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Try Hard Does Not A Die Hard

Try Hard Does Not A Die Hard

I’m going to watch all five Die Hards. I’m doing it in reverse order, starting with “A Good Day to Die Hard” because that one stinks and they only get better. The reason for this is not because of the simple derivative nature of sequels, but because Die Hard is at its best when it’s not trying to be Die Hard. Which is what Hollywood never understood.

The original spawned countless copycats; Under Siege was “Die Hard on a submarine.” Speed, “Die Hard on a bus.” They sold Cliffhanger as “Die Hard on a mountain.” And Broken Arrow “Die Hard on a train...wreck.” That movie sucks. But that was the production and marketing plan for 90s action movies. Even the titles were knock-offs. Steven Seagal made a movie called Hard to Kill. Studios are still trying to recapture the lightning. In 2013 there was White House Down, billed as Die Hard in the White House. They put Channing Tatum in a white A-shirt just in case that was the key. For thirty years everyone was trying to make a Die Hard movie by trapping a good guy in some confined place and surrounding him with bad guys. Probably give him a sidekick with no experience.  But they all mostly failed because aiming to be a Die Hard wasn’t how you made a Die Hard. You made a successful Die Hard by not setting out to make a Die Hard, which is what the franchise always did, until the 5th installment, which is why it is bad.

Ingredients for a Die Hard

John McClane

A villain with a #2 who has a commanding physical presence and a penchant for brutality (Karl from 1, Katya from 3)

A major city (L.A., D.C., New York, D.C. again)

An unlikely partner (Sgt. Powell, Zeus, Barnes, Powell again, Ferrel, his son)

A family member in jeopardy (Wife, wife, daughter, son)

A reference to flying (Arrives in L.A., the D.C. airport, helicopter in 3, 4, and 5)

Quips (“Welcome to the party pal!”)

Creatively killed bad guys (Karl hanging by chain, dude thrown into airplane engine, guy sliced in half by metal cable)

McClane insisting he’s being forced to be a hero because he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time (into walkie-talkies, to Sam Jackson, to Timothy Olyphant)

Yippie-ki-yay motherfucker (right before killing, blowing up, or shooting the antagonist)

Yes, all these make up a Die-Hard, and so most of these are in the knock-offs, but what truly makes a Die Hard die hard is a script with a villain’s plan and no John McClane.

Die Hard is not the best action movie because of Bruce Willis. All the Die Hards star Bruce Willis. Hell lots of action movies star Bruce Willis and they’re mostly bad. The original Die Hard is the best action movie due in large part to Alan Rickman. The villain makes the Die Hard. Die Hard with a Vengeance is very good because of Jeremy Irons. Die Harder and Live Free or Die Hard are also good because of their antagonists. But this, like the Bruce Willis problem gets conflated with the actor. It’s not Timothy Olyphant  in 4 or the naked General in 2 that make the movie, it’s their plan. The movie was written around their plan.

The first Die Hard was a sequel to a movie called The Detective starring Frank Sinatra. In fact, they were contractually obligated to offer the part to Mr. Sinatra before they could think about casting Bruce Willis.  So they took this detective sequel and made it a movie about thieves posing as terrorists. And our down-on-his-luck detective just gets caught up in the chaos as he tries to revive his loveless marriage. But the plot is really about Alan Rickman trying to make off with a bunch of treasury bonds. And that’s what happened movie after movie.

And that’s why A Good Day to Die Hard doesn’t work. It was written around John McClane. John McClane isn’t the perfect hero because he’s trying to be. He’s the perfect hero because he’s trying not to be. His agenda isn’t to save the day. His agenda is to repair his marriage (1), pick up his wife (2), self destruct (3) and NOT babysit (4).  But in 5, the mistake they make is right off the bat, they give McClane a mission. It’s his movie from the start and that’s why it was doomed to fail, even though the action is good, and all the ingredients are there for a tasty Die Hard movie, but it lacks substance. For the first time in the twenty-five-year franchise history, Hollywood wrote its first Die Hard for Die Hard.

