I can’t believe I left Will Smith, one of the all-time great trailer line deliverers, off the original list. “I’ve found a cure for the plague of the 20th century and now I’ve lost it!”
#MOVIE 300 TRAILERS MOVIE#
If the movie was a relative disappointment at the box office and a complete flop with critics, the attempt to boil down its convoluted plot into a single trailer line did give us this magnificently clunky yet unforgettable trailer line. Connery’s protege was played by Lorraine Bracco from Goodfellas and The Sopranos. In his follow-up to Predator (1987), Die Hard (1988), and The Hunt For Red October (1990) John McTiernan chose… this absolute head-scratcher about a doctor in the Amazon played by Sean Connery (sidenote: has any director ever had as good a three-movie run as Predator, Die Hard, Red October?). Trailer Line: “I’ve found a cure for the plague of the 20th century and now I’ve lost it!” I had also memory-holed the part where Bruce Willis’s character’s name in Striking Distance was “Tom Hardy.” Can we get Tom Hardy to play Tom Hardy in a remake of Striking Distance? I would watch the hell out of that movie. He’s truly a man in command of his instrument. Pain in the ass though he may be, it’s hard to imagine De Niro, Gibson, or Douglas being able to strike that exact note of fed-up cop petulance that Willis hits in “I’m trying to solve a murder here!” (Is this the 90s cop version of “I’m walkin’ here!”?) The way his voice gets a bit brittle when he’s really pushing it - it’s almost like his voicebox has a “gain” setting. According to Striking Distance director Rowdy Herrington, Robert De Niro was attached first, then Mel Gibson, and then Michael Douglas, before Bruce Willis got involved. Trailer Line: “I’m trying to solve a murder here!” (line at 1:18)Ī consistent theme of interviews I’ve done with eighties and nineties filmmakers is what a pain in the ass Bruce Willis apparently was.