For many cinophiles, they don’t care for the Hallmark Christmas movies or whatever family-friendly “instant classic” Disney tries to present each year. No, there’s one filmmaker whose pretty much made it his goal to focus as many movies he can around the holidays.
A lot of people may not know the name Shane Black. But they kow his work. He’s the writer behind such action movies like the first Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, Last Action Hero and The Long Kiss Goodnight. He was the director and co-writer of Iron Man 3. Altogether, he has a 10 credits on feature movies. He has a story by credit on Lethal Weapon 2 as it was re-written by Jeffrey Boam at the studio’s insistence, partially because Black thought Martin Riggs should die at the end.
He also worked uncredited as a script doctor on Predator, in which he played the military commando character Rick Hawkins. He also did some polish work on the action-horror-comedy Dead Heat, written by his brother, Terry. He also worked on The Hunt for Red October which makes references to the upcoming Christmas season with Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) buying a huge teddy bear for his daughter for Christmas. And then, he also worked on the script RoboCop 3, which was directed by Fred Dekker who co-wrote it with Frank Miller. You can see Christmas decorations in the background of many scenes.
Black and Dekker also wrote the infamously unproduced action-horror-comedy Shadow Company, which is also set at Christmas. The movie was set to go into production in the late 1980s with John Carpenter directing, Kurt Russell in the lead role as a Vietnam vet, and Walter Hill, a well-respected gritty action filmmaker, as the producer. It would’ve been one of the sweetest action movies of all time. It was supposed to involve Russell’s character battling it out with six evil Army zombies.
What could have been? Sometimes, things don’t work out. Still about two-thirds of the movies he’s written scripts for have a Christmas element to them. And yet, people turn to filmmakers like Frank Capra or John Hughes as holiday movie makers.
Lethal Weapon, his first produced script, is set heavily around the Christmas season with a lot of of Christmas decorations and references. It even opened in March of 1987, a good year and a half before the other Christmas action classic Die Hard. Two major action scenes involve Christmas trees. Then, there’s the scene of several police officers practicing singing Christmas carols. The movie ends on Christmas Day when Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) attending dinner with his new partner Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover).
After he left the production of Lethal Weapon 2, Black said he didn’t write anything for two years as he went through a bad relationship break-up. By his own admission, he said he just wanted to smoke cigarettes and read paperback novels. He then sat down and wrote the script to The Last Boy Scout as he channeled his own feelings into the main character of Joe Hallenback, a burnt-out private investigator who used to be a respected Secret Service Agent.
That movie had a very troubled production. Bruce Willis, who plays Hallenback, didn’t get along with Damon Wayans. And Willis reportedly wasn’t Black’s choice. But the film producer Joel Silver wanted Willis for the role meaning Black had to massively rewrite the script because there were similarities between Hallenback and Willis’ role as John McClain in the first two Die Hard movies. Black was reportedly paid a record-breaking $1.75 million paycheck for the script following a bidding war. That would be almost $4 million today.
However, Black said the finished movie wasn’t near what the script was. It was reportedly edited multiple times. There are a few references to Christmas but it’s mostly left out. The movie is set around professional football, which usually takes place in the fall close to Christmas. The movie was released two weeks before Christmas and took some criticism for being released so close to the holiday.
Ironically, Black would find himself being hired to rewrite Last Action Hero, written by Adam Lefff and Zak Penn, which was intended to be a parody of the types of scripts Black wrote. In actuality, Black himself was parodying the action genre with the first Lethal Weapon. The movie begins with the final scenes of Jack Slater 3, the fake movie within a movie, which is set at Christmastime. In a nod to his friend and collaborator, the hard-nose lieutenant played by the late Frank McRae is named Dekker.
Unfrotunately, Last Action Hero was considered one of the biggest bombs of the decade and the biggest of 1993 before finding some new-found respect on the home video market and cable TV. When you consider it came a good two years before Michael Bay would make the same movies but without the tongue-in-cheek feel with Bad Boys and The Rock, it was saying a lot at the time. Now, with Zack Snyder and Bay himself competing for who can make the most macho stylistic movie, it’s kinda like Idiocracy with a sign of things to come.
In the mid-1990s, Black penned probably his most underrated and underappreciated Christmas action thriller, The Long Kiss Goodnight. The movie was directed by Renny Harlin and starred Geena Davis as a former CIA trained assassin who suffered amnesia about a decade earlier and is living a normal life as a school teacher in small-town Pennsylvania. But after suffering a concussion when her vehicle strikes a deer, she discovers she has special skills she didn’t know she had.
