Essentials: Die Hard

Year: 1988 (USA)
Genre: Action/Hostage Film
Directed: John McTiernan
Stars: Bruce Willis, Reginald VelJohnson, Bonnie Bedelia, Paul Gleason, William Atherton, Alan Rickman, Hart Bochner, Alexander Godunov
Production: 20th Century Fox


NYPD cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) has been having a bad day. Not only is he at a Christmas party for a bunch of corporate nitwits and not only did his attempt at reconcilement with his estrange wife (Bonnie Bedelia) not work, now he has to deal with Euro-trash terrorists who have taken everyone but himself hostage. To make matters worse, he’s in Los Angeles for the holidays; Merry Christmas. That in a nutshell is what Die Hard (1988) is all about, one ordinary guy put in an extraordinary circumstance, making the best of a bad situation and picking off the bad guys, one guy at a time.

Dammit! Why is there one less of you than there was before?!

Yet that simplicity, that clear-cut, no B.S. approach to unrecompensed violence and explosions is exactly what makes Die Hard so appealing. It’s a culture piece, an ambassador of action-thrillers meant to make the pulse quicken. Not just a standard of hostage film excellence but the only standard there is.

Surprisingly enough, no one had ever thought of making a movie like Die Hard before 1988. There were smatterings of the idea in American westerns like The Silver Lode (1954) and police procedurals like The Dirty Harry movies (1971-1988). The screenplay for Die Hard is based on the novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp so it’s not like an elongated hostage situation is unheard of in literature. But it wasn’t until director John McTiernan and writers Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza put their collective talents together did something like Die Hard truly pop into existence.

It really is obvious when you think about it

The tropes introduced in Die Hard would later become imperious parts of action-movie mayhem. A running joke in Hollywood is using Die hard as a common descriptor for screenwriters to get their products produced. “It’s like Die Hard only on a bus,” brought us Speed (1994). “It’s like Die Hard but in Alcatraz,” gave us The Rock (1996) “It’s like Die Hard only on a battleship/train,” got us Under Siege (1992) and Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995). Very few movies can lend themselves to a rhetoric trick so easily.

It's like Finding Nemo only shittier

After the films release Bruce Willis, who had mostly done comedy, rocketed to action icon status. He exemplified a new kind of hero, one with frailties and fears, who occasionally freaked out and was limited. Bruce Willis’s John McClane was not a muscular tough man like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme. He was a leaner, smarter, everyman kind of guy who wasn’t above getting glass stuck in his bare feet. Later versions of John McClane in the sequels would have him saving entire cities, surviving helicopter crashes, jumping on trucks and jets, ship explosions; car chases, and Justin Long. Yet the original John McClane is and will remain a symbol of cowboy weltanschauung with a lack of pretension. “Yippie-ki-yay, motherf***er.”

Want to see me save the world in Die Hard 6?

Final Grade: A