... he didn't like the quality of the script, but what exactly was it about the script for this movie that made him dislike it, and how come he hadn't had a problem with say several other poor scripts he DID choose and accept for some of his rather disappointing movies?
shareinteresting. i'd guess the daylight script wasn't far off from a script like this.
shareMaybe he somehow found the tone of the movie uneven from reading the pages of the script?
sharemaybe fighting a female penguin
shareHe didn't have a problem with killing that treacherous lady cop in "Cobra" (1986).
sharetrue
shareBut then given how in his career Stallone chose some rather poor and mediocre scripts, like for movies like Stop or My Mum Will Shoot, Driven, Get Carter remake etc, I wonder what aspects of this film's script he considered poor.
sharemaybe it was too close to a die hard and bruce willis would have made fun of him, or too close to an undersiege.
shareWith Stop I believe Schwarzenegger tricked him by saying he was interested in it. Schwarzenegger had done a bunch of successful movies while the majority of Stallone's works outside of Rocky & Rambo were flopping/ underperformed, so he figured Arnie knew best.
With Get Carter well it was a remake of a popular movie, so I guess he figured folk would rush out to see it. Also I believe Michael Caine said the original script was much different from how it turned out because of middling producers.
😂
shareStallone was trying to avoid action movies since he was entering his 50s and had said that it did not look realistic for him to be playing that kinda role any longer (which he obviously went back to and is still playing in his late 70s... and he's great!)
Anyways, Sly was trying to look for different characters, Daylight's Kit Latura was a NYC cab driver and former paramedic, who was just trying to help people survive this situation and get out of the tunnel, he wasn't shooting machine guns and beating an army of terrorists on his own.
Daylight was more Poseidon Adventure than Die Hard.
They are both weak scripts though, but from the actor's pov, I understand why Sly chose one over the other.
Likely he made Daylight because disaster movies were trendy at the time and he wanted to capitalize on that. Independence Day and Twister had just come out earlier in the year when Daylight was released, and Dante's Peak and Volcano were slated for the next year.
Sudden Death, on the other hand, was a Die Hard clone that came out seven years after DH did, and that followed several imitators, including one of Stallone's own in Cliffhanger.
I'm a big Van Damme fan but Sudden Death is not a movie I ever feel compelled to rewatch. It's not that it's terrible; it's just that it's not particularly good.
Really, it comes off as exactly what it is: A cheap knock off of other, superior films.
I can understand why Sly passed. He had already made his Die Hard movie with Cliffhanger.
Also. Towards the end of Sudden Death, the bit with the helicopter seems to almost copy the helicopter climax from Cliffhanger.
shareI can't say I remember it well enough to comment on specific elements, but I'm sure you're correct.
This was really about the time that Van Damme's output started going to shit. He made his name with martial arts movies, and then, for some reason, decided he didn't want to be a martial arts guy anymore. No, instead, he wanted to be a regular action guy who occasionally threw some punches and kicks.
This shift started with Double Impact, which is kind of like a hybrid martial arts movie/straight action movie. And then it was mostly complete when he made Universal Soldier, Nowhere to Run, Hard Target and Timecop.
Sudden Death, to me, was the movie that signaled things were headed downhill, and while there have been some bright spots between then and now, he never really has recovered.
In interviews that Van Damme did for a French magazine called Impact, he claimed that he wanted to be as big as Stallone and Schwarzenegger. This is why he wanted to move away from doing pure martial arts films.
shareThat makes sense. He WAS a top action guy for a very brief period of time so I can see how he could convince himself that it was possible but, frankly, Arnold and Stallone both had attributes that Van Damme never had. Arnold not only had next-level charisma but he also worked with top directors like James Cameron and John McTiernan to make some stone-cold action classics. Stallone also made some truly classic films and, on top of that, he was a very talented writer and director.
Van Damme was certainly charismatic, and he could do action, and his martial arts ability was a thing of beauty, but he wasn't a writer or director, and he never got paired with A-list directors who were able to produce films on the level of Terminator/T2, Rocky, Total Recall, Cliffhanger, etc. Van Dame made some truly classic martial arts films, like Bloodsport and Kickboxer, but his straight action films were pretty lackluster, in my opinion. I never feel a desire to go back and watch Sudden Death or Maximum Risk or even Universal Soldier.
I'm sure you've heard that Van Damme was more or less blacklisted after Time Cop because he acted like an asshole and demanded too much money after that movie hit $100 million. It would be interesting to see how his career would've gone differently if he had been more reasonable.
He also had a cocaine problem. In the mid-nineties, he talked about wanting to work with Tony Scott and Oliver Stone (who is a fan of Hong Kong cinema like him).
shareIt would be interesting to know how Van Damme's career might have gone differently if he had worked with some better directors and gotten some better scripts.
This is not to say that everyone he worked with sucked, but they weren't A-listers. And even when he did work with a good director, the work the director did with Van Damme was not his best. For instance, Peter Hyams' films with Van Damme were a big step down from 2010, and Hard Target was nowhere near as good as Face/Off or many of Woo's Hong Kong films.
The exception was Sheldon Lettich. When Lettich and Van Damme worked together, Sheldon was at his best.
The script is godawful, one minute it’s a goofy comedy, the next innocent people are being executed in cold blood leaving their relatives traumatised, or a little girl is about to be shot in the head at point blank range. It’s a sickly sweet tonal mess.
shareSo basically speaking, in a nutshell, even though it does state that in this movie's "trivia", its quite possible that Sylvester Stallone refused to accept the role in this movie and star in it for reasons beyond him simply finding this movie's script quality, for a better word, "lacking". Correct?
P.S. Does Mr Stallone in your opinion, or in fact even, have a talent for choosing or even analysing correctly film SCRIPTS? Thanks.
Do you watch American sports?
shareErr, not very often, no, but how is this relevant here? To the subject of Sly's script choosing and script analysing abilities?
shareOkay that makes sense. So in American sports, particularly hockey and basketball, you play 4 rounds. Each round you play the same team at most 7 times. The first team to reach 4 wins moves onto the next round. This movie takes place during game 7 in the 4th round. Why would the terrorists plan this when they don't know if Pittsburgh will even make the finals, and also don't know that they will have to play the full 7 games? The story itself just doesn't make sense.
shareAnd also the fact that there seem to be little to no security in that hockey stadium and that when all the explosions happen outside the game doesn't get postponed etc.
shareSly was quite particular with his scripts even in the 90s. He usually wanted to be in a film where he could actually act a bit (remember he got an oscar nomination for his performance in Rocky which guys like Arnold and Van Damme were nowhere near getting) thus he wouldn't do a film if it was all action. Take for example...
Cliffhanger: Gabe's guilt over the girl's death at the beginning and his reluctance to climb again, plus his antagonistic relationship with Hal who blames him for the accident.
Demolition Man: Spartan awaking from being frozen and coping with everyone he knows being gone, and now adapting to the future and its differences to the past
Daylight: Kit being a disgraced former medic who was responsible for accidentally killing people, is not accepted by anyone he tries to rescue and treated with distrust and thus has to win them over
Assassins: There is a lot of acting by Sly in this film, it's not just guns and explosions.
Most of the 90s films done by JCVD, Arnold, Seagal & Lundgren were probably stuff that Sly rejected because they didn't have enough of an edge for Sly, not enough depth to the character he was playing. He was very good at playing relatable characters and 'Sudden Death' was likely just too thin for him.