The movie Stephen King called the second coming of ‘Die Hard’: “It’s got a twinkle in it”
Comparing a high-stakes action movie to Die Hard has become one of the laziest descriptors in Hollywood, which didn’t stop Stephen King from making it anyway. As almost always tends to be the case, though, it was wide of the mark.
Ever since John McClane kicked off his shoes and went galivanting around the Nakatomi Plaza armed only with an increasingly dirty white vest and a barrage of one-liners for company, the Die Hard model has almost become the default setting for any genre film that unfolds in or around a singular location.
Some of them have been great in their own right, with Michael Bay’s The Rock, Jan de Bont’s Speed, Harrison Ford’s Air Force One, and Simon West’s Con Air transplanting the concept to Alcatraz, a bus, and two planes to spectacular results, but there have been just as many lazy rehashes that failed to resonate.
Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Sudden Death, Dolph Lundgren’s Performance Command, Peter Weller’s Top of the World, and Mickey Rourke’s Point Blank thought it would work in a hockey arena, rock concert, casino, and shopping centre, only to discover that ripping off Die Hard isn’t as easy as it looks.
In King’s defence, he wasn’t making a like-for-like comparison. On the other hand, he was patting himself on the back a little bit, since the film he hailed as the Die Hard of the current generation was based on a story originated by none other than Stephen King. He didn’t say it the first time around, but when Edgar Wright was handed the reins for the remake, The Running Man got the author’s seal of approval.
“It’s got just a twinkle in it,” he told the BFI, before explaining that Glen Powell’s Ben Richards had everyman chops to rival Bruce Willis himself. “He’s an immensely likable character, and he has that in common with McClane in Die Hard. So, I mean, it’s important to have a likeable main character, and he really is, and he feels fleshed out. It’s good.”
Of course, the comparison instantly falls flat, for no other reason than the fact The Running Man is a cross-country jaunt that finds Richards running for his life over the course of 30 days, whereas McClane only has one night and the duration of an office Christmas party to thwart a terrorist plot.
Wright’s latest foray into big-budget Hollywood filmmaking won’t be remembered as his best effort behind the camera, and it’s already slipped out of the zeitgeist. In the current cinematic climate, an R-rated blockbuster that costs in excess of $100 million is always a risk, although you’d have thought Powell’s status as the industry’s flavour of the month may have helped its chances.
Instead, it bombed and hasn’t come close to recapturing those costs in ticket sales. Die Hard spawned four sequels of increasingly declining quality, and based on how things have been going so far, The Running Man may not even be guaranteed a second viewing by those who caught it on the big screen.
