THE TRINITY

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.”
—Auric Goldfinger

The vast majority of artists spend their entire lives without a major success. Or, since “success” is a relative term (I personally consider my play where I adapted the Madison scene from Bande A Parte, set it to “The Amazing Sounds of Orgy” by Radiohead, and danced with two women with none of us wearing anything other than sunglasses, a success; even though that play lost money, just go back and read that sentence again and tell me I don't fucking rule) I should probably say, the vast majority of artists spend their entire lives without enjoying major critical and commercial success. One artist in the select minority in this regard is movie director John McTiernan.

As of this writing, John McTiernan is in gigantic fucking legal trouble. In the criminal trial of performance artist Anthony Pellicano (nominally a private investigator but actually a metatheatrical auteur attempting to attain such a level of sleaziness as to stain the very fabric of the universe) it was revealed that McTiernan lied to the FBI about his dealings with Pellicano. Whoops. A kerfuffle (technical legal term) ensued, and federal prosecutors are sharpening their knives and muttering with unshaven, gruff malice, looking to do McTiernan jurisprudent harm. With all this mess, it kinda looks like McTiernan's directing career is done, which kinda sucks. But it sucks because it's a shame to have to go out like that, rather than due to unrealized potential, because whoa baby did McTiernan's pre-perjury body of work kick ass.

The quote from cinema's greatest villain that opens this epistlet refers to the second through fourth feature motion pictures of John McTiernan's career. These three movies, done consecutively, constitute one of the most consistently impressive one-two-threes in the history of cinema, and without question the most masculine. They are:

Predator
Die Hard
The Hunt For Red October

Bow heads in reverence.

Now think about that for a second. If someone directed one of those pictures, his career would be complete and he'd never have to pay for a drink the rest of his life. If a guy directed two of those pictures, it'd be fucking silly. But all three? These are quantum levels of badassness. Fucking John McTiernan in the late 80s was a massively parallel, five-dimensional being with sentient testicles capable of exploding universes with the power of thought.

Success, as mentioned above, is a fleeting thing, as much dependent on serendipity as it is on talent. After The Hunt For Red October, McTiernan, having danced for four years and three pictures, found himself having to pay the fiddler, which he did with the hideously awful Medicine Man (Sean Connery is Sean Connery, but remember, for every Man Who Would Be King, there's a Zardoz, and for every Untouchables there's some fucking piece of shit paycheck picture . . .) and the truly staggering The Last Action Hero. Before we get to the subject of this post, we need to digress briefly, with copious profanity.

Okay. The fucking problem with The fucking Last Action Hero is that postmodernism is something that should require a license to operate. I love Arnold more than any ten of you put together, but putting Arnold in a movie whose premise requires the intellectual level to process the interaction between observer and observed to be anything other than a stupid fucking joke, is fucking unfair. Arnold is not up to that task; he's smart, but he ain't that fuckin' smart. Casting aside the problem of Hollywood making a mockery out of an intellectually interesting premise (best case scenario, you get, what, The Purple Rose of Cairo with car chases and a couple oil tankers blowing up? What has two thumbs and wants to be signed the fuck up? Yours truly.) the rhetorical question needs to be posed: do they have some fucking factory in southern California where they manufacture retarded kids to put in movies? Listen, I know all kids are retards to some degree or other, but come on, man, the kids in my acting class in junior high (who were all there cuz we couldn't sing and didn't like the smell of photographic chemicals) were better than these dipshits who end up in movies all the time. The single most retarded kid in the history of retarded movie kids is the little Last Action Hero one. Granted, he doesn't have much to work with—the extremely expensive and highly touted spec script it began as rapidly devolved into “fuck, I gotta get these rewrites done so I can get another 8-ball from my dealer” bullshit—but man that kid is fucking annoying. Arnold spends the whole movie looking like a cue card guy is holding up The Wall Street Journal so he can check his portfolio while he acts. Arnold would only go on to make one more good movie, and that was more Jim Cameron's doing.

But anyway. That's enough of that. McTiernan, after that massive flop, was forced back to the Die Hard franchise after being too big to direct the first sequel, and did a fairly decent job (the only real flaw with Die Hard 3 was the single worst assortment of New York accents ever heard on film, despite being shot on location in New York, the rest of the movie fuckin rules ass) then did a competent if uninspired job remaking The Thomas Crown Affair, directed three-quarters of an awesome movie in The 13th Warrior before getting fired, but then crashed and burned spectacularly with the remake of Rollerball (even more retarded than The Last Action Hero) and the too-generic-for-anyone-to-give-a-shit Basic. Then he started lying to the Feds, only the problem, as he soon found, is that when you lie to the Feds in real life, your sidekick doesn't come in with a machine gun and bust you out, the Feds take out their J. Edgar Hoover model dildo and do to you what Clyde Tolson used to do to J. Edgar.