A Good Day To Die Hard

I’m embarrassed to say I’m watching this for the third, maybe fourth time, and five minutes in I have no clearer understanding than I did the first three times. That’s actually not true. I  know what McClane is doing, but I don’t have a clue who the bad guy is or what his plan is. And so before the movie gets a chance to hit all the other beats, it’s already lost most of the audience. Skip Woods wrote this movie. And Skip Woods can write a pretty good action movie. He wrote the underrated, or maybe now overrated, but hard to find Thursday, and the easy to find, accurately rated X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

In A Good Day... John McClane tries to reconnect with his son, which maps with its predecessors arcs of John being estranged from his wife, wife, wife, and daughter. So that tracks. And they have Willis say “I’m not involved in this.” But we don’t even know what “this” is. All we know is McClane actively flies to Russia to get his son. And that simple active choice is the critical flaw. A Die Hard movie is the bad guy’s plot that John McClane is thrown into. But this is a John McClane movie where they force the bad guys in. And that’s not what people want to see, no matter how many tanks, helicopters and giant machine guns are thrown in.

The shame with this movie is they didn’t phone it in. I mean I’m sure Bruce did. He hasn’t worked hard in thirty years, but his phoning it in is everyone else’s “giving it their all,” which is what everyone in this film appears to be doing. There’s a lot of hard work on the screen. People are screaming at each other, running, fighting, exploding, sweating, chasing, shooting, beating, and dying. Hard. Still it fails. As a Die Hard. As an action movie, it’s pretty fun. I’m halfway through and they’re making every effort to have John McClane resist being a hero, but it’s too late because he flew to fucking Russia. Even if they don’t show it, I know he got a passport, bought a plane ticket, packed a bag, asked someone to water his plants, notified his cell phone company and credit cards, and that’s entirely too much effort.

Now McClane is reflecting on being a bad father. They really did hit every note. Except I don’t have a clue what the bad guys are doing. Their mission is not being forwarded. The bad guys put their mission on hold to chase the good guys and get back some old guy and that’s just not how it works. John McClane has to be a step behind every step of the way, but here, it’s not even clear which direction everyone is walking.

The movie grinds to a halt. There are three father son scenes before the third act starts. But more troublesome than that is McClane is chasing the bad guy. To Chernobyl. Even the most self-identifying hero pauses at the thought of going to a nuclear wasteland. John is predictable because he looks to get out of harm’s way unless he’s out of options, which he usually is.  But here there are plenty of options. They don’t even have his family. He could just alert the authorities that some bad guys are at Chernobyl. This movie makes the mistake Die Hard with a Vengeance almost made.

So in Die Hard with a Vengeance, there’s an alternate ending you can watch on the Blu-ray or YouTube.  John McClane hunts down Simon long after the events in New York. He finds baby Gruber reading a paper in some small foreign cafe. John shows up with a bazooka and has Simon “spin-the-bottle” it, a taste of his own child-like medicine, before forcing him to launch the rocket. Spoiler alert, the good guys win. But the problem with this ending is it made McClane more hunter than protector. The vengeance in the title was not in reference to McClane. It was about Simon’s revenge.

Back to 5. The acting here is not bad. It’s even good. Yuri, the bad guy, plays a weak old man through most of the movie and he seamlessly switches to a ruthless villain. The problem is we don’t know why. So we don’t care.

They repeatedly have McClane say he’s on vacation as a sort of runner to remind us he doesn’t want to be there. But he’s not saying it literally like the previous iterations. He’s saying it sarcastically. He’s not in the wrong place at the wrong time this time. He’s exactly where he wants to be.

They even throw the bad guy off the roof and we watch him fall in slow motion. There’s nothing quite like it, and I’ve actually come to appreciate it on this viewing. This is a Die Hard movie written as a Die Hard movie and as such it’s nothing like a die hard movie. It’s more Scary Movie than Scream. Everything is written with John McClane in mind which is not how you make a good die hard. You write a movie without him in mind and then insert him into the mix.

This movie does looks great though. It has a 14% on rotten tomatoes. I think that’s grossly unfair. Give it a different title and I bet the score doubles. It’s 14% a Die Hard, but at least a 30% action flick. This movie is terrible, but I’m happy it exists. I like growing old in a world where a New York cop saves the day every 5-7 years.

Live Free or Die Hard.

