Tag: John McTiernan

REVIEW: Predator [1987]

Jared Mobarak

I ain’t got time to bleed. I really hope the anecdote is true that Jim and John Thomas wrote their script for Predator based on a joke positing how the only opponent left for Rocky Balboa to fight after Ivan Drago was an alien. It’s a cheesy thought and cheesier premise, so the fact that they and director John McTiernan could craft something as severely brutal as the finished film is a testament to their craft. They decide to move beyond pure action adventure motives, utilizing horror tropes for their…

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REVIEW: Die Hard [1988]

Jared Mobarak

“Make fists with your toes” It’s become such an action classic with numerous sequels, copycats, and homages and yet Die Hard as we know it almost never was—by choice. Novelist Roderick Thorp wrote Nothing Lasts Forever, his follow-up to The Detective, thirteen years after the original because he saw The Towering Inferno and dreamt up an idea of one man in a skyscraper hunted by terrorists. It starred his NYPD Detective Joe Leland, now aged and retired, visiting his daughter’s office building in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve where he…

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