Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
It’s easy to forget, given the film’s enshrined status as perhaps the height of American action films and one of the most ripped off/parodied/homaged premises ever, but Die Hard was no sure thing in 1988.
Originally conceived as a sequel to a detective film starring Frank Sinatra in the ’60’s (that film being creatively dubbed…The Detective), Die Hard was offered to just about every leading man in the industry at that time, including Frank Sinatra. According to various accounts, the film was turned down by Harrison Ford, Richard Gere, Sylvester Stallone, Don Johnson, Burt Reynolds, and Clint Eastwood (ironically enough, Eastwood’s final Dirty Harry film, The Dead Pool, came out only two days after Die Hard, cementing the latter film as the mark of a new era).
Somehow, the studio ended up with a Christmas-themed action thriller, released in July, starring the dude from Moonlighting and a completely unknown British stage actor who had opted to take up acting in his late 30s after managing a successful graphic design firm for most of his adult life (no, I am not kidding).
Yet somehow, this strange confluence of talent behind and in front of the camera yielded not just a successful film…it yielded Die Hard.
The premise finds New York cop John McClane arriving in Los- haha fuck you, you know what the plot of Die Hard is.
Today, Die Hard is beloved not only as a landmark moment in action cinema, but as a Christmas classic that gets trotted out every Yuletide season. While that seasonal love may have taken root among dudebros trying to be cool or ironic or some shit like that, Die Hard’s themes of forgiveness and reconciliation make the Christmas setting more than just an ironic counterpoint to the blood and bullets and fireballs.
Scrooge got ghosts (and/or Muppets), The Grinch got all the Whos down in Whoville, and John McClane got a building full of terrorists. Truly, a Christmas miracle.
But for as revered as Die Hard is, have the years done anything to dull the impact of its carefully choreographed mayhem? Or does this treat still sing with the best of them?
I mean…it’s Die Hard. You already know the answer. But let’s let the team take it away.
Next Week’s Pick:
There’s a new Star Wars. It’s the holidays. You’re special.
Let’s do this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJDAmBQ1u2g
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Our Guests
Trey Lawson:
Die Hard is one of the best Hollywood action movies of all time. But is it a great Christmas movie? This is something I’ve wavered on over the years, but ultimately I have to say yes Virginia, Die Hard is a Christmas movie. The season is too tightly woven into the fabric of the film, from the party setting to the seasonal music peppered throughout the score and soundtrack.
More importantly, Die Hard is just a whole lot of fun. Bruce Willis utterly changed the American action hero. Far from the perfect musclebound 80s superhero a la Stallone or Schwarzenegger, Willis was (at least in this film) more of an everyman. He makes mistakes, improvises, and is rarely in control of the situation. Of course the rest of the cast is great too, with Alan Rickman setting the standard for how suave eurotrash villains should be played. Plus Hart Bochner & William Atherton both deserve spots on the Mount Rushmore of 80s Hollywood sleazeballs. But the real heart & soul of this movie is Reginald VelJohnson as Al Powell. His sincerity and his devotion to John McClane keep the film from delving too far into cynicism. In fact, I’d say it’s largely due to VelJohnson’s performance that Die Hard works so well as a Christmas movie.
Die Hard is great. You know it; I know it. It’s the action movie that spawned an entire subgenre (in addition to a franchise of four sequels), but accept no substitute this holiday season and make room alongside White Christmas and The Muppet Christmas Carol for John McTiernan’s Die Hard. (@T_Lawson)
Brendan Agnew
Writing about Die Hard without resorting to empty superlatives or revisiting old ground that’s been covered by wiser writers is about as easy as. . . well, navigating a glass-strewn floor amidst a hail of machine gun fire, but what the hell? ’Tis the season.
I love Die Hard. It’s not just my favorite Christmas movie (yes, it’s a Christmas movie, it’s about a man who reconnects with his loved ones because he gives of himself and learns to be humble in the face of a greater need DO YOU ALSO WANT ME TO SPELL OUT WHO THE GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE ARE IN THIS THING, BECAUSE I FUCKING CAN), but it’s possibly my favorite action film of all time and a movie that you can use to literally teach both screenwriting and film-making. In fact, the only flaw in the entire endeavor is that it’s John, and not Holly, who unfastens the Rolex during the final struggle, casting aside the useless status symbol of a job she excels at regardless of glittery reward.
In fact, let’s talk about Holly Gennaro. Let’s talk about a woman who opens her house to a man she still loves but won’t let him use her as a welcome mat just because he’s still sore about having fucked up. Let’s talk about a woman who keeps her cool in the middle of a hostage crisis even as her ’80s alpha male coworker is sweating out his coke high. Let’s talk about the woman who not only negotiates with Hans better than poor, stupid Ellis, but manages to pull the wool over his eyes about her and John’s identity even as he’s sitting at her very fucking desk. And let’s talk about a woman who, even when held at gunpoint, knows exactly what cue her apparently-hysterical husband is throwing her way and reacts without a moment’s hesitation.
There’s a lot of ink been spilled about John McClane, and rightly so — he changed the way audiences think of action films and action heroes forever. And there’s just as much about Hans Gruber, arguably the greatest screen villain not voiced by James Earl Jones. But practically every named character in Die Hard is that well-drawn and perfectly functional, whether they’re a hero or an obstacle or a lovable comic foil. Die Hard is a masterpiece because it’s more than the sum of its parts, but even if it were *only* that, it’d still be great. Because those parts are stellar.
Happy trails. (@BLCAgnew)
The Team
The thing that always strikes me about Die Hard is its patience. John McTiernan is more than happy to take his time and lay his trap out piece by piece, devoting almost a full half hour just to establishing the loving-but-fraught relationship between John McClane and Holly Gennaro. When Alan Rickman and his crew storm the building, McTiernan still holds off on the fireworks, letting the plan unspool piece by piece like a classic bit of caper plotting. Indeed, most of the things that probably spring to mind when you hear the words “Die Hard”, all the carnage, one-liners, and indelible supporting characters like Officer Powell, the Agent Johnsons, the principal from The Breakfast Club (fine, I forget his name in this), don’t start cracking until close to an hour in, if not longer.
But that patience is what makes those big moments of bombast feel all the more indelible, and that focus on these characters and the work that went in to establishing John and Holly as empathetic, painfully human characters is what allows the action in the film to really sing. I’ve seen many, many action movies involving heroes dealing with broken glass. Hell, I’ve seen Die Hard probably a couple dozen times over the years. Yet I still wince each and every time John McClane realizes he’s going to have run barefoot across a floor coated in shards of the stuff. Even as the franchise has pushed him to higher and higher feats of superheroism, McClane in this first film remains the most human of all action heroes, and Bruce Willis attacks the role with a hunger that can only come from a talent recognizing their big shot.
I could go on but, come on. It’s Die Hard. You know it has the goods. (@TheTrueBrendanF)
I first knew Reginald VelJohnson as the harried police officer dad on Family Matters, but he also played a handful of cop roles in the 80s in movies like Ghostbusters, Turner & Hooch, and the Die Hard series, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg of why Die Hard is magical.
Endlessly aped as the prototype for the 90s action thriller, the original remains one of the best and most imminently watchable action movies of all time, and one worth returning to over and over again.
Bruce Willis’s John McClane is the perfect hero, tough and smart but believably vulnerable — embodied best, I think, by his missing shoes and a scene in which he has to step across broken glass.
The series spawned a couple more great movies but eventually lost its way with the last movie or two, but the original remains one of the best reasons to come out to the coast and have a few laughs. (@VforVashaw)