Guest Review: Die Hard (1988)

By ScottDS
I spend Chanukah with my family but I spend Christmas with John McClane. What more could possibly be said about Die Hard? It’s a modern action classic – my generation’s equivalent of a John Wayne movie. To the best of my knowledge, it does everything perfectly, so much so that it spawned an entire subgenre: “Die Hard on a [blank].”

NYPD detective John McClane (Bruce Willis) arrives in LA to reconcile with his wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) who works for the Nakatomi Corproation. The building is soon seized by a group of terrorists led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman in his American film debut). In a twist, it turns out that they’re nothing more than simple bank robbers who are after the $640 million in negotiable bearer bonds in the company vault. McClane – who had been in the bathroom during the initial melee – is left up to his own devices to save the day. He’s assisted on the outside by LAPD Sgt. Powell and is encumbered by several others, including a deputy police chief in over his head, a couple of cowboy FBI agents, and an overzealous reporter. Ultimately, McClane manages to rescue his wife and save the day, killing Gruber by dropping him off the building.

With the exception of some hairstyles and a couple effects shots, this film has aged remarkably well. It’s based on the novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorpe, which tells the story of a cop named Joe Leland who visits his daughter who works for an oil company which is soon taken over by a German terrorist group. Director John McTiernan – who has since run into some unfortunate legal problems but managed to give his A-game here – wanted to give the film a sense of “joy” which is why the terrorists in this film are merely bank robbers. In his view, terrorism isn’t fun and movies about terrorism (at least back then) were more often than not dreary and needlessly violent affairs. But with bank robbers, the audience could sit back and enjoy the film without feeling bad. After all, people love a good caper and there is comic relief to be had among the villains. Also – and this is something I’ve said before – with terrorism, you’re often forced to go political. McTiernan had no interest in the characters’ ideology; he simply wanted to craft a great piece of summer entertainment.

I feel bad for young people who watch it for the first time, having been exposed since childhood to all the clichés pioneered by the filmmakers. The craftsmanship is top-notch and European cinematographer Jan de Bont (who would later direct Speed and Twister) gives the film a wonderful sense of style. Geography and spatial relationships are clearly established and the camerawork actually helps to create a psychological reaction: the camera closes in on Willis at just the right time (usually when it appears he’s doomed), the exteriors actually feel more cramped than the interiors thanks to the use of long lenses (which compress the foreground and background), and there’s a great use of triangular composition, with the camera for instance starting on a henchman, then moving to the henchman’s gun, then to McClane in another area of the shot. We understand everything in one shot with no dialogue. That’s direction.

At that point in his career, Bruce Willis was best known for ABC’s Moonlighting. He’s perfect as John McClane who, at the time, was a new kind of hero. He was a blue-collar working stiff as opposed to a muscle-bound superman like Arnold or Sly. His relationship to his wife is what grounds the movie and according to McTiernan, they finally managed to get a handle on the character when they realized that McClane doesn’t really like himself very much… but like all of us, he does the best he can. He’s an underdog and people love to root for an underdog. Everything you need to know about him can be summed up in one shot. The company has sent a limo to pick him up at LAX. He meets his driver, Argyle (De'voreaux White), and decides to sit in the front with him instead of the back – a genuinely human moment. I’m not familiar with much of her work but Bonnie Bedelia more than holds her own as Holly (Gennaro) McClane. After Gruber kills her boss, she becomes de facto leader of the hostages.

Hans Gruber, as played by Alan Rickman, will go down in history as one of the best movie villains of all time. He’s ruthless but he’s also stylish, well-spoken, and clearly the smartest one in the room. His fake American accent is not great but his voice is positively mellifluous. He’s accounted for every possible contingency and even has some fun at the government’s expense when it comes to his fake demands (“Asian Dawn?”). His team consists of some familiar faces including the late Alexander Godunov (Witness) as Karl and Andreas Wisniewski (The Living Daylights) as Karl’s brother Tony, whom McClane kills early on, seriously pissing off Karl who is hellbent on revenge. Another familiar face is Al Leong (as Uli). You’ve seen him before: the Asian guy with the big forehead who showed up in seemingly every Joel Silver action film in the 80s.

The rest of the supporting cast is filled with some great “Hey, it’s that guy!” character actors. Reginald VelJohnson lends humor and heart to the film as Sgt. Al Powell, who has his own character arc that is resolved at the end. He would go on to play a cop on TV’s Family Matters. The late Paul Gleason plays Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T. Robinson the same way he played all of his other characters back then: as a total prick! He and McClane get to spar over the walkie-talkie as Powell just watches in amusement. Hart Bochner plays Holly’s coked-up co-worker who soon regrets getting involved with the situation. James Shigeta plays Holly’s boss Joseph Takagi, a dignified and accomplished man who sadly becomes Hans’ first victim.

The Agents Johnson are played by Robert Davi and Grand L. Bush. They’re overbearing and irresponsible, bringing to mind the old line “We need to destroy the village in order to save it.” (Some have theorized about the Vietnam subtext in this film but I’m not qualified to do so.) Reporter Dick Thornburg is played by William Atherton and after the crap he got for playing a dick in Ghostbusters, it’s amazing he agreed to play another one! He gets his comeuppance in the end and the media actually plays a minor role in the movie, with McTiernan cutting to news reports featuring know-nothing anchors and clueless talking heads. As I said, the film has aged quite well. [smile]

The Oscar-nominated visual effects – supervised by Richard Edlund of the late Boss Film Studios – still hold up for the most part. It’s not an “effects movie” per se, but the filmmakers obviously couldn’t blow up parts of the building. The Nakatomi building seen in the film is actually Fox Plaza in Century City, which was brand new at the time and, in a typical display of Hollywood accounting, the studio actually charged itself rent! (Funnily enough, I had a job interview in the building when I lived in LA. I didn’t get the job but it was still worth the trip!)

The Nakatomi lobby is a replica of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and on the DVD commentary, production designer Jackson De Govia mentions the subtle political subtext: that a Japanese corporation (this was the 80s) had the nerve to purchase Fallingwater and re-create it in the lobby, ironically presenting it to people who would never otherwise see it. As I said, the attention to detail is immaculate. Even the Playboy centerfold taped to the wall in a stairwell serves a purpose: as a “breadcrumb” so to speak, helping McClane get his bearings in this densely-packed industrial jungle.

And yes, the music. The score by the late Michael Kamen pays homage to both Christmas and Kubrick. In addition to the bells, there are references to “Singin' in the Rain” and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, both of which were used to great effect in A Clockwork Orange. The Beethoven music is mainly used as a theme for the villains and both Gruber and his hacker Theo (Clarence Gilyard) hum it during the film. This all goes back to McTiernan’s wish for joy in the film. After all, the final movement of the 9th Symphony is “The Ode to Joy.”

I always enjoy revisiting the world of Die Hard. There’s nothing like a well-executed action film. Not to get all mushy but when I think of films like this, I think of my dad who, as I type this, is sitting in the TV room watching some action flick on Spike, and my late grandfather who had a large picture of John Wayne mounted in his pool room. Hopefully this tradition (for lack of a better word) will continue for a long time… if Hollywood doesn’t screw it up.

“Yippee-ki-yay, motherf---er!”