusual helicopter explosion which seemingly crops up out of nowhere.

Artistic merit 

Director Len Wiseman keeps it simple. The helicopter blows up amidst a conventional explosion. What imagination has been brought to the scene is contributed by the method of destruction.

Exploding helicopter innovation 

There are two noteworthy elements to this chopper fireball. It’s the first time a car has been used as an improvised, surface-to-air missile. 

Relevance to plot

The chopper’s presence is justified by the plot. Part of the villain’s plan is to create traffic grid lock in the city. Clearly the villains have planned effectively and made sure that they have suitable transport to remain mobile.

Positives

Having watched hundreds of action films, we’re often able to anticipate how events will pan out. There’s a genuine element of surprise to the circumstances that lead a driverless vehicle into destroying the helicopter as if it were an over-ripe watermelon.

Negatives

The excitement and surprise of the scene though cannot disguise its complete ridiculousness. How does the car continue to race forward with no-one at the wheel or on the accelerator? And how could Willis possibly have worked out the perfect speed and angle needed to launch the car at the chopper? Is he a professor of theoretical physics? 

Interesting fact 

The exploding helicopter scene took three weeks to film. It was shot practically with CGI only being used toe delete the cables that the helicopter was being suspended from.  

Review by: Jafo

Still want more? Then listen to the Exploding Helicopter podcast episode on Die Hard 4. Listen or download the show from iTunes, Podomatic, YourListen or Stitcher. 

Die Hard

When terrorists seize control of a tower block, an FBI team led by the great pock-marked villain Robert Davi, are brought in to free the hostages.

Davi’s plan involves cutting-off the buildings power and before giving them "helicopters up the ass". Exploding Helicopter is not sure if that's possible, but it sounds anatomically awkward. 

Regardless, Davi and his FBI colleague fly-in, ostensibly to evacuate the hostages, but really so they can shoot the terrorists. Unbeknownst to them, the villains have rigged the roof with explosives which are detonated, destroying the buildings upper floors and taking out the helicopter.

Number of exploding helicopters

1

Positives

There‘s a pleasing Vietnam reference when Robert Davi yells: “Just like fucking Saigon!” as they begin their low level chopper assault.

Negatives

Robert Davi never gets to deliver “helicopters up the ass” which surely would have been an anatomical first.

Exploding helicopter innovation

First known usage of a tower block to explode a helicopter.

Artistic merit

Disappointing. The helicopter’s explosion is overshadowed by the detonation of the tower block’s roof.

Favourite quote

"Hey, I read the papers, I watch 60 minutes, I say to myself, these guys are professionals, they’re motivated, they’re happening. They want something. Now, personally, I don’t care about your politics. Maybe you’re pissed at the camel Jockeys, maybe it’s the Hebes, Northern Ireland, that’s none of my business. I figure, you’re here to negotiate, am I right?"

Interesting fact

The film is based on a book by Roderick Thorpe - a sequel to a previous novel he had written called The Detective. A film of that novel was made in 1968 with Frank Sinatra. 

A clause in Old Blues Eyes contract, meant Sinatra had to be given first refusal on Die Hard - despite the fact he was 73 at the time. 

Review by: Jafo

Still want more? Then check out the Exploding Helicopter podcast episode on Die Hard. Available on Podomatic, iTunes, Stitcher or YourListen.