After more than six years of battling the courts, director John McTiernan—the man behind Die Hard, The Hunt For Red October, and Predator, among others—appears to be headed to federal prison, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his latest appeal. McTiernan was sentenced in 2010, handed a year for lying to federal agents investigating the wiretapping of various Hollywood players by private detective Anthony Pellicano. He pled guilty to that in 2006, admitting that he’d attempted to hide his hiring of Pellicano to investigate Rollerball remake producer Chuck Roven, a lie that was exposed once a digital recording surfaced of McTiernan discussing the illegal wiretap of Roven’s phone.


Ever since then, McTiernan has been lobbying to have his sentence dismissed, based on the fact that there’s no proof Roven was ever actually wiretapped—a last-ditch argument that lingers on in a motion that’s still sitting before the judge. Such motions have obviously not been successful in the past, however, and this final one will likely only be delaying by weeks McTiernan’s seemingly inevitable incarceration. And so the man who made a living telling stories about men who are backed into corners yet always beat the odds doesn’t appear to be headed for a similarly triumphant ending—unless he has a decoy Soviet submarine or maybe one of those Predator self-destruct bombs still lying around, anyway.