History Film / TheHardWay

-->'''Nick''': It's another big budget, big box-office, easy-to-flush piece of crap! ... When are you going to come to me with something with a little relevance? Something with a social conscience? Something that doesn't have a goddamn Roman numeral in the title? Did you ever hear of ''Theatre/{{Hamlet}} III''? ''[[Theatre/AMidsummerNightsDream Midsummer Night's IV]]''\\

-->'''Brix:''' You got two ways to do this. You got the easy way, you got...\\

* Typecasting: InUniverse. Nick wants to land a role as a hard-bitten cop because all his movies to date have been light, frothy action films.

'''Nick:''' C'mon John. Look, my character kills this guy. It's probably an innocent by-stander. I just want to know what that's like.

-->'''Nick:''' Ever killed anybody?
-->'''John:''' Counting today?
-->'''Nick:''' C'mon John. Look, my character kills this guy. It's probably an innocent by-stander. I just want to know what that's like.
-->'''John:''' You can't. Not by asking someone.
-->'''Nick:''' Will you open up? I just want to know what it feels like to be inside your skin.
-->'''John:''' '''I don't want you inside my skin, you understand?''' It's private! What's in there belongs to me! You're not gonna learn what it means to be a cop by eating hot dogs and picking your teeth and asking stupid questions. We live this job. It's something we are, not something we do! Every time a cop walks up to a car and has to give a speeding ticket, he know he may have to kill someone or be killed himself. That's not something you step into by strapping on a rubber gun and riding around all day. You get to go back to your million dollar beach house and your bimbos and your blow jobs and you get 17 takes to get it right. We get one take. It lasts our whole lives. We mess it up and we're dead.
-->'''Nick:''' (''takes out a tape recorder'') [[ComicallyMissingThePoint Fuck,was that great! John, look, can you just say that one more time for me, please?]]
** Another example of this: Nick manages to give the Party Crasher a TapOnTheHead on the climactic battle, only for the Crasher to be too tough for ''one'' tap to work, and so he turns, yells "this is ''not'' a movie, asshole!" and shoots Nick on the shoulder.

-->'''Nick''': It's another big budget, big box-office, easy-to-flush piece of crap! ... When are you going to come to me with something that has a little relevance? Something with a social conscience? Something that doesn't have a goddamn Roman numeral in the title? Did you ever hear of ''Theatre/{{Hamlet}} III''? ''[[Theatre/AMidsummerNightsDream Midsummer Night's IV]]''\\

-->'''Brix:''' You got two ways to do this. You got the easy way, or...
-->'''John:''' The hard way.

-->'''Nick:''' (''takes out a tape recorder'') [[SugarWiki/FunnyMoments Fuck, that was great! John, look, can you just say that one more time for me, please?]]

* ComedicSociopathy: Moss attempts to get rid of Nick Lang by making him think he shot and killed an innocent person and hurriedly getting him on the next flight headed back to LA. Nick has a crisis of conscience and rushes back to the station to confess, [[spoiler: only to find out it was all a set-up by Moss; the gun Nick shot the guy with was loaded with blanks and the man he "killed" was a friend of Moss in on the set-up. Understandably infuriated, Lang tracks down Ross and rips him a new one before knocking him to the ground with one punch.

* BersekButton: Nick Lang is understandably very pissed off at Moss for making him suffer through the mental trauma of thinking he accidentally killed an innocent person and shoving him on the next flight out of town just because he didn't want to deal with a Hollywood actor pestering him.

Not to be confused with the TabletopGame of the same name. Or with ''Film/ThreeTheHardWay''.

* HandCannon: The Party Crasher's laser-sighted Wildey Magnum. Also a RareGun (so rare that looking into how the Crasher would get a replacement gives Moss a significant lead on the case).

NYPD cop John Moss (Woods) is on the case of a serial killer known as "Party Crasher" (Creator/StephenLang). After a failed attempt to capture the Crasher in which he is injured, Moss is shown on the news having an obscene outburst. Meanwhile, actor Nick Lang (Fox), known as the star of a popular movie series featuring the hero "Smoking" Joe Gunn, wants to be taken more seriously as an actor, and decides to study under Moss after seeing his outburst on the news. This leads Lang to annoy Moss to no end, as well as making an impression on his girlfriend Susan (Annabella Sciorra) and her daughter Bonnie (Creator/ChristinaRicci).

* ItsAllAboutMe: Lang is able to advise Moss that this is the Party Crasher's mentality -- all of this death and hell-raising is just to make himself look important in front of the world world and draw attention. He then tells Moss to mock him on national television and that will make him go into a VillainousBreakdown. It went horribly right.

* GenreSavvy: As a veteran actor that has made many action movies, Lang warns Moss that the killer will come after him as it's the Third Act. Moss laughs off the warning, as "real criminals stay well away from the police". The Party Crasher being not entirely sane, that's exactly what he does.

** Nick's EstablishingCharacterMoment on his Hollywood home has him watching an interview with Moss taken after the Party Crasher chase at the beginning, with Moss battered and bloody, and Nick says that ''that'' is "real"-the blood, grit and everything, and he wants to reflect that on his films, not be a BoringInvincibleHero. By the near-end of the film, he has been on various shootouts, [[spoiler:falsely]] believed he killed a man, is battered, gritty, bloody and being put on an ambulance because he has been shot.

-->'''Nick:''' (''takes out a tape recorder'') [[CrowningMomentOfFunny Fuck, that was great! John, look, can you just say that one more time for me, please?]]

* DisneyVillainDeath: [[spoiler: The Party Crasher is killed like this.]]

* IShouldWriteABookAboutThis: The final scene of the movie shows that the movie's plot was adapted into an InUniverse film titled "The good, the Badge and the Ugly", starring Nick. Moss' ThisIsReality speech is on it.