Davis character, Samantha Caine, then finds herself being tracked by terrorists and CIA officials trying to save face. The movie is full of over-the-top action scenes that work. Sam is assisted by a lowly private investigator played by Samuel L. Jackson. It has everything one might expect from a Black action movie. Imagine what would happen in a bizarro world where the Hallmark Christmas movies involve a lot of gunfire and explosions to the point that Sam is flying through the air to snag a submachine gun off a burning henchman’s body to fire at the main villain in a helicopter firing upon her.
And you have to love a movie where Davis’ character says, “Suck my dick” before plowing a semi-truck into a brick wall barrier. The movie got good reviews and still grossed about $95 million against a $65 million budget. Why that might have not been much of a profit, the movie has gained a cult following over the years.
However, the box office results led to Black getting out of the action genre and he made the neo-noir black comedy crime movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang with Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer. Downey plays a petty criminal who turns to actor and Kilmer is a wiley private investigator. Produced by Joel Silver, the movie was a critical hit but broken even on its modest $15 million budget. But it’s typical of his movies to have a Christmas setting. This was his first movie as a film director.
But his next movie as a director would reteam him with Downey on Iron Man 3 and be his most successful movie as of yet. Even though it was released in the middle of Spring in 2013, it takes place in the weeks leading up to Christmas as Downey as Tony Stark/Iron Man has to deal with a mysterious terrorist character Mandarin and Aldrich Killian, a scientest who had developed a techno-organic virus that rewrites people’s genetic codes.
The movie would gross over $1.2 billion worldwide. And after watching earlier, it harkens back to an era when the MCU movies were still fun and exciting before being bogged down with a lot of comic book lore. You can watch the movie without having seen the previous entries and not feel lost. Also since it’s the first movie after The Battle of New York, it’s not so nauseating as in later entries where they constantly reference this. The movie was the first of the Phase Two movies and it mixes Black’s mixture of holiday cheer and bang-up action.
After that he made The Nice Guys, with Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe in the leads. It’s the last movie he’s made that has a Christmas setting. Golsing plays a mediocre private eye hired to find a woman who’s gone into porn in the late 1970s and Crowe is the enforcer who’s been hired to scare him away. They end up working together after first not able to get along. Like a lot of Black’s movies, it’s really about characters who are far from flawless but you end up rooting for them to win.
The Christmas settings work as a kind of metaphor for the characters learning to be better people. They’re all flawed human beings struggling with their own vices and demons. In a Biblical sense, it’s like the mantra “We’re all sinners.” Like Job, they are punished and hurt, but aren’t entirely broken down as both Riggs and Murtaugh both weak after being tortured still punish the evils of Mr. Joshua (Gary Busey) Gen. Peter McAllister (Mitchell Ryan). As Saul was blinded on the road to Damascus and was reborn as Paul, many of his characters (Hallenback, Dix, Stark) learn the errors of their ways and change their habits.
In Lethal Weapon, Riggs is suicidal following the death of his wife. At the end, he has accepted the death and found a new family with the Murtaughs. And Murtaugh who was initially critical of Riggs learns the man is broken and he needs love. Rigg’s also willing to stick his neck out for someone who he barely knows at first more than his other friend, Michael Hunsacker (Tom Atkins) who was corrupt and wanted to use Murtaugh’s friendship as a crutch.
In Last Boy Scout, Hallenback’s marriage and family is on the rocks, but at the end things look brighter as they’re going to work it out for the better. He still loves his wife, played by Chelsea Fields, despite her adultery because marriage and relationships take work. Wayans’ character, Jimmy Dix, who is a washed up athlete stuggling with grief over the death of a wife and infant child has a painkiller addiction, but at the end, he seems to have moved on as well.
At the end of Long Kiss, Davis’ character, Samantha, has killed the bad guys, saved her daughter and ready to go back to the life as a school teacher with her boyfriend who will become her husband. And even Stark learns to move on as he initially suffers from panic and anxiety attacks following the events of the Battle of New York from The Avengers. He finally shows devotion to Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and gets the shrapnel removed from near his heart. Stark is realizing that his role as a philandering playboy billionaire has run its course and its time for him to change his ways in more ways than one. This leads to his progression over the MCU in later movies such as Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Endgame where his attidude has change as he’s grown.
When The Nice Guys opened in 2016, he told Entertainment Weekly his obsession with Christmas is a “thing of beauty.”
“It tends to be a touchstone for me,” he said in the interview. “Christmas represents a little stutter in the march of days, a hush in which we have a chance to assess and retrospect our lives. I tend to think also that it just informs as a backdrop.”
It’s ironic and sad for a jolly time that Christmas is the one time of year in which we try to be better people. We donate money, food and other items to those in need. We’re happier people even though the holiday is taking place during one of the most bleakest times of the year – winter, when everything is dying. But through the cold temperatures and shorter days, we work to make the days better.
And we should continue to do better not just at Christmas but all throughout the year. After the credits roll, we feel the characters are going to be better off. So, we should all try to be better after the holidays.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 