Despite Die Hard being one of my dad's favorite movies (if he stumbled upon it on TV he'd probably stay and watch it) I'd never seen it in its entirety, though I'd seen parts of it many times. Die Hard is really the platonic ideal of an action movie, as well as the template for many an imitator. New York cop John McClane (iconicly Bruce Willis) travels to Los Angeles to visit his estranged corporate exec wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) and children for Christmas. John is to meet Holly at her companies Christmas party, held around 30 stories up in the new Nakatomi Tower. While John is waiting in his wife's office the building is taken over by a group of West German terrorists headed by one Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman). McClane manages to escape to an upper story and tries to signal the police, he eventually gets in contact with a sympathetic officer played by the future dad from Family Matters Reginald VelJohnson.
Gruber's group quickly becomes aware that someone is upstairs and send men after McClane (at the time not realizing that they have his wife among their hostages). McClane takes out the men sent after him and starts a cat and mouse game with Gruber and his group, more police officers eventually arrive and McClane tries to end the standoff. It turns out that the supposed 'terrorist' group are really sell outs who have taken the tower so they can break into a highly secure volt holding hundreds of millions of dollars of bonds, this will become a theme in the later Die Hard films were the bad guys pretty much do everything for money rather then ideology.
Everything seems to work in Die Hard , especially the performances, Willis plays a good 'every cop' stuck in an impossible situation who makes it work, and has some memorable one liners. The films source material is said to be the 1966 novel The Detective by Roderick Thorp, which was itself previously made into a successful movie of the same name with Frank Sinatra in 1968, but reading about both online there doesn't seem to be much connection to the final product here. However this will set a pattern followed by many of the later Die Hard films of deriving (apparently loosely) from source material that does not feature the John McClane character.
Die Hard is kind of a perfect movie, very enjoyable, and sets the stage for what would prove to be a very persistent movie franchise.
Die Hard: ****
The tremendous success of the original Die Hard yielded a sequel a mere two years later. Die Hard 2, sometimes given with a subtitle of Die Harder, takes the formula established by the first film and follows it very closely, even down to copying its Christmas setting. By the time of this film John and his wife are back together and he has even transferred to the Los Angeles Police Department to be near his wife. For Christmas John has taken the kids to DC to spend the holidays with his in-laws, as the film begins John just arrived at the airport to pick up his wife who has taken a later flight to join them. The perceptive John is the first to notice something amiss at the airport when he sees two guys sneak into the restricted baggage area, he follows them, there is a fight, one of the bad guys gets away and the other is killed. The airports chief of security Dennis Franz is furious at and skeptical of McClane, but John eventually manages to get the ear of the airports chief of operations, played by a pre-senatorial Fred Dalton Thompson.
There is another hostage situation in the works here, this one headed by a group of disgruntled U.S. military mean upset at their governments "betrayal" of a former allie, the anti-communist dictator of a fictional Latin American nation who is being brought to the United States to face charges relating to his side business in the illegal narcotics trade. The bad guys, headed by William Sadler as Colonel Stuart take remote control of tower operations and threaten to crash civilian planes unless a runway is cleared and a plane made available to take them and General Ramon Esperanza to safety once he arrives. To make their point the bad guys crash a plane captained by Colm Meaney after repealing an early attempt to stop them. With McClane's wife on a plane running increasing low on fuel John will do anything to stop the terrorists, pitting him again against the obvious bad guys as well as bureaucratic good guys on his own 'side'.
Die Hard 2 is basically a re-tread of the first Die Hard changing details like the setting and bad guy while making the scale bigger, yet remaining true to the essence and much of the formula of its predecessor. Thusly this Die Hard is not as good as the original, but its still good and very watchable. Subsequent Die Hard films would free themselves up more as regards formula constraints, but this movie is a great example of franchise films of the period and there extreme unwillingness to deviate much from their original entry, think Home Alone and Home Alone 2.
Die Hard 2: ***
Five years after the release of Die Hard 2 came Die Hard with a Vengeance, which like the first film was directed by expert action director (The Hunt for Red October, Last Action Hero) John McTiernan, (Die Hard 2 had been directed by the Finnish director Renny Harlin, who would go on to direct such films as Cliffhanger and The Long Kiss Goodnight). At this point John McClane has returned to NYC and the police department there, but his marriage to Holly (Bonnie Bedeila does not appear in this film but her voice can be briefly heard on a telephone) has again faltered and the two are in the process of getting a divorce. Said divorce has lead John to drinking and said drinking has endangered his position on the force, but things are about to change.
