BIG'S BIG MOVIE LIST
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
"Die Hard" (1988)
Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Bonny Bedelia
Directed by John McTiernan
I was 2 years old when Hans Gruber took Nakatomi Tower. It wasn't in the papers, or on the news…it wasn't even Nakatomi Tower, to be true, it was the then unfinished 20th Century Fox headquarters, where in 1988 a 33-year old Bruce Willis donned a sleeveless undershirt, pulled off his socks and said "Yipee kay yay". Pulling from a golden age of the action genre, amid such indispensable 80's classics as Predator, Robocop, Aliens, and Lethal Weapon (to name a few), I chose John McTiernan's "Die Hard" #114 at present on the IMDb top 250 movies.
John McClane (Willis) is a New York cop in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve trying to patch things up with his estranged wifey (Bonnie Bedelia). The two clearly have a storied past and know each other well, but before their first argument can cool off, "European" terrorists led by übermensch Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman in his big screen debut!) bust into the foreground and start an elaborate plot to break into the tower's vault, which contains hundreds of millions of dollars as well as priceless artifacts and works of art. Honestly, I kind of wanted to be one of them--a group of MP5-toting Europeans and one Black American computer systems expert (which I feel in 1988 was something akin to an Albino Unicorn)
McClane excels as a steely badass in the face of insurmountable odds. creeping through the halls of the elaborate architectural marvel that is the Nakatomi building (sort of a character in itself). The sequence of events is meticulous and lean, without much superfluous material that would otherwise weigh down the pace. Subplots (particularly romantic ones) can poison an action movie if they're mismanaged (see : Amazing Spider Man 2) but I felt an appropriate amount of time was spent on the characters revolving around Gruber and McClane.
This adaptation of Roderick Thorp's novel "Nothing Lasts Forever" has many of the staples of a great action film: a dynamic score, a healthy number of explosions, lens flare, and lots of gunplay with extra loud blanks (Willis suffered permanent damage to his hearing during shooting!), there isn't a whole lot you can ask of this movie that it hasnt already brought to the table. This film remains to me one of the great hallowed classics, a film that still nourishes my inner moviegoer 26 years later and hopefully beyond.
I give "Die Hard" 5/5 white sleeveless undershirts.
