Yippee-Ki-Yay ...

Illustration by Deanna Staffo

The latest installment of the Die Hard franchise, A Good Day To Die Hard, opened in theaters this week. The reviews have been mostly negative: In her write-up, Slate film critic Dana Stevens calls the film ?sclerotic? while Stevens, Chris Wade, and Alice Tynan take turns panning the film in their Slate Spoiler Special. But to honor the franchise?s better days, we reprint Eric Lichetenfeld?s article from 2007, in which he celebrates one of the most memorable cinematic one-liners of all time.

On the city streets of America, buses have been displaying a strange ad. No art, just white print on black, a slogan stranded between English and gibberish: "Yippee Ki Yay Mo?." Although the line is not spelled the way it's pronounced, it's still recognizable as the first half of a well-known action-movie one-liner. The ad is teasing the June 27 release of Live Free or Die Hard. Since the Die Hard franchise, and its catchphrase, have been absent from the screen for 12 years, a question arises: do the words "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker" still matter? And why did they resonate in the first place?

First heard in the original Die Hard in 1988, "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker," is one of the many one-liners that have graced the action film, a body of work not known for its strong verbal tradition. Indeed, the delivery of the one-liner ranks among the most cherished rites of this ritualistic genre. Whether a quip, catchphrase, or callback to an earlier installment in a franchise, one-liners, even at their corniest, provoke the same glee as the most pyrotastic action sequences.

Many one-liners are bad, if treasured, puns (Arnold put his stamp on "You're fired" long before Donald did). Others display a wit that we might grudgingly concede ("Barbeque, huh? How do you like your ribs?"). The one-liner is also remarkably versatile. It spans the grandiose ("I'm going to show you God does exist"; "I'm your worst nightmare") to the minimalist ("Get off my plane"; "Whoah"). It ranges from the functional ("Dead or alive, you're coming with me") to the iconic ("Go ahead ? make my day"). And while some are uninspired ("It's time to die"), others are absurd ("I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass?and I'm all out of bubble gum"), self-referential ("No sequel for you"), and sardonic ("Go ahead ? I don't shop here").

The 1980s were the golden age of the one-liner, with the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Clint Eastwood, and the ascension of such screenwriters as Steven E. de Souza and Shane Black, who penned many of the decade's high-concept action and buddy movies (Die Hard, Commando, and Lethal Weapon chief among them). Yet, like many action film conventions, the one-liner has roots in other genres. In the landmark Western The Searchers (1956), John Wayne growled, "That'll be the day," prompting Buddy Holly to immortalize the catchphrase in a hit single the following year. And not only did the James Bond franchise give us "Bond?James Bond," but lines such as "Shocking! Positively shocking!"; "He had to fly"; and "He got the boot" prove that Bond also gave action films their penchant for punning. Throughout the series, Bond's cheeky dialogue defuses the emotion of a given scene, just as the one-liner does throughout the action genre.

Such glibness lays bare the action hero's core reticence. "I ain't got time to bleed," insists Predator's Jesse Ventura, who would repurpose the line for the title of his book, I Ain't Got Time To Bleed: Reworking the Body Politic From the Bottom Up.Less quoted but even more germane is the declaration by Road House's Patrick Swayze, "Pain don't hurt." A contradiction, yes, but one that defines both the action hero and, more literally, one of the genre's most iconic roles: the title character of The Terminator.

That 1984 movie inaugurated Arnold Schwarzenegger's signature, "I'll be back." In this case, the one-liner is funny only in hindsight, as the cyborg comes right back, fully armed and with a pickup-truck-of-mass-destruction to boot. Reversing the typical action-sequence structure, the quip is the set-up, the violence is the punch line. There is nothing especially remarkable about "I'll be back" (it is not, after all, Cobra's "You're the disease, and I'm the cure," a line noted by the press six months before the film's 1986 opening). Even so, "I'll be back" distills the action movie's ritualistic appeal. The pleasure of hearing it said from movie to movie is the same as hearing a story told time after time.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=22d91a375b194257c6f5cbd3f8f4f079

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