Plan B Forum

Late yesterday afternoon, I was flipping through the TV listings, and I saw that Diehard With Avengence was showing on TNT.

In my opinion it's the best of the "Diehard" series, (it has a lot of great action and plot twists) and Tati had never seen it, so we sat down to watch it...

Here's the basic plot, from IMDB:

John McClane is now almost a full-blown alcoholic and is suspended from the NYPD. But when a bomb goes off in the Bonwit Teller Department Store the police go insane trying to figure out what's going on. Soon, a man named Simon calls and asks for McClane. Simon tells Inspector Walter Cobb that McClane is going to play a game called "Simon Says". He says that McClane is going to do the tasks he assigns him. If not, he'll blow off another bomb. With the help of a Harlem electrician, John McClane must race all over New York trying to figure out the frustrating puzzles that the crafty terrorist gives him.

There's a scene very early in the movie where Bruce Willis, (McClane) is directed by Simon to go stand out on a street corner deep in Harlem in his underwear wearing a sandwich board...

It's a critical scene, because it sets up the relationship between McClane and "Zeus" (the Harlem repair shop owner, played brilliantly by Samuel L. Jackson) which is central to the movie.

In the original version, the words that the terrorist tells McClane he has to have written in big letters on this sandwich board, as he stand wearing it in his underwear on a street corner in Harlem are:

I HATE NIGGERS

Jackson sees this, comes out of his shop realizing this is going to cause big trouble. A group of young local street toughs are provoked by this bizarre display, and attack them...

In the basic cable sanitized version we saw yesterday, the words on the sandwich board have been changed to:

I HATE EVERYBODY

Which makes the whole scene (Zeus running out to deal with McClane, and the subsequent attack and their escape, which sets the premise for the whole rest of the movie) make absolutely no sense...

It's one thing, I suppose, to butcher a movie in the name of Political Correctness by revising things that are peripheral, but if you're going to do it with something that's central to the plot development, why even bother to air the damn movie?

That's mad.

Hey, he's got a shirt on too!!!

It was an incredibly clumsy way to "fix" it, in that, as you said, it completely destroys the sense of what's going on.

But the usage of the word in this case falls in one of those iffy areas. It's not Atticus Finch saying, "Don't say 'nigger', Scout, it's common," nor is it a thoroughly bad type using it which would just be a part of his badness (is that a word?). Yes, McClane is being forced to wear the sign. But does he hate wearing the sign because he hates the word, or is his only concern with wearing the sign that it could get him killed, while his attitude towards the word itself remains ambiguous?

Why didn't they change it to "I hate black people"? Somewhat dampens the deep visceral reaction that the n-word would have in that context, but would still get him killed in that neighbourhood.

Why didn't they change it to "I hate black people"?

That very thought occurred to me too; at least then the scene would have still made some sense...

Though I don't think the real point of the scene was to examine McClaine's personal views on the word "nigger" (it's pretty clear from the rest of the movie and the evolution of his relationship with Jackson that the character isn't a racist)

I think the idea was that Simon wanted him to stand out in the middle of Harlem wearing a sign with words that would maximize the chances that he would be attacked, and possibly killed; words that would be the most inflammatory in the situation...

I get that, and I get that "black people" waters that down somewhat, but not so much as to ruin the scene. At least, it's a lot better than "I hate everybody".

I wasn't meaning that his personal view of the word was the point of the scene, what I meant was, unless the character's opinion of the word and the way he/she is using it is blatantly obvious, then the writer is entering some very choppy waters. It's probably ok for someone to use it in the context of denouncing its use, and it's probably ok for someone to use it when there is nothing redeeming about them that would create even a hint of acceptability about its use, but anything in between is probably too ambiguous to risk for prime-time television.

Lord Jim wrote: I think the idea was that Simon wanted him to stand out in the middle of Harlem wearing a sign with words that would maximize the chances that he would be attacked, and possibly killed; words that would be the most inflammatory in the situation...

He also was on a win/win if he showed Mclean didn't have the guts to go through with it.

What's with the shirt though?

Bruce Willis's nipples are obviously not very PC...

That's weird about the shirt...

He wasn't wearing one in the version we saw yesterday...

Come to think of it, that whole picture is kind of strange...

The background is completely different from the original; I wonder if it was photo shopped...

Here's an image that looks what was in the movie we saw yesterday...

My, oh my.

Another reason why I killed off my CATV more than a decade ago.

Watch only DVD or VHS now.

I am free to watch an un-etited/sanitized film they way the director saw fit.

From the pix Gob posted, I wonder if they actually shot a second scene (maybe at a later date), with Willis wearing a shirt & the different sign. The letters are written differently (the E in "hate" is very noticeably different), the background is different enough that I suspect it may be a different area. Actuyally, the signboard itself looks a bit different, though that could easily be the photo quality.

I refuse to watch movies I've never seen before on commercial television, because of stupid editing like this, and also because the repeated commercial breaks disrupt the mood of the film and thus the overall experience.

Well, maybe this thread needs the counter point. We are talking Die Hard here, not Citizen Kane. It's not like our civilization suffered a major loss, as much as I enjoy the Die Hard series for fun, action adventure. And Die Hard With a Vengeance was rated R, so it needed to be toned down for broadcast. I don't know what is required to get by the censors, but the "n" word is likely to get a broadcast show in trouble. I will say it is amazing how easy it is to get sucked into a televised movie I've seen several times before and then hang in there throughout the entire broadcast; even when with a little effort OnDemand or Netflix Instant might have the movie ready to stream to the television.