Sudden Death
Die Hard in a Stadium, but with some extra heart. This is by far the best Jean-Claude Van Damme film, the fight scenes are closer to Jackie Chan in variety. Hell, every setup pays off in the future, like clockwork.
The protagonist was a fireman, but after failing to save a little girl, he goes crazy and gets demoted to fire marshal in a big hockey stadium. His wife divorces him, but he still hangs out with his kids. McClane, I mean, McCord is still loved by the kids, particularly when he brings Stanley Cup tickets. The stepfather is no asshole, they are polite.
The little girl is learning sign language, and can now sign “I Love You”. This will be important in the future.
They get there, and our protagonist is the life of his workplace. All coworkers adore him, they even hold the line so the kid can stamp and older dude’s hand. This will be important in the future.
The home team mascot is a giant penguin, but underneath lies the blonde bombshell that our protagonist hangs out with. The boy is a bit older, pre-teen, so he’s starting to get that annoying Holden Caulfield personality. The girl is still naïve and childlike.
They visit the locker room (burly grown man strolling around naked don’t mix with little girls, what the fuck), go straight for the star player, but there’s also a goalkeeper that the children humiliate by repeating what the dad says when watching the game on TV. Incredibly, this seems to be a real player, the balls of that guy.
Meanwhile, the actual plot is going on in the background. It’s pretty convoluted: an evil CIA rogue agent gets together a crew to kidnap the Vice-President in his stadium box and demand they transfer billions from some sanctioned accounts or something. This involves kidnapping the chief cook’s wife, so he can let them go in and keep the VP in the box. The secret service is absolutely worthless.
The protagonist goes search for his girl, sees the mascot, but it’s a fuckup. The kid gets taken to the evil box, and the protagonist fights a wacky kitchen-based fight sequence that is very silly, but gets more hilarious the more they keep it deadpan. This is the climax of the film.
Hans Grüber literally assassinates a lot of hostages, to show he is serious. They brought in a bad tech guy to monitor the accounts, but they don’t budge, he literally plays Doom to pass the time.
Sadly, our protagonist won’t be getting laid, the mascot’s girl is found killed.
The Secret Service don’t help him, but he doesn’t care, he will find all the C4 himself, disarm it, and save his child. Saving the VP is a bonus. By this time, our protagonist is also MacGyver, he rigs some a circular saw and everything. A kind of jury rigged blowgun. This is only used once.
But wait, the secret service dude is also a terrorist, this is White House Down too. Next time they see each other, our protagonist has filled a squirt gun with lighter fluid and that traitor burns for his sins.
McClane keeps disarming bombs and escaping the bad guys, and one way to do it is by taking the goalkeeper’s outfit and get into the ice, after which he does the save of game! Not bad, for a former semi-pro from Canada. He even signs “I Love You” to his kid!
The game is almost over, but since the teams tie in the last second, the game goes into Sudden Death. There’s time for our protagonist to climb to the top, struggle with some bad guy and throw him off the rooftop, into the scoreboard. This leads to panic!
The protagonist then Tarzans his way into the box, and gets inside by throwing an improvised grenade (just acid and sodium in a couple of jars). There is still time for the bad guy to take the girl to the same rooftop and attempt to escape by helicopter, after some fisticuffs.
John shoots the helicopter out of the sky, which falls neatly into the hole and crashes to the ice. Ambulances are called, the kids love their dad, it’s all good. Roll Credits.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.