What’s Aged the Best?
Friday Night Football montage; Joe Hallenbeck's beatings; the title on the football card; the disgraced-hero backstory; bad guys saying a full name derisively; Wayans's hat; the witty exchanges; Halle Berry's brief role; the conspiracy explanation scene
In the discussion (11)
Approx. transcript time · 00:37:35Read transcript
- The Friday Night Football montage, with a question about who Bill Medlay is.
- Joe Hallenbeck is hit in the face seven times, three times in the back of the head, tasered and stabbed; he is compared with Marvin in Midnight Run for most abuse.
- Nobody is better at getting beaten up in movies than Willis, who lacked the ego seen in the Pacino speech in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
- The football card signed to the daughter works the title into the movie about as well as it gets; research traced it to the early-90s Pro Set.
- The trope of a hero who did the right thing about something terrible, then falls into a much worse job, often a former Secret Service agent, with In the Line of Fire and The Sentinel cited.
- Private detectives in movies are always drinking alcoholics sitting in cars.
- Bad guys saying someone's full name derisively, as Taylor Negron does, is a great way to mark a villain.
- Wayans's fez-style hat with the tassel is cool, also worn by Hallie Berry in Boomerang, and should come back.
- The exchanges are witty in script form and Willis somehow pulls them off; the movie is tired, drunk, sarcastic and dead inside.
- Hally Berry brings so much to a small part in only four or five minutes, which makes Boomerang's premise ludicrous.
- The owner Shelley explaining the conspiracy recalls Donald Sutherland in JFK, and the gambling-and-blackmail conspiracy could still work today.