Weird Wednesdays: Live Wire

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

Live Wire is appropriately weird, but not in the way one would normally expect from a Weird Wednesday movie. This New Line production from 1992 was clearly intended to originally be a Summer blockbuster, but somehow it ended up premiering on HBO, with a video release following after. Despite a humble rollout, somehow, somewhere, a 35mm print was struck, and remaining pristine, it played beautifully to an unsuspecting crowd.

Director Christian Duguay is best known as the director of the sequels to David Cronenberg’s Scanners, movies best known for their willingness to capitalize on the infamous head explosion from the first film by upping the ante time and time again. Once you learn what makes Live Wire what it is, you’ll understand why that’s important. In theory, it’s a plot about FBI bomb expert Danny O’Neill (Pierce Brosnan) as he tries to uncover a conspiracy behind American senators who seem to keep spontaneously combusting. About 35% of the movie is about that, the rest actually being about how his wife Terry (Lisa Eilbacher) has left him for Senator Frank Traveres (Ron Silver) and has laid a restraining order on him. Brosnan spends much of the movie roundly ignoring this restraining order, acting like a human trash bag every chance he can, and somehow still thinking that his wife will come back to him if he just keeps acting like a distillation  of all the worst “divorced guy” stereotypes at all times. Nary a scene goes by, be it a crime scene inspection or a dressing down by his superiors, without someone asking about his wife’s exploits with Traveres. It hilariously hangs over the movie in a way that really makes you wonder what screenwriter Bart Baker was going through at this time. This is decidedly not Zulawski’s Possession though, so eventually they have a very elaborate mid-90s sex scene and (spoiler alert) make up after almost dying several times. If the plot mattered, I would be more shy about these details, but you don’t even know the plot yet. Before getting into that, here’s a disclaimer: for fans of insane old-school action movies with huge explosions and absurd stunts, stop reading now and find this movie any way you can, because once the secret of Live Wire is revealed, I can’t put it back in the box. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

The action movie part of Live Wire kicks off with a senator having dinner at a full restaurant, surrounded by people. He drinks water, as is customary to live, and within moments he begins to act weird and the next thing you know, a massive fireball is shooting through the front of the building, leaving everyone inside charred to a crisp. O’Neill investigates, realizing that there are no signs of an explosive device or detonator present at all. A terrorist by the name of Mikhail Rashid is responsible for this act, and many to come, but the question is how. As the investigation continues, another senator is blown to bits in a limo, leading to the apprehension of one of Rashid’s henchmen. To cover up this loose end, Rashid figures out a way to combust the judge in his case, taking out said henchman as well. At this point, our soon-to-be-divorced hero discovers that the human body itself is the detonator. These terrorists have perfected an explosive that is, in essence, water, activated by stomach acid. Water is everywhere and in everyone. Nobody is safe. Especially not the guy banging his wife.

O’Neill would love nothing more than to see Traveres explode into bits, but he recognizes that Terry could be collateral damage. Plus, hey, maybe this is another way to win her back instead of just respecting her wishes to move on with her life after the tragic loss of their daughter, who drowned in the family pool when neither parent was paying attention; an incident that clearly drove a wedge in their relationship. What follows is a mix of elements that would sound made-up if I hadn’t seen them with my own eyes, but there’s an attempt on Traveres’ life at a fundraiser that ends with our eventual James Bond taking down a rogue clown (nowhere near the lowest point involving a clown disguise relating to the Bond legacy, as anyone who has seen Roger Moore dressed as one in Octopussy can confirm), leading to the climax, that feels like a mix of Die Hard and Home Alone, as O’Neill makes his way to Traveres’ mansion to MacGyver his way through a full-on assault of terrorists, a hilariously creative and fun sequence to punctuate an absurd film, the type where every minute or so, a henchman is dispatched in ways that elicit loud “oof” sounds and raucous laughter from an excited crowd, capped by one of the most insane conclusions ever put to film. You will not believe how this movie ends its time with Ron Silver.

Live Wire shouldn’t work. The protagonist is hilariously despicable. The plot is patently absurd. But a true crew of professionals know how to make magic happen in a script that would fail in lesser hands. Duguay’s direction is solid, but the man knows why he’s here: he knows how to make people/places/things exploding look awesome. The cast helps too. I’ve always liked Lisa Eilbacher, even if she should have walked away from both of these guys and never looked back. Brosnan is solid, but this is another reminder that the whole era of his career between Remington Steele and Goldeneye is weird, as exemplified by another wild New Line release of the era, virtual reality epic The Lawnmower Man. Ron Silver made a career of being a sleazy yuppie type, and he was born to play the role of the guy who makes you go “...HIM?” when you realize someone was cheating on a dashing Irishman with him. In other words, a perfect American senator.

The entire cast puts in great work for such a ludicrous script, but the real star of the show isn’t even visible. The great Craig Safan’s score sets a tone from the opening titles that hooks you instantly, a constantly wailing mix of orchestra, bombastic guitar, and reeling saxophone. This is the 90s as it sounded best, and he goes hard enough here to earn a hall-of-fame position alongside other intense 90s action scores like Hans Zimmer’s work on Broken Arrow and The Rock, the “pre-bwahm” period of his career (and as many might agree, the superior era). If you aren’t riveted by the end of the literally explosive title card, you’ll be on board with this movie’s (hopefully) self-aware absurdity with an opening text crawl that extols the virtues of America’s “stable political system” that hasn’t had any terrorism in the last decade, a crawl that nearly had people rolling in the aisles with laughter from since this sounds like science fiction in 2026. This is the right vibe though, because humor saves this movie. Live Wire is the last of the kind of fun, trashy Hollywood action that ended alongside films like Stone Cold (another Weird Wednesday classic), making way for more sanitized PG-13 blockbusters the following year like Jurassic Park and The Fugitive, fun and classic but decidedly lacking in sleaze and absurdity. This movie was the end of an era, and it deserves your time. We didn’t know how good we had it.

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