This was originally a script titled WW3.com. The plot was relatively the same. Bad guy Cyber attacks the government. You see, how the bad guy’s plan is foiled is not the focus, which is why you can just plug in ol’ Bruno. What is of importance is a solid plan for the antagonist. That way McClane can be a fly in the ointment. That’s all you need. And a McClane who doesn’t want to be there. In this one he’s close to a dorm, so he’s told to go check on a student, Matthew Feral (Justin Long), and then people go to kill Matt and John has to kill them. From there we’re all set. John is partnered with an unlikely sidekick and is forced to save the day against his want.

I think this movie is great. You have to watch the unrated version of course. It makes a difference. The change in violence is negligible, but the profanity is significantly more and it really makes for a much more fun time at the movies.  You feel it immediately.

I have significantly less to say about this film because it’s solid without being very interesting. But there is something here. Die Hard 4 is well reviewed, and easy to revisit, but it gets underrated or criticized because John McClane is superhuman in it. He transcends the “everyman” hero.  I, for one, appreciate the heightening. Most of it is elevating the action he survives, not what he is able to do. On par, he’s just as much of a threat as he’s always been.

There’s this great scene wedged into this movie where McClane talks about how being a hero sucks, and all he’s lost because of it, and if there was someone else to do it, he would let them, but there isn’t, so that’s why he’s doing it. He’s also doing it because putting “die hard” in the title probably adds some substantial millions to your otherwise mediocre movie, but his declaration is accurate and good. It’s not McClane’s abilities and durability we should focus on. It’s his motivation to what’s necessary even when it’s undesirable. It’s at the core of every good die hard, and it’s what I love about them. It’s why the Fast and Furious franchises will never be on the mantle. Dom and O’Conner and Hobbs love to show off and go to work. Every car they race and punch they throw is just an off-the-backboard pass to their next dunk. For McClane, every bad guy he kills is just one step closer to going home and drinking a beer before bed. That’s what makes him an every-man. Most people don’t like to risk their comfort and safety to make the world a better place. And neither does John. He does it. But he doesn’t enjoy doing it. And Ferral points this out- “doing it when you don’t want to is what makes you a hero.” So in a sense, McClane was never an every-man. He was always a superhero. He’d just rather not be. And his reluctance makes him extremely fun to root for.

This movie sure blows a lot of shit up. And features a lot of helicopters. Then Kevin Smith shows up. I think this is the biggest bummer in the movie. I used to love Kevin Smith. And I still think he’s a great storyteller, maybe not cinematically, but conversationally. He just doesn’t belong in Die Hard. Because Kevin Smith exists in a world where Die Hard is a movie. But John McClane doesn’t. So when Kevin Smith, even as a character, shows up in Die Hard, it ceases to be a story. It becomes a pop culture reference. It’s ok though because we’re back in it when McClane gets on a two-way radio and calls Gabriel (Olyphant) a dickhead.

In the last 15 minutes of this movie, besides killing more bad guys, John McClane takes down a jet on foot. Literally. He’s running around on the jet. So ok, yeah, maybe I’ll conceit McClane may have been made superhuman. After all Captain America does the same thing five years later in The Winter Soldier. Immediately following the dismantling of the plane, we get the second best yippie-ki-yay motherfucker in the franchise. McClane pushes a barrel of a gun further into his own wound, then pulls the trigger to shoot the bullet through himself and into Gabriel. It’s a fitting ending. Then it’s par for the course as we get a nice blanket over the shoulders as the camera pans out on the ambulances. Roll credits. I am having an excellent time.

Die Hard with a Vengeance

This movie starts with an explosion which you think would be good, but it actually sets up expectations that don’t pay off for another hour. But we’ll get to that in a moment. For now, let’s get McClane’s new partner. The scene where John meets Zeus, played incredibly by Samuel L. Jackson, is so nutty. McClane has to go to Harlem with a sandwich board that says he hates the n-word, and Zeus saves him because he says he has a moral obligation, but we later learn it’s because he didn’t want a dead cop in Harlem. John has a gun duct tapped to his back, a nod to the original film. It’s hilarious that the police force’s best idea was to reuse an idea John had when he was out of options.

Everyone is a character in this movie. There’s too many to name. Charlie the bomb expert who says “like I said, very cool stuff,” after he blows up a chair in a police precinct. The police inspector is classic 90s angry. Joe, the cop, is making quips. The psychologist is very detailed and passionate about information he’s just heard. And as if it’s not enough to have the villain spout riddles, he also stutters. New York is full of characters am I right? I’m walking here!

