Despite being two very different beasts with regards to genre and presentation, The Incredibles and Die Hard With A Vengeance actually share a particular scene. Regardless as to how their sequels were received, these films are iconic in pop culture. Still, it isn’t uncommon for movies to borrow from one another, no matter how popular. Although more often than not, it occurs in those which are similar to an extent. This is why when Pixar’s superhero family flick The Incredibles chose to copy-paste a moment from the third installment in the Die Hard franchise, the head scratching began. The only common thread between the two is veteran actor Samuel L. Jackson, which was all the Incredibles director Brad Bird needed to bring them together.
Early on in The Incredibles, Bob Parr, aka Mr. Incredible, and his crime-fighting friend Lucius Best, aka Frozone (Jackson), commit an act of illegal vigilantism. After saving multiple people from a burning building, the two find themselves in the middle of a jewelry store, wearing all black to conceal their identities. Mistaken for thieves, the two are held at gunpoint by a police officer, who nervously instructs Frozone to freeze. To replenish his power, he slowly grabs a cup of water, maintaining his composure as the officer becomes more frantic. He reassures him many times that he just needs a drink before freezing the cop, and the two make their escape.
The scene was by no means original, having been ripped straight from Die Hard With A Vengeance (via Reddit). During the high stakes series of games set forth by the villainous Simon Gruber, Jackson’s Zeus Carver and Bruce Willis’ John McClane have to find and dispose a bomb planted on a subway train. While McClane goes off to locate the explosive, Carver is left to answer one of Gruber’s taunting phone calls. Before doing so, a NYPD officer pulls a gun on him for not paying his fare on the way into the station. In a similarly shaken fashion, the cop orders him to put his hands in the air, to which he responds calmly that he needs to answer the ringing phone. He slowly does, and is greeted by Gruber on the other end, who detonates the bomb that McClane has removed from the subway train.
When looking at these scenes with a critical eye, they are strikingly similar yet very different due to their context. One is set in a fictitious, Watchmen-esque universe full of super-powered beings while the other is not too dissimilar from the actual world in 1995. The end results are quite different, with one officer being frozen in ice by Jackson’s character while the other gets off relatively clean after Gruber’s bomb destroys the subway station. It is the presentation that makes them mirror images. The stressed out cop, Jackson’s collected delivery, and the framing of both respective shots aid in bringing out these details further when comparing them side-by-side.
The Incredibles and Die Hard are surely two franchises that do not get often brought up in the same breath. One is an animated kids movie, while the other is quite obviously the opposite in almost every possible way. They both have Sam Jackson on the cast list, which was more than enough overlap to justify a similar sequence between them both. Fans may have never gotten that Die Hard/Beverly Hills Cop crossover, but at least they have this to hang their hat on. It may have been a whole decade that separated them, but eagle eyed fans would not be deceived by this blatant callback no matter how much time has passed.
