Christmas action movies provide holiday entertainment alternatives

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

December means the repetition of old rituals that people have practiced for decades or even centuries: eggnog, carols ad nauseum and holiday classics on DVD. While many take comfort in the familiarity of “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Miracle on 34th Street,” for some the holidays bring with them a sense of drudgery — dreading yet one more cringe-inducing rendition of “Jingle Bills” on the radio and the same 10 flicks taking over the airwaves the final month of the year.

Yes, there’s even a segment of the movie-appreciating public that spins movie discs that utilize the holiday season as the backdrop for an entirely different type of yuletide joy: action movies.

So if you’re one of the chosen few who appreciates “Christmas action movies,” here are eight alternative holiday flicks to ease the pain of family visits and fruit cakes. And just because it’s Christmas doesn’t mean you have to stop enjoying your entertainment loudly and explosively. For as Hans Gruber once observed: “Now I have a machine gun. Ho … ho … ho.”

 

8) “The Long Kiss Goodnight” (1996)

“That’s right, you can’t kill me, mother*******!”

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Or perhaps it was screenwriter Shane Black’s then-unheard-of $4 million purchase fee and the addition of “Die Hard 2” and “Cliffhanger” director Renny Harlin that set expectations, if not high, at least to a level of churning out a semi-decent action flick.

Alas, “The Long Kiss Goodnight” is what we in the biz like to refer to as a “turkey.” It’s included here only because, in its two hours, a lot of stuff goes boom in the days leading up to Christmas.

The plot, such as it is, involves suburban mom Samantha Caine (Geena Davis) who can’t seem to remember anything before her domestic, tranquil life commenced eight years ago. But then bad guys show up and start shooting, and Samantha learns she is actually CIA operative Charlie Baltimore, an assassin long thought dead but who, in her amnesia, traded a sniper rifle for a kitchen apron. Her only hope to remember her past life (cause, you know, who’d want to forget all that?) may be private detective Mitch Henessey (Samuel L. Jackson).

Chases, crashes, improbable probabilities and epic gun battles ensue — absolutely none of it believable. All of that is fine in the service of a solid story, but the script is an absolute disaster. Mr. Black, who wrote “Lethal Weapon,” was then at the height of his hubris and star power in an informal war with Joe Eszterhas to see who could sell for the most cheese — with no one to tell him maybe this script wasn’t a good idea. Little wonder the wealthy scribe then disappeared for a while from Hollywood not long after.

The best thing about the flick is Mr. Jackson, who screams and rants as he always does, so much so that you can’t help but smile as he chews his way through every scene he’s in with typical overacting abandon.

After “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” you’ll likely never look at Christmas the same way again.

 

7) Turbulence (1997)

“That’s it. I’m never flying this airline again!”

“Turbulence” is essentially a hot mess in search of validation by having a “strong female character” in Lauren Holly, who stars alongside Ray Liotta in a Christmas Eve thriller that takes place aboard a transcontinental flight transporting convicted murdered Ryan Weaver (Mr. Liotta) from New York to Los Angeles. To say things don’t go as planned would be an understatement, as bullets fly, U.S. Marshalls are killed and Mr. Liotta and Miss Holly face off in a battle of the witless.

This is the kind of film that is made to be enjoyed with stiff drinks in a group setting, as the film piles on both the disasters and the stupidity as Mr. Liotta goes from charmer to ranting maniac on a dime and Miss Holly — grossly miscast as the saving-the-day flight attendant — executes decisions that make even co-eds running from masked killers in slasher flicks seem Einsteinian by comparison.

There’s of course almost-crashes and near-disasters as Miss Holly must guide the plane somehow into a soft landing at LAX, which only ratchets up the audience Schadenfreude even more.

A word of advice: Don’t watch “Turbulence” alone. Or, if you must, do so with a bottle of scotch at your side. You’re welcome.

 

6) “Batman Returns” (1992)

“Merry Christmas, Alfred. Good will toward men … and women.”

Hopes were high that Tim Burton’s 1989 re-imagining of the Batman mythos would be followed by an equally exciting sequel, but 1992’s “Batman Returns,” despite a rather ambitious production design and intentions, never quite got there. And how could it? “Batman” was that rare superhero film (for its day) that combined a great story with one of the great cinematic villains of all time in Jack Nicholson’s Joker.

That said, “Batman Returns” does take place at Christmas and provides enough entertainment to make it better viewing than say the more recent Adam Sandler flicks.

Still nursing psychological wounds from his epic battle with the Joker, Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) is called back into action as the Batman when the marshaled forces of the Penguin (Danny DeVito) rain havoc down on Gotham City. In a bit of a head-scratcher, the Penguin aims to become mayor of Gotham while masking his true plan to murder all of the town’s first-born in retribution for his parents tossing him into the sewer as a baby.

