Bovie Movie

This is the action thriller that minted Bruce Willis’s career, launched a franchise and still stands as a giant of the genre. Recalling the disaster movies of the 1970s, it places a group of people in peril (office workers at a Christmas party in an otherwise empty Los Angeles skyscraper) when suave Alan Rickman and his Euro-terrorists take them hostage. One man (Willis, naturally) is charged with saving them. Director John McTiernan handles the bravura, vertigo-inducing set pieces with aplomb and the script oozes dry wit, but the star of the show is Willis, as resourceful but world-weary off-duty cop John McClane, who just wants to get home for Christmas dinner. 

After a sexual harassment incident, Dennis Burke (Peter Coyote), a Nathaniel Hawthorne scholar, goes to work at a California college. He begins correspondence with an imprisoned murderer, Lydia Davis (Nastassja Kinski). Burke is finding old habits hard to break, developing relationships with obsessive coeds. Meanwhile, Lydia escapes from prison. Dennis and his colleague Thurston, a computer scientist and hacker, find themselves caught in a web of intrigue.

The National Lampoon franchise continued its nosedive into mediocrity with this lacklustre teen comedy. A spiritless melting pot of fratboy high jinks and syrupy sentimentality, director Walt Becker’s first film doesn’t seem to know whether it’s a cheeky romance or a moralistic farce. Feebly mimicking American Pie and its ilk (even casting Tara Reid as love interest Gwen), this tale of world-shy student Van Wilder, who will do anything to maintain his indefinite college stay, is just too bland to leave more than a fleeting impression. US TV star Ryan Reynolds lacks the personality and colour to play Wilder, while the humour is so weak that almost every gag falls flat. Even the attempts at “fashionable” gross-out tactics are distinctly third-rate, with the usual scatological and sexual themes hardly raising an eyebrow. This is a pitiful failure.