Here’s All Four Minutes and 16 Seconds of the McBain Movie from ‘The Simpsons’
Of all the iconic action heroes who have achieved worldwide fame and graced screens large and small in their shlock movies, the name of Rainier Wolfcastle is not one that’s likely to appear in any of our film history books — bye, book.
In the Simpsons universe, Wolfcastle is a very busy man, much like how his inspiration Arnold Schwarzenegger has stayed preposterously active throughout his real life. Springfield’s biggest movie star was once the governor of the state Springfield is in. He sold Fritz Schnackenpfefferhausen Bratwursts. And, of course, the crowning achievement of Wolfcastle’s career was his role as the no-nonsense, ass-kicking, one-liner-spitting one-name-having renegade cop McBain in the movie series of the same name. The first McBain movie is such a big hit in Springfield that the local networks seemed to have the TV cut of the film on repeat throughout the early seasons of The Simpsons, which allows us, the Simpsons audience, to get brief glimpses of the action-packed masterpiece in various episodes from the Simpsons Golden Age.
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The Simpsons superfan podcast Four Finger Discount was kind enough to compile all the clips of the McBain movie that were shown on the Simpsons’ television set in those early seasons and create one cohesive, quippy and explosive reconstruction of Herr Wolfcastle’s magnum opus that would make his Nazi father proud:
The character of McBain is an amalgamation of so many different protagonists from so many similar action movies of 20th century — obviously, Bruce Willis’ John McClane from the Die Hard series is a primary inspiration, and Clint Eastwood’s Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan from, well, Dirty Harry contribute to the loose-cannon cop archetype that McBain parodies. There’s also the clear influence of every movie Schwarzenegger ever made baked into the McBain film, along with about a hundred different action movie tropes all rolled into a heart-pounding, sub-five-minute blockbuster.
There’s the partner talking about retirement, his daughter’s graduation and his boat “The Live-4-Ever” shortly before a hitman riddles him with bullets meant for McBain. There’s McBain refusing to operate by the police officer’s handbook by blowing away the book itself. There’s the banquet hall full of powerful villains all toasting “to human misery” after inventing a drug 10 times more addictive than marijuana (a vice that’s famously non-addictive). And, of course, there’s the liberal and hilarious use of one-liners, all of which straddle the line of parody and pastiche with their stupid brilliance.
Honestly, the entirety of the first McBain film contains about as much entertainment value as most feature-length action sequels from the 1990s. I mean, I’d watch Four Finger Discount’s compilation 20 times before wasting five minutes on Speed 2: Cruise Control.