There was really no way to replicate the awesomeness of the ’89 original, and in “Returns” Mr. Burton made less of a Dark Knight film and more a parade of the grotesques marching to the tune of a Batman plot (think “Edward Scissorhands” dropped into a superhero story). The overall end result is a bit of a schizophrenic dud, but there are some things to cheer about, namely an ironic romance between Wayne and sexy Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer), who fights Batman at night as Catwoman. There’s also an uncharacteristically subdued performance by Christopher Walken and some genuinely well-done action scenes. And Miss Pfeiffer sure knows how to fill out a vinyl black costume.

Mr. Burton gave it his best, but after the original film, he should have passed the bat-mantle on to another director — but one other than Joel Schumacher, whose abominable “Batman Forever” (1995) and “Batman & Robin” (1997) would hurry the franchise into an ignominious grave until Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy rebirthing.

 

5) “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” (2005)

“I want you to picture a bullet in your head. Can you do that for me?”

Remember what I said earlier about Shane Black going into self-exile after “The Long Kiss Goodnight”? Well, the uberwriter returned to Hollywood in the mid-aughts to direct his own screenplay based on a Brett Halliday novel. “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” (so-named for the style of film, as decreed by Pauline Kael) is a Hollywood noir comedy that features Robert Downey Jr. in some of his first acting since getting sober and Val Kilmer as a prissy detective who joins him to solve a case.

Oh yeah, and it’s Christmastime in L.A.

Mr. Downey plays Harry Lockhart, a thief who, in a desperate bid to escape pursuers, wanders into a Hollywood audition and absolutely wows a cabal of producers by spilling his guts in a monologue about his life. Mr. Kilmer is Gay Perry, a PI whose case will intertwine with Lockhart’s life in ways that will fascinate any viewer. Mr. Downey and Mr. Kilmer have awesome chemistry and play off each other’s screen types rather well.

“Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” is, at its heart, a black comedy and sendup of both detective stories and Hollywood noir, offering up reversals and plot revelations while smartly playing it all for laughs. It also showed that the years of licking his post-“Long Kiss Goodnight” wounds did Mr. Black some good when it came time to get back to moviemaking.

 

4) Gremlins (1984)

“They’re gremlins, Kate, just like Mr. Futterman said.”

Jumping off from the World War II myth that mean little creatures often sabotaged U.S. aircraft — which more likely were simply built on the quick and rushed to the front — “Gremlins” brings said premise to idyllic Kingston Falls, where a hapless inventor (Hoyt Axton) returns to the family home with a diminutive, furry “mogwai” creature, whom he rechristens as Gizmo (voiced by Howie Mandel), as a Christmas gift for son Billy (Zach Galligan).

But all gifts come with restrictions, and so Gizmo cannot get wet (lest he breed), exposed to sunlight (lest he melt) or eat after midnight (lest he turn into an evil gremlin). It goes without saying that all three rules are broken, leading to a horde of vile little beasties running roughshod over town, destroying everything in sight, requiring Billy, girlfriend Kate (Phoebe Cates) and Gizmo to conjure all manner of weapon to take down the critters, be it a baseball bat or a movie theater showing “Snow White.”

It’s more dark comedy than action movie, but “Gremlins” has enough explosions and melting creatures to satisfy the adventurous movie itch in December.

 

3) “Die Hard 2: Die Harder” (1990)

“How can the same s*** happen to the same guy twice?”

In the not-terribly-original department, 20th Century Fox thought it would be cool to copy the formula of the original “Die Hard,” right down to Christmas Eve shenanigans, but this time set at Washington Dulles International Airport, thus broadening the canvas for once-again-in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time John McClane (Bruce Willis) — and thankfully this time giving him some shoes!

Sequels are tricky business: They have to be different enough from their predecessors to not be a precise retread while nonetheless still checking off much of what made earlier iterations successful. Ergo, “Die Hard 2” returns the action to Christmas, pits McClane once again versus a team of hardened terrorists and gives him soft targets in the forms of cranky bureaucrats and self-righteous do-gooders who decry his one-man style. In this last point, “Die Hard 2” excels thanks to a scenery-chewing performance by “NYPD Blue” star Dennis Franz as an airport police chief who reams out McClane at every opportunity — and applying every four-letter word in the manual — the great John Amos as stentorian anti-terror platoon leader Maj. Grant, whose military training rubs up against McClane’s lone-wolf McQuaid tactics, and the late Fred Dalton Thompson (later a U.S. senator from Tennessee) as the ATC master who can’t decide if McClane is right about his hunch or just a holiday nuisance.

