Bovie Movie

This film is a ’90s version of the classic Robin Hood story, with Kevin Costner starring as the good-guy thief. Costner is joined in his efforts against the murdering Sheriff of Nottingham (Alan Rickman) by Morgan Freeman who plays a philosophizing Moor, and by Nick Brimble, who plays Little John (anything but little). After Robin barely survives a watery skirmish with Little John, the two become allies and Robin joins forces with Little John’s band of robber thieves to overcome the evils of the dastardly Nottingham sheriff.

Matthew McConaughey stars as explorer and adventurer Dirk Pitt in this adaptation of the best-selling novel by Clive Cussler. Pitt thinks he may have found both a fortune and the answer to a long-standing mystery when he discovers a rare coin in the waters of a river in West Africa. During the Civil War, an ironclad battleship with a valuable cargo went missing, and Pitt’s theory is that the coin places the ship somewhere in the Sahara Desert. Pitt and his goofy sidekick, Al Giordino (Steve Zahn), set out to find it, but along the way they make the acquaintance of Dr. Eva Rojas (Pen?lope Cruz), a scientist and physician who is trying to determine the source of a strange and deadly disease sweeping the nation. As Eva joins Dirk and Al, they begin to wonder if the mysteries they’re trying to uncover might be somehow linked. Sahara was only the second of Cussler’s Dirk Pitt adventures to be adapted for the screen; the first, 1980’s Raise the Titanic, was publicly dismissed by the author.

With Goldfinger, the James Bond series took a turn away from relatively straightforward spy thrillers and toward campy gadgetry, extravagant sets, and kitschy jokes. Bond (Sean Connery) has to prevent a notorious gold smuggler, appropriately named Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe), from robbing Fort Knox. Goldfinger is surrounded by evil henchmen such as the sexy female pilot Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman) and Oddjob (Harold Sakata), who kills with his steel-rimmed bowler hats. In order to stop Goldfinger, Bond has to survive several perilous situations, including a huge, deadly laser. Goldfinger is one of the most popular films in the James Bond series, and it set the tone not only for the rest of the series but also for most of the action/adventure films of the late ’60s and early ’70s.

Lethal Weapon 2 reteams Mel Gibson and Danny Glover as, respectively, “loose cannon” LA detective Martin Riggs and Riggs’ partner, the cautious family man Roger Murtaugh. The villain this time is a South African diplomat (Joss Ackland) who doubles as a drug dealer. Though Riggs knows what’s going on thanks to characterless character witness Joe Pesci, he can’t touch the villain because of “diplomatic immunity.” After perils too numerous to mention, Riggs and Murtaugh shoot it out with the heavies on the deck of a South African cargo ship. Lethal Weapon 2, of course, contains as one of its comic high-points a now famous suspense scene: Mel Gibson agonizingly attempting to extricate a terrified Danny Glover from a booby-trapped toilet seat. Gibson, Glover, Donner and Joe Pesci would be reunited three years later for Lethal Weapon 3 and in 1998 for Lethal Weapon 4.

Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh, after escaping death from the previous movies are put on a hit list by The Triads. When blood thirsty mercenaries are on their tail they team up again with Leo Getz and Lorna Cole, a newcomer (Chris Rock) to finally put an end to the Triads for good.

It’s Christmas time in L.A., and there’s an employee party in progress on the 30th floor of the Nakatomi Corporation building. The revelry comes to a violent end when the partygoers are taken hostage by a group of terrorists headed by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), who plan to steal the 600 million dollars locked in Nakatomi’s high-tech safe. In truth, Gruber and his henchmen are only pretending to be politically motivated to throw the authorities off track; also in truth, Gruber has no intention of allowing anyone to get out of the building alive. Meanwhile, New York cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) has come to L.A. to visit his estranged wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), who happens to be one of the hostages. Disregarding the orders of the authorities surrounding the building, McClane, who fears nothing (except heights), takes on the villains, armed with one handgun and plenty of chutzpah. Until Die Hard came along, Bruce Willis was merely that wisecracking guy on Moonlighting. After the film’s profits started rolling in, Willis found himself one of the highest-paid and most sought-after leading men in Hollywood.