Anyway. Now that we got all the inconsistent directorial output (I didn't mention his first movie, the one before Predator, Nomads, but you didn't miss anything) and legal troubles out of the way. Let's talk about the three-sided-star and the apex of testicular cinema:


Predator (1987)

Ah ha ha, god DAMN it this is such a good movie. Arnold was still on steroids, you could still be politically incorrect in a major studio movie, Carl Weathers, Bill Duke . . . AHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Okay. Deep breaths. We open with a space ship in near-Earth orbit putting on the parking brake, the Club on the steering wheel, and launching a little one-alien sized spaceship back down to Earth. This, we can correctly assume, is the Predator. Or . . . is it?

We can chew on that later. First things first. A helicopter lands somewhere in the middle of the jungle, and probably the single most we will fucking kill you bunch of MEN ever assembled gets out: Bill Duke, Billy from 48 Hrs, Jesse fuckin Ventura and his chewing tobacco, and two little guys—one of whom is Shane Black—whose presence is even scarier, because if these little fuckers are allowed to hang around with Bill, Billy, and Jesse, they must be fuckin fierce.

The best part about this intro is that the team all gets out and hops to, and Arnold just sits there in the fuckin chopper smokin a cigar like he's too fuckin bored to even scratch his balls. This is why Arnold rules.

Finally, Arnold summons the desire to move, and he heads inside to be briefed by this military guy, only the mission seems a little ho-hum for Arnold's boys:

Arnold: So why dun you yoos de reggala Army? Whut de yoooo need us foah?
Carl Weathers (off-screen): CUZ SOME DAMN FOOL ACCUSED YOU OF BEIN THE BEST.

Introduce Carl Weathers, old friend of Arnold's, now with the Central Intelligence Agency of Langley, VA, 22101.

Arnold: Whut is dees fockeeng tie beeznus?
Carl Weathers: Man, forget about the tie.

But Arnold can't forget about the tie. Carl Weathers leads Arnold and his guys out into the middle of fuckin nowhere to go ventilate some Commies, but he's a little stingy with details and motivation. They head on out, and Jesse Ventura offers chewing tobacco to the chopper but is rejected by everyone:

Jesse Ventura: Buncha slack-jawed faggots. This stuff'll turn you into a goddam sexual Tyrannosaurus, just like me.

As if their mere appearance weren't enough, there's some terse discussion of past missions, referred to only by the country (Afghanistan, Cambodia, etc) to establish these motherfuckers as serious. They make short work of a much-better-armed-than-anticipated bunch of rebels, and it turns out that Carl Weathers mildly bullshitted Arnold about the purpose of the mission, which pisses Arnold off, but there isn't much they can do—they're on the wrong side of the border so they have to go through some pretty unforgiving jungle to, as Arnold later says, “Geet to da choppa.”

It's at this point that some unseen entity with heat vision and garbled, digitized hearing takes notice of our protagonists. When Bill Duke knifes a scorpion on Carl Weathers' back and leaves its corpse on a log, the unseen entity regards the expired scorpion and can be seen to ruminate . . .

Bill Duke and Carl Weathers bond:

Bill Duke: You're ghostin' us, motherfucker. I don't care who you are back in the world, you give away our position one more time, I'll bleed ya, real quiet. Leave ya here. Got that?

Then something invisible starts killing Arnold's dudes! This bit is not for the faint of heart—Jesse Ventura gets his whole abdomen blown out, Bill Duke loses three-quarters of his skull, Carl Weathers loses his arm—and in short order the only people who are left are Arnold and the local chick who has warned them that in the heat of the summer, something comes out of the jungle and fucks people up. Arnold has astutely noted some glowing green shit on a leaf and come to the following conclusion:

“If eet blids . . . ve can keel it.”

Once everybody else is dead and Arnold has taken an alien rocket launcher to the shoulder at point blank range (which actually produced some blood) Arnold tells the local chick “GOOOO! GEET TO DA CHOPPA!” the line that has become half of the sole basis of any good Arnold impersonation.

The dialogue dries up for a bit as Arnold uses his wits and testicles to evade the alien hunter through the jungle. Eventually, Arnold realizes stuff like if he covers his body in cold mud the hunter can't see him, and he builds flaming arrows and booby traps and all kinds of awesome shit. He lures the hunter into a trap.

