The race of Bruce Willis is full of unforgettable movies, but the vast majority of us always remember John McClane, the mythical character he played in five films of the ‘Die Hard Jungle’ saga. The first of them launched his career on the big screen, so it is curious that he was totally opposed to the second installment including humor.
“That’s not the John McClane the public loves.”
Has been Renny Harlin, director of ‘The Jungle 2: Red Alert’, who has revealed this surprising fact in a chat with Empire. In it he has assured that Willis wanted to play McClane “completely straight, this movie had to be serious“, so no jokes, one-liners, or things like that. As expected, the rest of those involved did not like that too much and Harlin comments that he told the actor the following:
That’s not the John McClane the public loves. They feel that you are his friend now, and they don’t want to lose their friend.
However, Willis was hell-bent on it, which forced the producer Joel Silver got involved in it and a curious agreement was reached that Harlin remembers as follows:
We had a great meeting, Joel, Bruce and me. The result was that Bruce agreed to do as many takes as he wanted in the way he wanted to do it, and then we would do one take the way I wanted to do it, with humor. He did so reluctantly, and not very happily, but he did it. In the end, every funny moment that could be captured – even a smile he might have cracked before realizing the cameras were rolling – was made into the film. The first question executives asked me when they saw it was, “Does it have any more humorous moments?” I told them, “Unfortunately, I have used everything I had.”
The also director of ‘Lethal Memory’ also highlights a scene that Willis especially hated in which another character was flirting with McClane and he was pointing to his wedding ring and asking her to just give him the fax. That caused a small crisis during the filming of the film:
Bruce hated it. He said, “That’s so corny and stupid. I refuse to say it.” He spent an hour there on the counter with me begging him and Joel to get involved to get him to say it once, out of 15 takes. But he’s in the movie and people love it. He’s not just funny, he shows that he cares about his wife. He makes him relatable and really an honorable guy. Because it’s not just about saving the world, but about something much more personal.
Personally i think harlin was right and that we gained from the fact that the film maintained that sense of humor that was already so fundamental in the first installment.
In Espinof: