Die Hard DVD > Reviews > Yippee...

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Loved it
Story	Good
Characters / Performances	Outstanding
Special Effects	Good
Soundtrack	Average

Advantages:	The bad - assery of it all, the script, the direction, the acting .  .  .
Disadvantages:	Could do with more explosions .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

John McClane has had better Christmasses. He’s been arguing with his wife, who moved to Los Angeles with the kids to pursue her career while he’s been stuck on the New York beat, a run-down cop with a drinking habit. Now, coming off a plane to see his family again, he finds himself stuck in a slightly unusual situation. A hostage situation.

Die Hard sees McClane in the Nakatomi Plaza building, where his wife is having a Christmas Party with the rest of her office. After meeting her, and having yet another argument, John goes to freshen up and try to recover his wits from the jetlag he’s suffering. But while he’s off, the party is crashed by some sinister Germans (are there any other kind?) who carry guns and some hefty bags of explosives. They take the party hostage, and that’s where things go from bad to worse for McClane. As he runs off and hides, and tries to get a grasp on the situation, the leader of the Germans, the lip-curlingly evil Hans Gruber starts interrogating several of the employees, including the boss of the company… and Mrs McClane. John is determined to save his wife, but if he’s to do so it’ll mean picking the right moment for attack and taking down Gruber one man at a time.

It’s not your typical Christmas film. I mean, sure, we have snow and Christmas Trees and at the end “Let It Snow” plays over the credits, but Jimmy Stewart never had to deal with gun-toting terrorists before, did he? The film takes place almost exclusively in and around the skyscraper, with McClane finding himself in all sorts of awkward positions as he races to save the day. However, it’s probably one of the best Christmas films around. Die Hard is at times hilarious, over-the-top, cheesy and there are more explosions than at a Girl-Guides firework party (strange metaphor, that one). But it works! As a film, Die Hard is never anything less than entertaining, whether McClane is exchanging wisecracks with his wife, or hanging by his fingers from an air-vent, or throwing people off buildings. You find yourself gripped by it all, and it leaves you wanting more (which luckily, there was, in the form of Die Hard 3, 3… and the soon-to-be-here Die Hard 4.0).

Let’s go into a little detail. John McTiernan’s 1987 blockbuster was one of the new breed of action films, where an everyman (albeit a superactiony everyman) was put in a situation and forced to save the day, even though they didn’t want to be the hero. Rambo, every flick with Arnie in, and this one, they all featured the same basic premise. You know that the hero is going to survive, which means that the only thing to keep you interested in the film is if the hero happens to be interesting. And handily, John McClane just so happens to be one of the best protagonists in move history. Bruce Willis plays the role, wearing a dirty vest, no shoes, and an eternal look of bemusement. McClane is in a situation where by all rights he shouldn’t win, so if he finds himself any advantages he’s going to exploit them. He’s hilarious, too. Trying to get the attention of on-duty policeman Al (Reginald Veljohnson), who is about 15 storeys below him, John hits upon the idea of tossing one of the bad guys onto Al’s policecar. It’s this attitude of ‘If I don’t get this done, I’m toast’ that makes McClane such a formidable opponent for the bad guys.

Alan Rickman, as principal ne’er-do-well Hans Gruber, is a delight, stealing every scene he’s in for most of the movie. He’s camp, but he’s so villainous you want to boos every time he appears onscreen. And because he steals every scene he’s in, and Willis steals every scene he’s in, it builds up the excitement for their eventual meeting. Their back-and-forth makes for some genuinely tense moments in the film. Bonnie Bedelia, as the put-upon Mrs McClane, delivers several moments of girl-power, as she works hard to make sure her husband isn’t discovered and that the villains won’t get away with it. Final words go to Veljohnson and William Atherton, who overplay their roles nicely as the only policeman who believes in John and as a slimy reporter (again, is there any other kind?) respectively.

The film is a giant variant of a cat-and-mouse chase, as the villains don’t know who John is, or who his wife is, but in turn the police outside don’t know who Gruber is, and the FBI certainly seem to have no idea what Gruber’s up to. Everything twists and snakes along quickly, thanks to McTiernan’s dominance behind the camera. He’s not afraid to take his time with a scene, to build up tension, and there are few scenes which distract from the main body of the plot. Seeing John getting beat up is important for us, to see that he is a fallible hero who is really running on luck and bravery alone. He gets the crap kicked out of him in this film, and it’s really a miracle that he keeps going. McTiernan shows McClane as a real person, but he also throws in several hero-shots, most famous of which is probably seeing McClane in a tight air vent, crawling along holding a lighter, saying “Now I know how a TV dinner feels”. As the film goes on, the writers decide to introduce numerous dead-ends and loose pieces of plot, such as the role of the bickering FBI agents (one of whom is played by a sneering Robert Davi, who is always fun to hate) or Al’s dark past as a cop. These add to the realism, and don’t take anything away from the main body of the story.

The film plays upon the characters, at the end of the day, and they are wonderfully drawn out, from McClane to Gruber. Sadly, only a few of the supporting nasties make any real impression, as the Germans all tend to look the same (i.e. sinister). Only the American baddies seem to have any interesting character developments, and the development where one of the baddies is the brother to one of the people McClane kills is thrown away somewhat. However, what you have is a nasty, brutal thriller. It’s an 18-Certifiate, and rightly so, as people get killed in all sorts of nasty ways. Plus – and this could well be the main appeal of the film – it’s not afraid to throw f-bombs at you from all directions, most obviously in McClane’s final declaration “Yippee-Ki-Yay…..” you know the rest. The relentlessness of the film, along with the characters, the tight pacing and direction, and not forgetting the fact that there are loads of really cool explosions, means that Die Hard is one of the definitive action films, a film you can watch again and again and enjoy every single time.