Arnold: “Camman! Keel me! Dooo eeet! Doo eet NOOOOW!”

Eventually, Arnold actually fucks the hunter's shit up. The hunter, though, has one final trick up its sleeve—a nuclear explosion, that Arnold manages to escape by jumping far enough. However, this does mean that Arnold cannot geet to da choppa, da choppa has to come to him, and it hauls his tired ass away as the closing credits roll.

Now. You'll notice one thing—I never referred to the alien as “the Predator.” The reason is this: the alien hunter only hunts things that can fight back. Arnold notices this and tells the local chick not to pick up a gun, figuring—correctly—that if she's unarmed, she's safe. Arnold, however, is so clearly dangerous and on so much steroids that even without a gun he's still trouble. I maintain, in spite of the stupid sequel and the fucking truly retarded Alien-tie-in, that the real predator in this movie . . . is man.


Die Hard (1988)

As great as Predator was, it did mainly appeal to nerds, Arnold cultists, and the kind of woefully damaged people who love gruesome cinematic violence (and yes, I'm all of the above, but I still realize Predator's a tough sell to some). Die Hard had no such problem. A number of lazy critical overviews of 80s action cinema tend to carelessly lump Die Hard in with Arnold movies and Sly movies—and, in a slightly different way, Eddie movies (he's invincible in Beverly Hills Cop)—without taking the time to notice that Die Hard is a whole different animal.

It's easy to forget now, after he's bestrode the earth for two decades as one of the biggest movie stars in the known universe, but Bruce Willis was primarily known as a TV actor before Die Hard. He was not really a name (Moonlighting cultists aside), and as John McClane he was, until you'd seen his subsequent movies, a regular guy. I mean, he's kind of a regular guy. He's a regular guy with ridiculous amounts of self-assurance and charisma, but he's a regular guy nonetheless.

To save his failing (some would even say already-failed) marriage, New York cop John McClane flies out to LA, gets picked up by a chatty limo driver, and heads out to the Nakatomi building, his once and future bride's place of employment, hosting their Christmas office party. The limo driver, like every supporting character in the picture, is written and acted to be remembered. Instead of seeming forced, he just comes across like a really nice kid, and McClane likes him immediately.

The office party introduces Mrs. McClane (irritatingly going by her maiden name Gennero at work), the yuppie cokehead who's trying to get in her pants (an excellent Hart Bochner, taking in all the sins of yuppiedom like stigmata as he bleeds the cocaine of the sinners on his thousand-dollar suit) and the avuncular Japanese dude who runs the place, Joe Takagi. (note to Michael Crichton: how can you think this guy's taking over the country? He's a fuckin sweetheart).

The McClanes have a tiff. John stays behind in the wife's office and—fortuitously—takes the advice of the guy sitting next to him on the plane to make fists with your toes barefoot on the carpet. Just as he's realizing, hey, it works, a whole bunch of well-dressed men very efficiently seize control of the building and take the office party hostage.

This leaves . . . ONE MAN . . . to foil their nefarious plans. That one man is a jet-lagged, lovesick rank-and-file cop from thousands of miles away who has to scamper away barefoot in his undershirt. And he's up against one serious adversary:

This is the one man who can challenge Auric Goldfinger. Hans Gruber. Sophisticated as the day is long. A voice you can listen to forever. And hooooooly shit is this man dangerous.

Joe Takagi: I don't know [the password] . . . you're just going to have to kill me.
Hans Gruber: Okay.
Bang. RIP Joe.

McClane sees this and shits his ass. He sets out to pick off as many of the bad guys as he can; unfortunately the first one he picks off is Alexander Godunov's brother. Alexander Godunov is Hans Gruber's right hand man, and holy fuckin shit is he scary when he gets pissed.

“I WANT BLOOD!”

He even makes Hans Gruber nervous for a second before he formulates his reply: “And you'll have it.” The complication is, McClane has a whole bunch of their C4 and the detonators, so they need to get that back before just killing his ass. But McClane is smart enough to play this to his advantage, and he recovers a walkie-talkie from Godunov's brother, with which he talks shit to Hans Gruber pretty much non-stop. Hans Gruber tries to talk shit back.

Hans: “You know my name, but who are you? Just another American who saw too many movies as a child? A product of a bankrupt culture who thinks he's John Wayne? Rambo? Marshall Dillon?” (Ed. Note: nice fuckin' reference, Hans)
McClane: “I was always kinda partial to Roy Rogers, actually. I really liked those sequined shirts.”
Hans: “Do you really think you have a chance against us, Mr. Cowboy?”
McClane: “Yippie-ki-ay, motherfucker.”

