KINGS AND DESPERATE MEN. A Precursor to Die Hard?

From the series: Little-known films that could (but didn’t necessarily) influence box office hits. Kings and Desperate Men.

John Kingsley – a failed actor who emigrated from his native Britain to Canada – is the host of a popular talk show on the local JXYL radio station. The host doesn’t shy away from drinking (even on air), and he’s cynical, arrogant, and patronizing. He runs his show in a confrontational style, provoking and humiliating his guests – a method that has earned him local celebrity status. On the day before Christmas Eve, he invites Judge Stephen McManus onto his show and forces him to explain a controversial ruling: fifteen years in prison for a driver who fatally struck a police officer. That same day, a group of terrorists led by former university lecturer Lucas Miller simultaneously breaks into both the radio station and Kingsley’s home. Taking the judge, the host, and his wife and child hostage, the terrorists demand justice for the convicted driver; otherwise, they will blow up the high-rise building.

Kings and Desperate Men is the directorial debut of Alexis Kanner – a Canadian actor of French descent who worked mainly in England. After stints with The Royal Court Theatre and The Royal Shakespeare Company, Kanner landed roles in British television, most notably in the series The Prisoner (1967–1968). He never achieved major stardom and returned to Canada in the early 1970s to assist Harvey Hart in filming Mahoney’s Estate (1972). In 1977, Kanner co-wrote the script for Kings and Desperate Men with writer Edmund Ward (the title comes from a line in John Donne’s Sonnet X) and began work on the project. Shooting in Montreal was brief, but post-production took two years, and the film finally premiered in 1981 at the Montreal World Film Festival. In the following years, Kings… made appearances at film festivals in Chicago and London, but it never received a theatrical release and only reached the U.S. on home video.

Kings and Desperate Men is a thriller that hinges not on action, but on dialogue – an intellectual battle between Kingsley (Patrick McGoohan) and Miller (Kanner). The film appears to aim for a socio-political commentary on class privilege, mass media, and injustice, but any intended message is lost due to its amateurish execution. Technically, Kings… is a mess: jarring editing, odd camera angles, sound quality that resembles a rusty tin can (often out of sync with the visuals), poorly lit interiors, garbled dialogue, and a soundtrack in the style of medieval music (!). In short, it’s an “art film” in the worst sense – pretentious, overly verbose, and self-consciously styled in the vein of cinéma vérité or direct cinema. Worse still, the film lacks tension and sympathetic characters – an almost unforgivable sin in a thriller.

And here’s a curious footnote: In the late 1980s, Alexis Kanner filed a lawsuit against the creators of Die Hard (1988), directed by John McTiernan, accusing them of stealing plot ideas. The court found no evidence of plagiarism, and Kanner lost the case outright – which is somewhat ironic, considering that Kings… features a judge allegedly handing down unjust verdicts. The court likely got it right; the similarities are minimal, limited to a Christmas-time setting and terrorists holding hostages in a skyscraper. It’s also worth noting that Die Hard was based on Roderick Thorp’s novel, published in 1979 – two years before Kanner’s film premiered. Interestingly, Talk Radio (1988) by Oliver Stone shares more in common with Kings…. So why didn’t the Canadian sue Stone, too? Perhaps because, unlike Die Hard, his film wasn’t a hit.