They really lay on how bad McClane’s life is. He’s called a “toilet bug” by friends and his boss says he’s “two steps away from being a full-blown alcoholic.” Which sets up McClane’s great retort, “one step, one step away.”

Did you know Die Hard with a Vengeance is the fourth worst reviewed Die Hard? In order of Rotten Tomato scores it goes

Die Hard - 93%

Live Free or Die Hard - 82%

Die Hard 2 - 70%

Die Hard with a Vengeance - 52%

A Good Day to Die Hard - 14%

Now I might be one of the few people to argue 4 is better than 3, but the idea that 2 is better than 3 is probably the only argument you need for the irrelevance of rotten tomatoes. I think it’s probably Willis’ best performance outside the first one. Maybe it’s because it’s New York, or maybe it’s that the plot is so outlandish that by contrast a familiar character like John McClane seems that much more believable. That’s the Die Hard way. Force McClane into a situation he doesn’t belong in. This movie is the best example of the Die Hard recipe for success.

The script was originally written as a movie called Simon Says. According to the commentary from the writer Jonathan Hensleigh, the first hour is exactly as he wrote it for Simon Says. And if you think about it, that shouldn’t come as a surprise at all. Because there are too many fucking riddles in this movie. I remember feeling that way as a kid too. This will sound macabre or maybe just troubling, but I saw this movie in the theatre with my dad and I remember leaving dissatisfied with how few bad guys John McClane kills. The first movie is legendary for its slow, actionless start. It’s 20 minutes before someone fires a gun. But right now, I’m 40 minutes in and no one has even died softly, let alone hard. Yes, two bombs have exploded, but that’s just visual demolition. I need to see the bodies hit the floor. Am I supposed to imagine the innocent people who died in the explosion? I’m not a maniac. I simply want to watch 10 hours of one man shooting a bunch of other people and not be expected to use my imagination. John McClane hasn’t even seen more than a photo of the bad guy at this point. If you’re heightening a Die Hard franchise, you kill more bad guys, not solve more riddles.

It’s only now, after three riddles and a subway explosion we find out Simon is a Gruber, meaning brother to Hans, the iconic villain from the original. So now the movie must pick up right? Nope. Off to another fucking riddle. You know I might take back what I said about Rotten Tomatoes being wrong. Maybe it’s because I’m watching these in reverse order, but this movie is a little slow. They’re literally filling up water bottles at a fountain.

Wow, watching this movie now, I’d say you can start it at 50:00 minutes and have a perfectly excellent hour and fifteen minute Die Hard movie. The water jug scene wouldn’t make sense but you get the introduction of Simon Gruber, the giant German, and Katya- the bad ass woman with the huge knife. Plus, you understand that Sam Jackson is working with Willis because Sam says “I’m in this because a white cop killed some other white asshole’s brother.” Sure it doesn’t make complete sense but it never really did. You lose a couple explosions, but you get McClane firing a gun a lot sooner. Just to catch you up, we’re over an hour in before a bad guy is killed by McClane. It was disappointing when I was 11, and it’s disappointing now.

For the record, here’s how you solve the four gallons of water riddle when you you have a three-gallon jug and a five-gallon jug. You can fill the three gallon, pour it in the five, fill the three again, and pour it in the five until you have one gallon left. Then you pour the five out, pour the one in it, fill the three again and add it to the one to equal four.  Or fill the five, pour it into the three, leaving two gallons, then empty the three-gallon jug, and pour the two in. Then fill the five all the way up and pour one out of it. I’ve been solving this problem for twenty years. It hasn’t ever made me seem as cool as I thought it would. And writing it down was hard. Did the screenwriter write the solution into the script? Because I would think that would not be a page turner.

One of the best scenes in the entire franchise is the elevator scene. A good action movie always needs an elevator scene. Die Hard has them. True Lies does. Even Marvel movies. Captain America: The Winter Soldier takes another note from John McClane for a kick ass fight in an elevator. John recognizes his buddy’s badge on a bad guy posing as a cop and so he shoots four of them in the elevator splattering blood everywhere. The movie should have been more of this.