Oh, man. John McClane makes me proud to be from New York. We know how to talk shit here.

A brilliantly constructed game of cat and mouse ensues. McClane manages to establish contact with the LAPD, in the person of affable, overweight prole Al Powell, and the two bond over the radio, with Powell being McClane's one link to sanity, especially when fuckface suit cop Paul Gleason shows up and gives the typical awesome Paul Gleason performance as a belligerently stupid authority figure. As McClane kills more bad guys, Paul Gleason grows more antagonistic and insists that McClane let the impotent shitheads outside run things.

Hans Gruber kills Hart Bochner, which McClane takes hard (and Paul Gleason totally blames him for), because the poor naïve yuppie was only trying to help things in his dipshit yuppie way. So, as McClane is clinging to survival by a thread, the FBI comes in, in the form of Special Agent Johnson (Robert Davi, white, ugly) and Special Agent Johnson (Grand L. Bush, black, not ugly, also tangentially one of the only actors to be in both this and Lethal Weapon, the other landmark of 80s cop cinema) and insitutes their hostage protocol, which leads to exactly what Hans Gruber et al want: the power to get cut off so that the Nakatomi vault with gajillions of dollars in bearer bonds inside opens up. So the FBI sucks each other's dicks about a job well done while the remaining bad guys McClane hasn't killed yet count money.

After a whole bunch more bullshit—including McClane coming (at first unknowingly) in contact with Hans Gruber, who does a pretty spiffy American accent for a couple minutes, while noticing McClane is barefoot, and after the jig is up and McClane recognizes him for the Hans Gruber he really is, Hans Gruber has Alexander Godunov shoot a whole bunch of windows so McClane will cut his feet—the fuckin building blows up twice without collapsing or killing anyone except extras (good architecture). McClane works himself up into a psychotic rage and “kills” Alexander Godunov, and Hans Gruber takes Mrs. McClane hostage. After a dramatic showdown, McClane shoots Hans, who clings to Mrs. McClane's expensive, yuppie-given watch. Mrs. McClane symbolically removes the watch, and by her snipping that link to her non-McClane love life, kills Hans. Happily ever after . . .

. . . until Alexander Godunov shows up outta nowhere and Al Powell has to save the McClanes' lives by drawing his gun for the first time since he accidentally shot a kid and putting six in the crazed Godunov, which actually does kill him. Okay. Now we can live happily ever after. Oh, but Mrs. McClane has to punch William Atherton first, the asshole TV reporter who in a subplot was the one responsible for Hans Gruber knowing she was McClane's wife. Okay, goddammit, now can we live happily ever after? Yes. As the wisecracking limo driver drives the once-more-happy couple away, he says, “Man, this is your idea of Christmas, I gotta be here for New Year's.” Fuckin' a, sir. Fuckin. A.

Die Hard almost shouldn't work. It's long, it's got tons of subplots that don't really seem like they're going anywhere, but they all do. A guy who wasn't a movie star yet in the lead: that's dead risky. Fortunately that guy who wasn't a movie star yet was Bruce Willis. Oh, Die Hard. At this point it's almost redundant to say Die Hard rules, since for twenty-plus years now when something rules, we say “that rules almost as much as Die Hard.” But holy shit Die Hard is fucking awesome. Letting yourself get jaded about Die Hard just because you've seen it ten times is a dark fucking feeling, and I do not envy anyone with that cold dark canker in their heart where a warm blossom of love for Die Hard should be.


The Hunt For Red October (1990)

And so we come to the climax of the trilogy, the grace note, the single greatest submarine movie ever made (Das Boot can eat my schnitzel). Based on Tom Clancy's right-wing horseshit bestseller, The Hunt For Red October is that rare movie, like The Godfather, that transcends its origins as airport paperback crap to become cinematic genius. And, like Die Hard, a lot of that hinges on a guy nobody really knew was awesome yet in the lead role: Alec Baldwin's in the midst of a career reappraisal that has everyone pretending that they always loved him, but he had a loooooong stretch there where no one took him seriously as an actor. This stretch was unfair, he was always fucking great, he just needed good material. And, as far up his ass as Tom Clancy keeps his head, Jack Ryan is a fairly decent Everyman hero once you judiciously edit a lot of the right-wing fucktardery. Fairly decent Everyman hero part, meet highly skilled actor in his young and handsome days.