Reliable character actor William Sadler has the somewhat-thankless task of filling in the big shoes left behind by Alan Rickman from the original, and Mr. Sadler’s Col. Stuart, while no Hans Gruber, proves a chilling and cunning villain — introduced shadowboxing in the nude, no less — whose plans take McClane, and audiences, on one hell of a Christmas ride.

(Mr. Sadler told me earlier this year, while promoting the recent film “Freedom,” that “villains are delicious to play. They tend to be brilliant minds. That’s how I felt about Col. Stuart in ’Die Hard 2.’”)

 

2) Lethal Weapon (1987)

“I’m too old for this s***.”

Mismatched buddy comedies go back to the earliest days of cinema, and in the ’80s many screenwriters attempted to bring odd-couple chemistries to the action genre, birthing the microgenre of “action comedy.” As the ’80s and ’90s wore on, the attempts became far more about comedy than action, but “Lethal Weapon” was essentially lightning in a bottle that has never been repeated.

Yes, it’s Christmastime in L.A., and veteran detective Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) is newly paired with suicidal rogue cop Martin Riggs (a pre-crazy Mel Gibson) to solve a prostitute’s murder with a connection to Murtaugh’s past. The two perfectly mismatched cops must learn to trust one another as partners as the case slides deeper and deeper into drug running, hired killers, kidnappings and shadowy, Vietnam-era CIA ops.

At the center of it all is the dynamic between the excellent Messrs. Glover and Gibson that, despite its inherent play of opposites, never feels written to be dramatic. Here are two actors at the tops of their games in a cop drama with living, breathing characters whose choices are made at the demands of their natures rather than because the script says they must.

Murtaugh lives in a big suburban home with his family; Riggs lives in a beachside trailer with his dog. Murtaugh is thoughtful and cautious; Riggs is impulsive and withdrawn. The case can only be solved if they work together. The genius of the writing is that the skin colors of Riggs and Murtaugh are entirely incidental to their characters. The story would still work if Riggs were black and Murtaugh white, or if both were white, or both were black.

Much like the “Die Hard” series, the “Lethal Weapon” franchise ran out of gas and became a tired self-parody by the time the disastrous “Lethal Weapon 4” put the final nail in the coffin in 1998 — as evidenced by a scene that forced chuckles out of the main characters and audience thanks to, yes, laughing gas.

What the original “Lethal Weapon” offers is characters we care about growing and changing as they battle the bad guys (including the creepy Gary Busey) over the Christmas season — even going meta by having Mr. Busey angrily catching a classic Christmas flick on television. 

 

1) Die Hard (1988)

“Come out to the coast, we’ll get together, have a few laughs.”

Thus sayeth down-on-his-luck New York cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) while crawling through a ventilation shaft after being shot at by European crooks a third of the way through the greatest of all anti-Christmas flicks. At the time Mr. Willis was primarily known for the TV detective series “Moonlighting” and the offbeat comedy “Blind Date,” and his casting as a rubbish-mouthed, blue-collar cop out of his element in an L.A. high-rise took both guts and a certain eye for potential on the part of producers Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver and director John McTiernan after bigger names Frank Sinatra and Arnold Schwarzenegger passed (when the film was initially conceived as a sequel to “Commando”).

But own the film — and the ensuing franchise — Mr. Willis does as the plucky Gotham detective tangling with a team of German gunslingers on Christmas Eve. “Die Hard” became the schema for a long wolf against a team of baddies so much so that for years Hollywood-speak took its formula into multiple directions in an attempt to ape its success, with such permutations as “Die Hard on a battleship” (“Under Siege”), “Die Hard on a bus” (“Speed”), “Die Hard on a plane” (“Passenger 57,” “Executive Decision”), “Die Hard on a train” (“Under Siege 2: Dark Territory”) and, inevitably, “Die Hard the lessers” (“Die Hard”s 4 and 5).

The action classic also produced one of cinema’s greatest villains in the charismatic Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), a droll, serpentine intellectual nonetheless capable of the most rapacious violence when his aims require. The scene where Gruber, upon running into a severely dirty McClain, tries to get out of the situation by claiming to be a hostage — replete with American accent — is masterfully played, and both actors apply several levels of subtlety, with first-time audiences never quite certain who is playing whom.

Though copied and cloned numerous times since, “Die Hard”’s plot and structure — including its East Coast-versus-West Coast character duality — were once strikingly fresh and original, which has inarguably helped it attain cult status as the definitive Christmas action thriller.

And just in time for Christmas, “Die Hard” will be screening in District environs at Bethesda Row Cinema Wednesday and at the AFI Silver in Silver Springs Tuesday and Thursday (who’s got the moxie to attend all three?).