There’s something that happens in this movie that didn’t matter before 2016, but now it does. It doesn’t matter a lot. And I don’t really even want to talk about it but I will talk about it because it feels slightly more deliberate not to, but only slightly. At one point a woman says “yeah and I’m going to marry Donald Trump” as a sarcastic retort to an outrageous remark. Then later McClane yells at a woman driving “who do you think you are, Hillary Clinton?” Which makes Zeus think of the U.S. presidents. So the movie references both 2016 presidential candidates. What does it mean? Well, they don’t advance the plot. And they don’t hint at a larger theme, except maybe the idea of New York characters and their attitudes. So I guess the 2016 election was just one big New York attitude, and the result was some next level sarcasm. Rest In Peace sincerity. Long live ironic detachment. We may never see another action movie sincere enough to allow John McClane to flip the car he’s driving, shoot two bad guys and respond with “you got a AAA card?” Sarcasm only works when you’re telling things seriously. America hasn’t been serious for thirty years. But we’ve been saying sassy shit like it’s our manifest destiny.  And that’s not anywhere near as sad as the rampant oppression. But it’s still a demerit.

There we go. They just sliced a guy in half with a threaded cable. I’m not thrilled about a boat scene. I feel about them the same way I feel about trains. Which is that they overshadow the antagonist. I have no interest in Broken Arrow, Unstoppable, Money Train, The Lone Ranger, Under Siege, or The Hunt for Red October. I know some of those are submarines, but what is a submarine but an underwater train car.

John McClane is so bloody and beaten at the end of this. It’s great. He looks deranged. That’s how you want your heroes. On the brink. The school bomb plot doesn’t hold up well because we know it’s syrup. It funny that real stakes can still be intense even after multiple viewings, but fake stakes only work the one time. Never fake stakes in your movie.

This scene with Zeus and McClane handcuffed back to back is fantastic. They bond, they escape, they almost blow up.

But then this ending really stinks. McClane isn’t barely alive. He’s in a helicopter, they land, and then he shoots a telephone line that gets caught in Simon’s helicopter and it explodes. I return to my 11-year-old review. Underwhelmed.

I like this McClane more than the ones that come after because he seems out of his depths more, but most of the tension of this movie is puzzle solving with a hangover.

Die Hard 2: Die Harder

This has been a roller coaster. We started low, went high, then took an unexpected dive. Here’s hoping another high mark is on the horizon. But if not, no matter, we are a mere two hours away from the greatest action movie of all time.

I’m so excited to watch this movie. Watching this series in this order has been the best idea I’ve ever had. There’s this interview Chuck Klosterman conducted with Noah Gallagher from the band Oasis and he talks about how if his career went in reverse, starting with a solo album and ending with two records selling twenty million copies each, it would be celebrated as this great journey, but because it started with the giant successes and ended with the significantly less iconic album, people don’t celebrate the journey even though it’s the same. Now I’m not sure I agree. Never having been a fan, I can’t say that’s been my experience with the band, but take The Game for example, a rap artist whose first album is undeniably his best, if not one of the best rap albums ever, and his last album, while good comes nowhere close. Wyclef Jean is even a better example. The Carnival is supreme. The Carnival 3 or whatever his eighth album is, probably bad. What makes the first albums great is that they’re saying something that hasn’t been said before, or said in a uniquely valuable way. What makes the later albums less good is that they are saying the same thing, or saying something of less value.  The journey matters less when you lose substance along the way. If I drove across the country having experiences and finding treasures that journey would be more meaningful than if I drove across the country losing possessions and repeatedly blacking out. I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that both The Game and Wyclef recorded sequels to their first and most successful albums, a ploy that is totally absurd in the music industry. In movies, a sequel signifies the same characters or same ideas presented later. Every music album by the same artist is a sequel. I would challenge an artist to make an album after an album that would not qualify as a sequel. Anyway, the Noah Gallagher theory is far more applicable to the Die Hard franchise than to a band discography. To the degree that if you watch a series in reverse order, it’s like watching the movie studio start with a germ of an idea and keep polishing it until they have the perfect iteration. Watching Die Hard this way is like watching a chef start with an all-you-can-eat buffet, and then they keep cutting the fat and performing reductions until they have this stressed and overworked cop trapped in a building with this diabolical, calculated and ruthless villain served on a single tapa.