But, lest we forget, Sean Connery is the second lead. Actually, deciding which one of them is the lead is hard; it's kinda like the days when bands would put out a single as a double-A side. Sean Connery plays a Soviet submarine captain from the Scottish part of Lithuania (just like in The Untouchables he played a guy from the Scottish part of Ireland) who, having been given charge of a new sub with a nearly-silent propulsion system, decides to whack his political officer and defect to the US, bringing his sweet new ride with him.

The great thing the story does, is that even though by the end you know Sean Connery is going to defect, the Soviets can't let that happen, so they tell the Americans he's planning to start World War III by launching his nuclear warheads at New York and Washington. And so the audience isn't quite sure whether he's defecting or pulling some kamikaze first strike stunt. Alec Baldwin knows he's defecting, but shit, you try telling the Joint Chiefs the Russkies aren't acting the fool. So with CIA head James Earl Jones (good fucking GOD James Earl Jones is cool in this movie) pulling strings for him, Alec Baldwin goes out to the middle of nowhere in the North Atlantic to try to establish contact with Sean Connery.

MEANWHILE. One seriously awesome submarine full of US Naval officers is hot on Sean Connery's tail, due to the amazing ears—honed on fine classical music—of sonar operator Courtney B. Vance. Captain Scott Glenn grouches at him for “chasing an earthquake” but he's no dummy, he knows to trust Courtney B. Vance. They embark on (irony and such fail me) a thrilling, white-knuckle pursuit.

The sequence where Sean Connery captains the sub through this twisty underwater canyon is just terrific, but in spite of his best efforts to shake the Americans and the other Soviets, captained by the one and only Stellan Skarsgard—

“THESE ORDERS ARE SEVEN BLOODY HOURS OLD! Sitting on the bottom like an addled schoolboy . . .”

—Courtney B. Vance still picks him up the second they get out of the canyon. Ah, hell. At a very tense moment, Sean Connery and right-hand-man Sam Neill sit down and have a conversation about what they'll do when they get to America. And Sam Neill, who's heretofore been the paragon of rectitude, yes sir, you heard the captain, hop to itness, opens up and has this fucking AMAZING monologue about wanting to live in Montana and raise rabbits and have a pickup truck and “drive state to state . . . do they let you do that? No papers?” Fuckin' scene kills me. Then poor Sean Connery talks about his bleak life, his wife dying at sea, his whole life comprising a war with no monuments, only casualties, capping it by sighing that his wife died while he was at sea. This scene . . . man, it's good.

Right when Scott Glenn's sub has Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin's chopper shows up. He had to nag aircraft carrier boss Fred Thompson (later senator, at the time still the best character actor in the business at playing powerful Southern dudes) to let him have a chopper, and finally did, only to arrive, near frozen to death and terrified due to his fear of flying, to find a very cranky Scott Glenn, pissed that he had to break off from tracking Sean Connery. When some orders come in, courtesy of Soviet ambassador Joss Ackland (awesome as always) that the Red October needs to get blasted to kingdom come, like, five minutes ago, Alec Baldwin has to do some very fast talking to get Scott Glenn to entertain the notion that Sean Connery's defecting. Turns out . . . he is. Whaddaya know?

So a selected bunch of Scott Glenn's dudes join Alec Baldwin and they board the Red October after Sean Connery gets the crew off with a fake nuclear reactor accident. Sean Connery officially announces his intention to defect. But fuck it, there's a KGB mole or somebody who starts blasting away, shoots poor Sam Neill, who dies saying “I would like to have seen Montana . . .”and so Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery have to go chase the fucker before he causes a real reactor accident and blows up the sub (Alec Baldwin shoots him just in time). Not to mention goddamn Stellan Skarsgard is still out there fucking things up, so Scott Glenn and Courtney B. Vance have to take evasive maneuvers, the guy on Scott Glenn's actual sub has to pull this awesome risky maneuver to keep the Red October from getting blown up, and GODDAMMIT PEOPLE STOP THIS SHIT AND SETTLE DOWN!

Eventually Stellan Skarsgard blows himself up and Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery sail the Red October into a river in Maine to hide it out. Sean Connery quotes Christopher Columbus. Alec Baldwin says, “Welcome to the New World, sir.” The final shot is of Alec Baldwin, sleeping like a baby on the plane on his way back home, a new teddy bear for his daughter in the next seat.


And thus concluded the truly transcendent part of John McTiernan's career. Everything that came after, sure, it was rocky, parts of it even tragic. But over that four year period, Predator, Die Hard, The Hunt For Red October, he had one of the finest bursts of any movie director ever. Sure, others came close. Some may have even surpassed. But that period was truly special.