Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Steven Spielberg, Steven Soderbergh, Oliver Stone, Clint Eastwood, Ridley Scott, and Francis Ford Coppola are among the legendary filmmakers who have released two movies in a single year. Those directors are some of the most acclaimed in the history of the medium, with multiple Oscars to their names and some of the greatest films of all-time on their collective resumes. But none were as hardcore as Renny Harlin. Within nine days in July 1990, the Finnish-born director debuted Die Hard 2: Die Harder and The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, movies that planted him firmly among the top directors of the decade … if only the 1990s stopped before 1995.
But we’ll get to that. Harlin came to Hollywood in the 1980s, but didn’t break big until the end of the decade. Hired to direct A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, allegedly after filming started, he used that film’s box office success to land The Adventures of Ford Fairlane at 20th Century Fox, an R-rated detective story with a Shane Black cosplay script starring Andrew Dice Clay. The studio executives were so impressed with what they saw, he quickly landed the sequel to Die Hard — filming the action movie just two weeks after production on Ford Fairlane wrapped.
On the set of Die Hard, no one seemed to have any illusions that what they were doing held any great cinematic value. “To some extent, you have to give the audience what they expect, but you also want to give them more,” Harlin told the New York Times in 1989. “For them, it’s like reading a book and wishing it hadn’t ended because they got so involved in the characters. Making the sequel is like writing new chapters for the book.
“We call it ‘replicating the experience,'” he added. “You want the audience to feel the same excitement, and you want to give them the same kinds of payoffs as the original, but you want to do it in a different fashion.”
(Said star Bruce Willis in the same piece: “This is a commercial venture. Some of the parts that I accept in Hollywood I do for purely commercial reasons.” Movies, now more than ever!)
But Harlin’s mercenary attitude served him well on Die Hard 2: Die Harder, a sequel that leaned into the absurdity of its existence. In one of the film’s most memorable moments, Willis’ put-upon New York cop John McClane wonders aloud, “How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?”
Thirty years later, Die Hard 2 often feels like a punchline despite its box office success (it finished No. 7 on the list of highest-grossing films of the year, just behind Total Recall). It’s stuck between two far more respected movies — the original Die Hard and the New York-set, shoulda-been-franchise-ended Die Hard with a Vengeance (the less said about whatever has happened to the Die Hard franchise since, the better). But that does a disservice to Harlin’s go-for-broke style and stylistic flair. Die Hard 2 is hyper-violent and often funny (Willis might have done the movie for his paycheck, but he’s fully committed to the bit). Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel loved it. “Like the Dutch-born Paul Verhoeven, Harlin has taken Hollywood commercial moviemaking, shaken it and given it new energy,” Ebert wrote in his review, where he also admitted to thinking Die Hard 2 was better than its lauded predecessor.
Unfortunately for Harlin, the high lasted nine days. On July 11, as outrage against Clay for his homophobic and sexist stand-up material hit a fever pitch reserved nowadays for mask defying idiots trying to barge into Trader Joe’s, Ford Fairlane was dead on arrival.
“It was just great fun to make. We happened to have very bad timing,” Harlin said of the film years later. “There was a strong tide that turned just then because Andrew Dice Clay was incredibly popular when we started the movie, but when the movie came out, there was a huge backlash to the sort of comedy that he had done that was considered anti-gay and anti-feminist and so on. It really set up a roadblock against our movie, and unfortunately, we were caught in that, because I don’t think our movie had any elements in it like that. Therefore, Ford Fairlane wasn’t very successful — but it has kind of a cult-status, and I run into guys in bars who say, ‘Hey, I liked Ford Fairlane.'” (Sadly, that “cult-status” has not resulted in the film’s distributor, 20th Century Fox/Disney, making the film available to rent, own, or stream digitally.)
It didn’t really matter, of course. Die Hard 2 opened the door for Harlin to direct Cliffhanger with Sylvester Stallone in 1993. That same year, he married Oscar-winning actress Geena Davis. Together they formed a production company and set out to turn Davis into an action star. Their first attempt was Cutthroat Island, a calamitous 1995 flop that almost single-handedly wrecked Harlin and Davis’s career.
“Originally, Michael Douglas was supposed to star in Cutthroat Island. And he walked away. At that point, I was left there with my then-wife, Geena Davis and myself, and a company that was already belly-up [Carolco]. We begged to be let go,” Harlin said in 2011. “We begged that we didn’t have to make this movie. And I don’t think I’ve ever said this in any other interview. We begged that we not be put in this position.”
The fallout was so severe, not even the following year’s action classic The Long Kiss Goodnight where Davis absolutely fulfilled the vision of an action hero, nor 1999’s shlock fave Deep Blue Sea could put Harlin back on a Hollywood track. After a string of flops in the 2000s, he left Los Angeles to make movies in China.
“I feel that, for a long time, the number of studio movies being made in Hollywood has gone down every year. It’s either the Marvel-type superhero movies or the Blumhouse-type of low-budget horror films,” Harlin said in 2019. “There are a very small number of movies in between. It’s not at all like it was when I went there in the ’80s and ’90s. It’s all Netflix and Amazon now, and I like making theatrical movies.” Someday, maybe he’ll get the chance to do it again.
