Word: villainness
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...about this version. Director Jerry Zucker has not spared the horses (or the broadswords) in mounting his handsome production. There are well-staged, smartly edited bursts of action at the approved modern intervals (every 10 minutes or so), the scenery is always pretty, and aside from Ben Cross's villain (imagine Pat Buchanan in not-so-shining armor), everyone is terribly nice, terribly agreeable. They are pleasant, altogether reasonable companions on this curiously jaunty ride into anachronism...
Before he was a villain, Robert Vesco was a Horatio Alger hero. Born in 1935 to lower-middle-class parents in Detroit, Vesco, according to biographer Arthur Herzog, had three youthful dreams: to become a millionaire, to head his own company and "to get the hell out of Detroit." He accomplished those goals rapidly. Largely self- educated, the teenage Vesco, who managed to complete only half a correspondence course toward a high school diploma, grew a mustache to look older and try to qualify for jobs in local auto factories. He quickly moved from low-level design work to engineering...
...fact, Pocahontas, smartly directed by Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg, has a political agenda, but of a more general sort. In designating as its hero the spunky but idealistic princess and as its villain the English Governor Ratcliffe, head of the Jamestown expedition, the film takes the side of every available underdog: the working-class English sailors fighting the avaricious aristocrat, the Indian conservators over the white predators, the female spirit of conciliation over the male itch to resolve every dispute by going to war. Boldly eco-liberal, Pocahontas even pokes fun at the Disney Co.'s recent attempt...
...nothing in such disclosures, even in the immediate aftermath of the subway attack, could have prepared the Japanese for what police now believe. The man in the deep pink pajama suit seems to be the incarnation of that implausible villain in thriller novels: a megalomaniac who marshaled money, scientific expertise and loyal followers to act out his prophecies of doom and destruction...
...most definitive trait of the "Die Hard" movies is that the danger is not only (or even mostly) to the hero, but rather to the many innocent people that hero, but rather to the many innocent people that the villain holds hostage. In "Die Hard," it was people in a skyscraper, in and above Dulles International, and in "Die Hard With a Vengeance," it is the entire city of New York. That gives some indication of the ambition of this movie...