[QUOTE=Sitnam]
I’ll grant you the first part is a plot hole, but had Jones not gotten to Marion at all, the Nazi’s would’ve had the amulet, would’ve translated it properly and would’ve gotten the Ark.
[/QUOTE]
Nope. Toht followed Jones to Marion Ravenwood (you see him on the Sea Clipper, reading a newspaper); they were apparently unaware of Marion’s location or the fact that she retained the amulet. (Perhaps that’s why Abner stuck her tending a bar in the middle of nowhere.) And even if they had recovered the amulet, properly transcribed it, found the Well of Souls, and opened it up…they still would have been vaporized by their lack of humility. Whether the (evil cartoon) Nazis recover the Ark or not is immaterial; they still couldn’t have used it against the Allied Forces. Jones could have stayed home, sipping herbal tea and reading King Solomon’s Mines, and the world would have been just as safe. However, we would have been out a two-hour roller coaster ride of a movie, and the doubly classic ending (paying homage to Citizen Kane and recognizing Jones’ futility): “We have top men working on it…top…men.”
Then there’s Goldfinger, the Bond movie in which Bond does absolutely nothing worthwhile. It’s a great, iconic movie, but even a superficial analysis shows that the entire plot could have essentially transpired without Bond…unless you accept the implication that Bond ‘converted’ Pussy Galore from being a man-hating lesbian into a passionate heterosexual willing to betray her conspirator and collaborate with the U.S. Government. (Personally, I think she saw her opportunity to get out of the increasingly untenable scheme bourne of Auric Goldfinger’s malignant narcissism and jumped at the chance.)
As for Hard Boiled–sure, there’s a lot of action, but essentially no story. I don’t know about you, but I find that pretty tiresome after thirty minutes of nonstop bloodshed. One of the marvels about Die Hard is the pacing. McClane isn’t some invulnerable bulletproof superhero; he’s a guy that doesn’t really want to be there, scared for his life, would be perfectly happy to step aside and let the authorities do something if they’d only do something worthwhile, and when he gets into a fight he gets seriously bloodied and beaten. It’s actually possible to suspend disbelief and accept that wisecracking Bruce Willis–an intolerable personality in most films–is actually scared for his life and that of his estranged wife, and only doing crazy shit like jumping off of a building with a fire hose wrapped around his waist because the alternative is credibly more risky. McClane gets to rest once in a while–usually while picking glass out of his feet, or checking what was up with “the man upstairs”–and those interludes gives the viewer time to relax and see McClane as a human being rather than a cartoon figurine.
I’d have to agree that Predator has a great testosterone level, and more B-grade actors than you can pack into a two hours, plus two then-future state governors in the cast, and lines like, “I ain’t got time to bleed!” and “If it bleeds, we can kill it.” The final act was somewhat silly, though. We’re supposed to believe that the Predator can’t see Duke’s infrared signiture because of a little bit of mud? This was Schwartzneggger’s last heyday; after this, his films were mostly self-parody, even good ones like Terminator 2 and True Lies.
Stranger
). Time to go hit IMDB and see what else there is to see…
