‘Basic’: the final nail in the coffin for ‘Die Hard’ director John McTiernan’s career
History will do its best to remember him as one of the action genre’s greatest-ever directors. However, John McTiernan had slipped from that pedestal long before he ended up behind bars, with his legal issues and stalled attempts at a comeback in danger of usurping his finest work as the backbone of his legacy.
Helming Predator, Die Hard, and The Hunt for Red October within the space of three years is a remarkable way of putting yourself on the map, with all three regarded as classics that created a lucrative goldmine for their respective studios. Each of them gave rise to a multi-film franchise that combined to net billions at the box office. This wouldn’t have happened had McTiernan not crafted three individually excellent movies that left audiences crying out for more.
Sean Connery’s Medicine Man was a major misstep. However, the filmmaker proved beyond doubt he still had plenty left to offer blockbuster cinema by recovering with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s criminally underrated self-aware romp Last Action Hero, superior sequel Die Hard with a Vengeance, and his sultry remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. Unfortunately, it was all downhill from there.
The 13th Warrior went massively over budget and lost a fortune. His second remake couldn’t have gone much worse than the astoundingly terrible Rollerball before Basic effectively drew a line under his career. It’s been 21 years since the latter was released. While it had all the potential in the world to succeed based on the sum of its parts, it received a well-deserved critical and commercial mauling that underlined just how steeply McTiernan’s once-formidable talents had fallen off.
On paper, Basic markets itself. It’s from the director of Predator and Die Hard, featuring Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta reuniting on-screen for the first time since Pulp Fiction. The movie carries the easily marketable premise of a military investigator seeking to unravel the mysterious deaths of four soldiers and the subsequent disappearance of their commanding officer. Instead, it was an overly convoluted bust that failed to recoup its budget in ticket sales, blowing another hole in McTiernan’s reputation.
During that period, McTiernan was being eyed to direct Smoke and Mirrors with Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, true-life World War II spy story The Garbo Deception, literary adaptation The Booster, big budget adventure Murder In Canton, and action flick Crash Bandits. Not only did none of them happen at all, but the filmmaker’s livelihood was subsequently destroyed by his imprisonment.
In 2006, McTiernan was charged with lying to the FBI after hiring a private investigator to mount an illegal wiretap on Rollerball producer Charles Roven, where he was left with no choice but to plead guilty due to the evidence against him and several failed appeals. He served almost 12 months behind bars and served the remainder of his sentence under house arrest, and Hollywood hasn’t wanted anything to do with him ever since.
Following his conviction, he penned a script for potential sequel Thomas Crown and the Missing Lioness, action thrillers Deadly Exchange and Run, and more conventional actioners Shrapnel, Red Squad, Warbirds, Thin Rain, and Tau Ceti 4. The only one of them that came together in the end was Shrapnel – released without his involvement as Mark Steven Johnson’s The Killing Season – and it was terrible, with the overall recurring theme being McTiernan’s continued inability to get his career back on track.
By his own admission, he isn’t officially retired, telling Be TV that “I have continued to write, and I believe I have strength, years left.” Glancing at the facts, though, he was already on a downward slope long before he ended up imprisoned, with Basic looking increasingly likely to endure as a disappointing exclamation point to what was once such a storied career.