Die Harder is not bad. It’s weird, but it’s got charm. It starts in Washington D.C. during a snowstorm over Christmas. It quickly flashes to a naked colonel doing Thai Chi. Then it’s not long, ten minutes in fact, before McClane kills a couple henchmen. For some reason no authority figure is listening to him. I mean there is a reason. No one listened to him in the first movie, but in this one, he’s a cop who shot bad guys at the airport. He at the very least seems worth a question or two. Everyone is just a little too aware of the stakes and suspense this time around. But all the elements are here. It’s almost the movie we all want it to be. You really got to watch the franchise this way. It makes every excellent choice of every movie in the series pop more when compared to its descendant and further excites the anticipation for the original.

I’m not sure which movie has the highest body count, but Die Harder definitely has the highest quips count. McClane receives a fax and is hit on by the woman working reception and he says he’s married and just needs the “fax man. Just the fax.” Then when a reporter asks if the “stiff” she saw was his handiwork, he says he only does needlepoint. Then it’s just a slew of smart ass remarks as John tries to convince the airport something is awry.

As for the Die Hard theory, this movie is based on a novel called “58 Minutes.” It’s about a cop in an airport with his wife held hostage circling above. I mean this is the smoking gun. Take a story without John McClane and then put John McClane in it.

And as I typed the above sentence, Willis says “Another basement, another elevator. How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?” Little did ol John know, it would happen three more times, arguably with greater stakes, and less charm. Live Free or Die Hard is a better movie, but this is a better Die Hard. And this is probably the last movie to have guns in an airport. After 9/11, the plot to this movie became otherworldly. It still seems weird to see a cop, especially in plainclothes holster a gun in a terminal. If the terrorists wanted to ruin our way of life, they succeeded in limiting the number of places it would be workable to have an action movie.

McClane even crawls through another fucking vent! I think this franchise, and this movie in particular, made it possible for movies like Fast and Furious to exist without it seeming derivative. Yeah it seems crazy when McClane ends up having to save his wife from bad guys again, chatting with people over two-way radios, getting ignored by police, climbing through vents, and saying Yippie-Ki-Yay. But I would argue it’s more unbelievable that Vin Diesel defeats bad guys through fast racing eight times, all in the name of family who are really only friends. This movie took a bullet for repetitive screenwriting so that future movie franchises could go on installment after installment with the general public eager to revisit the familiar worlds.

The bad guy crashes a plane full of civilians. That’s fucking cold. That’s an act of terrorism. I mean he could be in it for the money, they always are, but none of the other antagonists blew up 200 people. They threatened to, they even planned on it, but this Colonel is the only one who did it. And strangely he’s the least compelling bad guy. Why is that? I think it’s because he doesn’t have any character development with McClane. The bad guys want money for freeing this war criminal or something. It has to do with Communism. I’m not entirely sure. But you get almost no back and forth between John and Col. Stuart. In the first one, that’s how we got cowboy, dickhead, and the infamous yippee-ki-yay motherfucker. We get a brief taunt from Stuart while McClane is trapped in the cockpit, but there’s a serious lack of ointment for McClane to be a fly in. The villains plot is still at the forefront, but without McClane aggravating it, the Col. never gets frustrated. The frustration we get from the bad guy lets us know he’s human. Which is more important than you might think. It’s not about how bad we can make the human, it’s about how human we can make the bad.

It’s why I’m not entertained by action movies that are about runaway trains or natural disasters, or whatever The Happening is. A human has wants and desires. If those wants can be frustrated and their desires derailed, then you have an emotional resonance with that villain. Even though they’re bad, we as the audience need to sympathize with them a little. A great villain should be fun to hate, but they should also be difficult to loathe. When they get particularly upset, there should be a tinge of relatability to them. When they get flustered, they feel real, and vulnerable. And a good villain needs to feel plausible. Few people are born outright evil, so the ones in movies who are pure evil, lack something familiar to us, a drive, and without a drive, then stopping them only saves the day. When a villain has a drive, they can be thwarted, which saves the day, and redirects the agony they caused back to them. It’s why superhero movies are bad for politics. and why Alan Rickman will always be the greatest villain. Superhero movies tell us that the other side is evil for inhuman reasons. But that’s just not how the world works. Everyone who you see as a villain is doing what they see as right, but it’s hard to sympathize with someone when the lens you view them through is pure evil. There’s no humanizing and therefore humanity literally suffers. Alan Rickman always worked to give his villains human characteristics, including rage, humility, frustration, ego, arrogance, and insecurity. See Die Hard, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Quigley Down Under for an incredible run of loathsome relatable bad guys.

