If at first you don't succeed ... Bruce Willis in 1988's Die Hard
Bruce Willis, soon to appear in Die Hard 4, is already talking about Die Hard 5. Rumour has it that the fourth episode of John McClane's sticky-moments action series puts us back on the serious-business end of the thrills, spills and gratuitous kills industry. But mentions of a fifth are likely to send a chorus of groans round the room: "Die Hard 5: Dead, Buried and Still Coming Back for More". That kind of thing.
But is there in fact anything inherently wrong with the much-diagnosed disease of cinematic sequelitis? Judging by the evidence, yes. Film sequels do usually turn out to be bad films. With the requisite few exceptions - Star Trek, The Empire Strikes Back, Godfather II - sequels are reliably conceived in a spirit of pure financial self-indulgence, and -thanks to a pre-guaranteed audiences whose main interest is in re-heating some ill-gotten pleasures from a previous encounter - usually sacrifice narrative roundedness for something rather more excitingly superficial.
Another familiar complaint is that all the just-credible features of an initial movie seem to explode into a feast of exaggerated improbability by the time the second and third sequels come around. Think of the irritating messianic Zionist undercurrent in The Matrix series, adequately reined in by the brilliant pacing and conception of the first film but bursting forth with fundamentalist gung-ho in the following instalments. As for Die Hard, well, the 52-year-old Mr Willis is in pretty good shape, but the single unarmed-man-vs-sleek-terrorist-army has only so far to go before we encounter a curmudgeonly octogenarian McClane, defusing a fision-bomb crisis armed with a zimmer frame and hearing-aid battery.
But aren't we guilty of double standards here? So OK, the Die Hard concept is a little more limited than something like the obviously re-iterable James Bond. Still, complaints about continuing James Bond are few and far between, just as no-one would have dreamt of telling Raymond Chandler to can Philip Marlow after The Big Sleep, or Wodehouse to ditch Jeeves after My Man Jeeves (although, oddly, Wodehouse did originally claim that he despised literary sequels).
Television serials are an obvious case in point here. The Sopranos had to end some time, just as Seinfeld eventually bowed out before it could eat itself completely. But few would argue that these long-running programmes should have been put to bed after series one. If anything, the occasional faults and awkwardnesses of the early episodes fed through, via the creative process in a trial and error manner, to a golden age around series 4. Boston Legal currently seems to be following this path.
Maybe it all comes down to originality. Most sequels, contributing nothing except more minutes to an already formulaic first film, tend to lack it in spades. But I don't see that there's anything necessarily unoriginal about the sequel idea. We just need directors who are prepared to take the implications of the follow-up a little more seriously. And in an industry where the limits of possibility (which once used to guarantee some kind of aesthetic relevance) have expanded well beyond anything that can meaningfully be called a limit, the restrictions implicit in the movie franchise might actually be a way of tightening up film-making. As Andy Warhol once showed, and Borges long - and much more interestingly - before him, you can squeeze originality even out of an exact copy. The key is knowing where to squeeze.