It wasn’t as well received at the box office as the pictures that preceded it or followed it, but Peter Hunt’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the finest of the James Bond movies and also arguably the last truly great movie in the series. James Bond, portrayed here by George Lazenby (in his only performance in the role) has spent nearly two years trying to track down Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas), the head of SPECTRE. He has been taken off the case by his chief (Bernard Lee), an action the pushes him to the point of considering resigning from Her Majesty’s Secret Service, just as he opens a possible new avenue of attack on his quarry. Whilst in the field, Bond has chanced to cross paths with the Contessa Teresa Di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg), a beautiful but desperately unhappy woman, whom he rescues from one apparent suicide attempt and an embarrassing moment at a casino gaming table — the Contessa, who prefers to be called Tracy (”Teresa was a saint”), is the daughter of Marc Ange Draco (Gabriele Ferzetti), an industrial and construction magnate and also a crime boss, who is impressed with Bond personally as well as professionally, and would like to see him marry his daughter. Bond is, at first, unwilling to involve himself with a woman — any woman — on that level, but Draco’s underworld contacts give Bond a vital clue to Blofeld’s whereabouts that get him back on the case and hot on the man’s trail. Journeying incognito to Blofeld’s mountaintop retreat in the Swiss Alps, Bond finds the criminal mastermind posing as a would-be nobleman and also as a philanthropist, running a clinic devoted to the treatment and eradication of allergies. It’s all a front for a surprisingly sinister (and scientifically valid) plot for international blackmail that would make any previous Bond villain quake in fear. And in the process of staying alive long enough to have a chance of stopping Blofeld, Bond discovers the Tracy is truly like no woman he’s ever known before — one special enough that he finds himself willing to give up his life as a free-living, free-loving bachelor.

“Another basement, another elevator…how can the same thing happen to the same guy twice?” asks John McClane (Bruce Willis), in what is doubtless the key question of this film. A year after foiling the terrorist takeover of a high-rise office building in the first movie, McClane is waiting to pick up his wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), at Dulles International Airport just outside Washington, D.C., on Christmas Eve. Scheduled to arrive the same evening is Ramon Esperanza (Franco Nero), a South American political figure who is being brought to the United States to stand trial for his role in a drug-smuggling ring. However, a group of terrorists, led by renegade American military officer Col. Stuart (William Sadler), take control of the airport, scuttling radio transmissions and placing their own men in the control tower. Stuart and his men ensure that Esperanza’s plane lands safely, and then demand that Stuart and his men be given a fully-fueled 747 and free passage wherever they choose to go. Otherwise, they will guide the many circling jets waiting for landing instructions into definite crash landings, killing the many passengers on board. Not willing to stand aside as terrorists once again threaten his wife’s life, the wise-cracking McClane once again leaps into action to foil Stuart’s plans and bring the passenger jets safely to the ground. William Atherton, John Amos, Dennis Franz, and John Leguizamo highlight the supporting cast.

LA cop Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson), whose wife has recently died, is a loose cannon with a seeming death wish. This makes him indispensable in collaring dangerous criminals, but a liability to any potential partners. Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover), a conservative family man who wants to stay alive for his upcoming 50th birthday, is partnered with Riggs. As Riggs gets to know Murtaugh and his family, he begins to mellow, though his insistence on using guerilla tactics to catch criminals is still (put mildly) above and beyond the call of duty. The main villain is The General (Mitchell Ryan), a drug dealer responsible for the death of the daughter of one of Murtaugh’s oldest friends. The General is also in charge of a deadly, militia-like gang of smugglers. Adding fuel to the fire is The General’s chief henchman, played with all stops out by Gary Busey. Moviegoers familiar only with the relatively tongue-in-cheek Lethal Weapon sequels may be amazed to find out how dangerous and unpredictable Riggs is in the first Lethal Weapon — and how likely it seems that Murtaugh might not survive until fade-out time.

Though not Ian Fleming’s most famous James Bond novel, 1962’s The Spy Who Loved Me was distinguished by the unique device of telling the story from the heroine’s point of view; in fact, Bond doesn’t make an appearance until the book is two-thirds over. This would hardly work in the film world’s Bond franchise, so the original austere plotline of the novel was eschewed altogether in favor of a labyrinthine story involving outer-space extortion. The leading lady, a “hard-luck kid” in the original, is now sexy Russian secret agent Barbara Bach, who joins forces with Bond (Roger Moore, making his third appearance as 007) to foil yet another megalomaniac villain (Curt Jurgens), who plans to threaten New York City with nuclear weaponry. Beyond the eye-popping opening ski-jump sequence, the film’s best scenes involve seven-foot-two Richard Kiel as steel-toothed henchman Jaws. Fifteen scriptwriters worked on The Spy Who Loved Me; only two were credited, including Bond-film veteran Richard Maibaum.