The exploding plane and McClane in the ejection seat is fun! There’s something about McClane still being shocked this is happening. I think if they kept him incredulous in the later installments it might have helped. If I get numerous flat tires, I might get better at changing the tire, but I don’t accept it more. If anything, I become more outraged. I think a McClane who is running around going “This is crazy. Like what the fuck is actually happening to me? Am I cursed? Fuck all these people!” would make the absurdity of this feel more engaging.

Oooo, McClane just killed a guy with an icicle to the eye! Very brutal. There’s a good twist in here where McClane realizes the Green Berets are actually bad guys because he uses one of their guns and hits nothing which means they’re all using blanks when firing on each other. On a repeat viewing, it’s very obvious because the gun fight is in the snow and against a white church. There’s no snow being kicked up or holes in the church. It’s a clever twist that a modern day movie audience would see immediately. I think internet criticism has given movie goers a sixth sense for plot holes and continuity errors.

Man, he even rides a snowmobile in this movie! Fun stuff director Renny Harlin!

McClane fights the two bad guys on the wing of the plane. He throws one into the jet turbine, and the other one kicks him off. The Colonel says these three lines in a row -

“How’s it going?”

“Bon voyage”

“Have a nice trip asshole”

Pretty underwhelming for a guy who was introduced to us doing naked Thai Chi and then blew up a plane full of people. Oh well. McClane sets a gasoline fuse and turns the plane full of bad guys into a soaring fireball. Then he races to find his wife. This version of McClane is the sweetest version. He’s not fighting with Holly or separated or divorced. He just loves her. It’s a rare moment in the franchise, and I like it. He should get to be happy with his wife. His work is thankless, his vacations are a nightmare. I mean the dude probably doesn’t sleep well. Let him love his wife.

I didn’t get much time to talk about all the quirky characters at the airport, but with the original so close in sight, I’m going to just say they’re all a little much.  But it’s ok. This movie is a near perfect Die Hard.

Die Hard

Wow. I’m actually a little nervous to do this, to actually do it justice. I’m tempted to just write- Best. Movie. Ever. And leave it at that. But we’ve come so far, so in the words of John McClane “welcome to the party pal.”

The first time I saw this movie I was in a motel room with my Mom and Dad on the way to California or something. I couldn’t have been more than seven, and I remember watching the movie under the motel bed blanket with my mom, pulling the cover over my eyes every time McClane murdered a bad guy. But sometimes I was too late. I still remember Karl swinging by his neck over the stairwell. I basically spent 90 minutes in a maid-made cave and probably bored for the first twenty.

Die Hard is famously slow to start as I’ve mentioned, but when you hold it up to its descendants, it feels like a pressure cooker. The world we’re dropped into is an unfamiliar L.A. At least through McClane’s eyes. Limousines and spandex. Rap music and making fists with his toes. McClane is already out of his element, but it’s not otherworldly. It feels very lived in. Nonviolent and glam. Plus Bruce Willis wasn’t an action star yet. So there really is this aroma of the guy from Moonlighting just caught up in another romantic complication.

There has been plenty written on how perfectly structured the writing is, about how we get all the exposition from Argyle asking questions, and the rift between John and Holly expressed through phone calls, framed photos, and computer directories. Harry Ellis mentioning the Rolex and McClane saying he’ll see it later, and then eventually when McClane sees the watch, it’s when he‘s unclasping it to save his wife. I’m not going to further attempt to retread well worn territory covered by far better writers than me. My point here is to simply say this movie is pure utility. Everything in it is used. Nothing is left over, and so there’s nothing to pull the audience away from the tension. It’s remarkable that this movie was ever franchised in the first place because it’s almost impossible to replicate. You can’t heighten the action, or raise the stakes without detracting from the tension. Every time I watch Die Hard, I worry that the time will finally come when I’m bored or uninterested in the set-up, but every time it cruises, and I’m clocking every introduction, every exchange of dialogue as a fuse sparking towards a bundle of volatile explosives strapped to a chair and thrown down an elevator shaft.

I‘ve seen the movie so many times I asked my girlfriend to watch it with me because she’s never seen it, and she speaks her mind during movies. So she’s the closest to going back in time and seeing it for the first time. What follows are a handful of the things she said while watching Die Hard. It should be noted that she’s only ever seen Live Free or Die Hard.

