Tony Scott’s The Last Boy Scout is book-ended by scenes of violence taking place in football arenas, time-honored spaces of an American pastime. In the opening sequence, a young player walks onto the field and opens fire – an ominous opener that seems especially bleak this far removed from 1991. In the showstopper climax, a sniper stationed high above the action on field is attacked by one of our leads, eventually gunned down by the police and – in the film’s Grand Guignol moment – then falls into the spinning rotor of a helicopter, rendering his body into a mere splatter of blood. In these moments, The Last Boy Scout feels most like Scott’s film, yet everything in between is explicitly from the pen of its writer, Shane Black. Only this time, Black’s war isn’t on Christmas. It’s on America.
Tag: Bruce Willis
DIE HARD is perhaps one of, if not the most, critically lauded action films. Made during a glut of intense shoot-em-up action vehicles ranging from the excellent FIRST BLOOD (1982) to the considerably less excellent DEADLY PREY (1987), DIE HARD broke from the pack by being an incredibly compelling scrappy and tense action thriller. At a time when the dominant approach to action films was spectacle and scale, DIE HARD differentiated itself by being relatively low-key and deriving Hitchcockian suspense from intimate moments and normal situations.