Did anyone else find Power Boothe's brutal executions of the hostages oddly upsetting for a mindless action movie?
shareYeah it was upsetting but it made you hate the bad guys and root for Van Damme even more.
shareYes it was pretty ruthless
shareThe film has an unnerving tone. On one level it's a cheesy action flick with lots of comedy (Powers Boothe's quips, the Big Bird fight) on the other hand it's absolutely sick as it relishes showing us numerous poor innocent people getting shot, occasionally focusing on their traumatised loved ones.
Basically a team of Hollywood suits watched Die Hard and tried to make it more humerous, more violent, with more evil villains, and it ends up being an awkward mishmash of tonally inconsistent ideas with no soul. Die Hard had wit and a hard edge, but it was very humane and you could sense director John McTiernan's presence lurking behind every frame, which gives it a unique charm. No such thing in Sudden Death.
Still, that penguin fight scene was pretty cool .
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It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing .
The penguin fight was a case in point - it was brutal, oddly prolonged, and bizarrely amusing - a massive bird mascot who towers above Van Damme then turns out to be a petite woman. WTF?
Earlier, the woman was about to shoot Van Damme’s 7 year old daughter in the head at point blank range - that’s unbelievably sick.
This film was totally made by committee, it doesn’t feel like a coherent whole at all.
I was just reading the trivia about it, as I just watched it
Apparently the first original draft of the movie was a comedy / satire, but the only scene the was unchanged was the slightly humorous long bird fight one
The rest was re-written
Fascinating. That makes a lot of sense now. Sounds like they threw in lots of murder of innocents to make the film more ‘serious’ but went totally overboard and didn’t remove enough of the comedy, like Big Bird, for it to cohere as a satisfying whole.
Another failed case of filmmaking by committee.
Hah, I wrote that trivia entry on IMDB after Randy Feldman came and talked to my film class at UNLV. I'm glad it's #1 in the trivia section now. :) He had a lot of amusing stories about Hollywood and how movies have the tendency to morph away from what the original writers envisioned. He also said that Terry Hatcher was cast in Tango and Cash entirely because she was dating one of the producers at the time, and that she was shoe-horned into much of the movie just to satisfy producer requests.
shareNo! No! No!, You're all wrong! Sudden Death is a hidden gem of an action movie and is a complete classic. Powers Boothe should have won a freaking oscar!
Herbert West: Who's going to believe a talking head? Get a job in a sideshow.
Boothe's Performance/Character is *beep* awesome. Thank god for brutal 90s Action flix.
shareNothing has yet beaten Die Hard for keeping the villainy "cruel but amusing"(Hans Gruber ruthlessly but pragmatically kills the Nakatomi boss, intends to kill everybody -- but remains civil and witty in manner throughout), but I think the pure evil of Powers Boothe's performance -- coupled with the executions or threatened executions of man, woman, and child -- makes Sudden Death one of the better knock-offs. These bad guys are BAD and it doesn't seem forced or faked. Van Damme takes 'em all out and it is satisfying every time -- and never so much so than when Boothe gets it.
I give points to writer-director Peter Hyams, who seemed to have a knack for tuning out exciting "B movies that look like A" thrillers with Capricorn One, Outland, The Star Chamber, and this. I believe that Hyams finished out his career as "Van Damme's house director" because Van Damme knew how good Sudden Death was...for what it was.
Boothe gets off too easy - a common problem with action movies, with the exception of Seagal ones where you almost feel sorry for the villain (see Marked For Death for the ultimate example).
After executing numerous innocent people, and laughing at the grieving loved ones, he deserves something closer to what Ramsey put Theon through in Game Of Thrones. Protracted torture, selective dismemberment, humiliation and prolonged psychological abuse until Boothe is reduced to a quivering worm, on display for all to laugh at.
Instead he just blows up with a helicopter - that’s way too merciful for such an evil cunt.
yes
shareAdmit the movie have strange mixed between action family movie and brutal action movie.
shareYeah the family-fun aspect is also incongruous with the tone. Van Dam’s son at the end is like ‘my dad’s a fireman!’ and the film wants you to be like ‘yay, haha!’
No. We’ve just seen countless innocent people coldly executed, leaving hundreds of grieving family members, but the film just waves them off with a quip from Powers Booth.
Hell, the daughter would be an absolute psychological wreck after witnessing the cold blooded murder of several innocents, and having her life threatened multiple times by psychotic adults intent on putting a bullet in her head.
Whoever wrote this film doesn’t seem… human.
Poor daughter, some characters will need long psychological therapy after this. The movie is rated R, like Die Hard, but the scenes are much more violent and brutal. The film could have been made a little lighter in tune and probably a little better. Despite everything, I enjoyed it.
They were like ‘let’s copy Die Hard but with MORE COMEDY and MORE VIOLENCE! Also let’s make it FAMILY FRIENDLY so kids will watch it too!’
The result is a tonally inconsistent mess that feels… icky.
The 90s really struggled with mean spirited, gratuitous violence that was simply too jarring to be enjoyed.
1990 got the ball rolling with several films
Predator 2 - penthouse scene
Robocop 2 - torturing officer duffy to death
Showdown In little Tokyo - Beheading of the girl
Action films felt they needed to be more bloody, more violent, in order to get attention.
The irony is nowadays everything is PG-13.
I didn’t have a problem with those scenes (although I haven’t seen Little Tokyo), in Pred and Roby 2 we see bad guys getting cut - I’m cool with that.
What’s disturbing about the Sudden Death violence is seeing innocent people being executed, sometimes in front of family, and a 7 year old girl about to be shot in the head by a psychotic woman until it turns out she’s out of bullets… all wrapped up in an incongruent semi-comedic tone.
It’s an unintentionally sick film.
in Pred and Roby 2 we see bad guys getting cut - I’m cool with that.
Yes, although I do want to see the violence you mentioned in Pred and Roby 2, I don’t want to see the violence in Sudden Death in which numerous innocent people are executed in a ‘comedy’.
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