“I didn’t realize he’s just a cop in a situation.”

“It’s true. My sister says people in California are very physical.” This After the guy kisses McClane on his cheek at the party.

“I’m on team Holly.”

“Look at Alan Rickman stand there- what a bad guy.”

“So they’re not there for him? He’s just in the wrong place.”

“Ugh that guy is the worst.” Referring to Ellis

“Shoot him shoot him, what are you doing?” Then the guy shoots at McClane as he scrambles under the table. “Shoot him shoot him in the nuts.” And then McClane shoots him in the nuts.

“Shoot at the car! He’s just going to drive away!” This is when Officer Al responds to the disturbance and is about to leave before John McClane throws a body on his cop car.

“Was that it? Is that the first time he says Yippie Ki Yay?”

“Oh, so this is a story about love?”

“Ohhh so they wanted the FBI to show up.”

“Ouch ouch ouch, the broken glass on his feet!”

“He’s really smart.”

“No, no! He’s going to repel down using the strap from the machine gun?”

“Ellis, shut up!”

“Oh my god, he hung him by a chain! Yuck!”

“Oh, go Argyle!”

“Ah ha! The watch!”

Tough to say it better than that, so I won’t even try. However I’d like to wrap up with some final thoughts after this journey.

As much as Die Hard defined action movies for the next thirty years, it really has never been matched. And even though movies have attempted to recreate the tension and the magic, Die Hard 2 and White House Down most notably, they are nothing like this movie. Rewatching it this last time, I noticed something I’m not sure I ever noticed before. Even though I’ve alluded to it numerous times. Yes, it’s Alan Rickman’s plan, yes McClane, as he says, is just a “fly in the ointment, a monkey in the wrench, a pain in the ass,” and yes the bad guys want to kill him, but when you stack that all together, and look at it through fresh eyes, McClane was the original Walter White. Die Hard broke bad first. We’re not taking a chemistry teacher and turning him into a drug lord, but we are taking a cop and turning him into a slasher. McClane kills all the bad guys in the movie, compared to two dead security guards, two civilians, and the asshole FBI guys. Maybe some of the SWAT team got killed, but likely just injured. McClane kills a dude’s brother, hangs a guy, throws a guy out the window, blows up a few guys, and shoots another half-dozen. By the fifth movie, he’s probably killed over a hundred people. And except that plane crash in the second one which is a HUGE exception I realize, McClane’s body count likely dwarfs the totality of the combined bad guys path of destruction. John went from a NY cop to a serial killer. And I say this not to disparage McClane, but to say how significant perspective is when telling a story. A bad husband going on a murderous rampage is so satisfying when he’s doing it to save his wife and stop a bank robber who shot a nice old man in the head. By the fifth installment, it’s not the movie was bad, it actually looks great, the action and one-liners are all there, it’s that maybe we feel a little guilty. Maybe the monster hasn’t checked his conscience in over a decade, and we feel a little weird about rooting for him flying across the world to kill some father and daughter, even if they are the baddies. They’re making a new one, and from what I hear it’s a prequel. And maybe that sort of addresses the innocence lost problem, but it will also threaten the fun of the first one being “just a cop in a situation.” So I humbly offer my own pitch. Don’t make a prequel. Set it in present day and have McClane kill a cop. On accident, be he definitely pulled the trigger. Probably should be a dirty cop, but do the whole police funeral and mourning family and then send the cops after him. McClane will have to run for his life and save the day WITHOUT killing everyone. The media will make this big case out of what a gigantic murderer he is. It’ll be like The Fugitive, but they’ll be chasing an actual killer. Then a bunch of the cops will be dirty and he can kill em all at the end, exposing a ring of corruption. There. You can Venmo me @jake-jabbour.

Also, I have to reiterate how good Alan Rickman is. He transformed villainy, and he’s been the mold ever since.

I love Die Hard, in all its iterations, with all my heart. It’s been such a fun ride, and it’s been the best movie franchise to ever exist. Maybe Indiana Jones is better, but Die Hard is more fun. I also may retract this after seeing Mission: Impossible Fallout, but that’s for another book. Until then, Ride Hard Die Hard.

Next Chapter: Contents and Fair Warning: A Preface