Die Hard (1988)

 

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!