Die Hard
You can normally tell how important a movie is by the size
of its Wikipedia entry. We are not talking “Sight and Sound” importance, but
pop-culture significance. The entry for “Die Hard” is enormous. The only
entries I recall being longer were for “Star Wars”, Indiana Jones, the
franchise and “Back to the Future”. It is actually crazy because “Die Hard” is
just another action movie with a single good guy up against a lot of bad guys.
Or is it a lot more? Why is it that I never get tired of watching this movie?
It is Christmas Eve’s day and John McClane (Bruce Willis) is
travelling from New York where he is a policeman to Los Angeles to spend
Christmas with his children and separated wife Holly McClane nee Gennaro (Bonnie
Bedelia). She works for the Nakatomi Corporation, and her boss, in appreciation,
has sent a limousine to take John to the Nakatomi tower where the staff is
celebrating Christmas. John has hardly arrived before the building is attacked
by a very professional group led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), who look like
terrorists but are there to steal over 600-million-dollar worth of untraceable
bearer bonds.
With the exception of those outright killed, the Nakatomi
staff are all herded together and kept as hostages. The only one to escape this
is, correctly guessed, John McClane. Here starts a cat against mouse game where
John is continuously chased through the building while trying to alarm the
outside world to what is happening. This is noisy, full of last-minute saves
and brutal deaths as the terrorists are decimated and John is worn down.
Gruber’s gang is incredibly well prepared and seems to have
anticipated everything. When John finally gets through to the outside world,
they act exactly as Gruber has predicted and appear not only stupid and useless
but actually helpful to Gruber’s scheme. Only Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson),
the police Sergeant John first get through to, seems to understand what is
actually going on here. Everybody else are so confident in their own brilliance
that they fail to question the situation. In a side story, the media, both in
the bits we see on screen and in the form of a TV journalist, Thornberg (William
Atherton) with incredibly low integrity, is both cheap and dumb.
The major part of the movie is this duel between McClane and
Gruber. It fascinating and exciting simply for its inventiveness and adrenalin
inducing action and while I read several assessments on the success of “Die
Hard that pin it on themes like a fallible hero or the single man against the
system, I am convinced that it is largely due to the chemistry of these two
characters and by extension, Willis and Rickman. They play up against each
other incredibly well and this is not only through their immortal one-liners
but just about everything about them. In retrospect, Willis’ character is a
little too obvious, maybe even cliché and his dialogue, especially with
himself, in the beginning may be stating the obvious, but as things heat up,
this is entirely forgotten and his talking to himself simply means we get
access to his thoughts. Rickman in a similar way is opening his character to us
with his arrogant, snarling dialogue, again often with himself, that is simply
brilliantly evil. These two characters could be doing dishes together and it
would be great to look at and especially listen to. Instead, they happen to
totally destroy a 40-stories office building.
I have watched “Die Hard” more times than I care to think of.
This is a staple during Christmas, together with “Christmas Vacation”, and I
never get tired of watching it. Taking it apart, this should be a standard
action movie, but Willis and Rickman make it so much more than that. It spawned
a franchise that has only stopped with Wills poor health, but none of the
sequels, despite the intense action elements, come close to “Die Hard” itself.
The obvious reason is they are lacking half of the equation: Rickman. There is
no making up for that.
Yippie-kai-yeah!
No comments:
Post a Comment