After "a department store is destroyed by a bomb during the morning commute" the police department "receive a call from a man calling himself "Simon", ordering them that suspended police officer Lt. John McClane be dropped in Harlem wearing a sandwich board that says "I hate niggers" and threatening to detonate another bomb if they don't comply. They collect McClane and follow Simon's instructions; McClane is saved from a potential attack by a group of young men by Zeus Carver, a nearby shop owner. McClane and Carver escape and return to headquarters, where Simon calls again and threatens to detonate more bombs if McClane and Carver do not follow his instructions." (quotes from Wikipedia).
Carver is played by Samuel L. Jackson and his character is not a big fan of white people, but the unlikely twosome is forced to work together in a series of increasingly outrageous scenarios (much like the Die Hard films would themselves become, a series of increasingly outrageous scenarios) including a race "to reach Wall Street station 90 blocks south, within 30 minutes to stop a bomb planted on a Brooklyn-bound 3 train" and filling containers with exact amounts of water to stop a bomb at a city park. In course of the film "Simon" is reveled to be "Simon Peter Gruber, the brother of Hans Gruber whom McClane killed in Nakatomi Towers 7 years before." Simon is played by Jeremy Irons, a great villainous actor on par with Alan Rickman in the first film. Anyway "Simon calls into the police again, knowing the FBI is there, and warns that he has planted another bomb in a public school somewhere in the city, and further it is rigged with a radio detonator that may be triggered by the police band. Simon tells them that he will get McClane and Carver the school's location if they continue to play his game. While McClane and Carver set off on Simon's next task, the police organize all the city's public works to begin searching schools, using 911 to coordinate activities." At this point were are still only about halfway through the movie, and there's a lot more action in it. (quotes again from Wikipedia)
Die Hard with a Vengeance is the film that proved that the John McClane franchise was capable of working without a rigid allegiance to the formula of the first two films. All we really want from McClane is for him to survive giant stunt pieces, have some sarcastic one liners and be forced to team-up with a reluctant partner, this later characteristic coming very much to four in the most recent three entries in the franchise. This Die Hard has everything you could want in an action movie, it doesn't really break new ground, but it does what it does quite well and is very enjoyable.
Die Hard with a Vengeance: ***
A dozen years would pass before the release of the next film in the Die Hard franchise, 2007's Live Free or Die Hard. Now I have read that at one point the studio had the idea of making a film that would feature both Bruce Willis's John McClane and Kiefer Sutherlands character of Jack Bauer working together. Now that could have been awesome, though it also could have been awful. I'm not sure how far that project got into pre-production but it wouldn't surprise me at all if either this film, or the next Die Hard film A Good Day to Die Hard grow directly out of it. Live Free or Die Hard has a particularly 24-esque plot, a disgruntled former government security analyst (played by Timothy Olyphant) recruits a group of cyber terrorists to bring down the nations electronic infrastructure because he is angry with the governments refusal to take his claims about its vulnerability seriously, but also (because this is a Die Hard film) to steal a bunch of financial information to make himself rich.
McClane, still a New York cop comes into the film when he is instructed to take a suspected hacker (Justin Long) in for questioning. Said hacker was not fully aware of what he was doing and was just being used by Olyphants terrorist group, so they try to kill him incase he gets wise, and luckily McClane is there to save him. Over the course of the film Willis and Long end up on the run together trying to stop the bad guys master plane, and John's estranged daughter Lucy (played here by the lovely Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is captured by the guys as leverage against McClane (hot daughter in trouble is a very 24-esque plot point). Both Maggie Q and (of all people) Kevin Smith also have roles in this film. Live Free or Die Hard features what may be the most over the top stunt sequence in any Die Hard film to date, namely a semi-truck versus fighter jet chase on a Maryland freeway.
Live Free or Die Hard is still a fun film to watch, in spite of or perhaps because of how really ridicules it is in places. The old action franchise is adapted well for the zeitgeist moment of 2007, one still scared of 9/11 style terrorist attacks but starting to become increasingly concerned about government surveillance.
Live Free or Die Hard: ***
I had almost forgotten about this most recent Die Hard film, 2013's A Good Day to Die Hard. This film has John McClane traveling to Russia to try and get his estranged son Jack (Jai Courtney) out of prison there. Well it turns out that Jack got himself arrested for a very specific reason, you see he is an American spy who got arrested as part of a plan to free a US intelligence asset there, one Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch). John of course interferes not knowing what's going on, then has a crash course in his son's secrete life and stays on to help when most everyone else Jack trusts gets killed. Of course Jack at first doesn't want his dad's help, which seems silly to me because he's got to know about the events of at least some of the previous Die Hard films. Anyway the two bicker and spar a lot at first, but they bond by the end and its actually fun seeing this father and son fight the bad guys together. The film sets its climax at the abandoned Ukrainian city of Chernobyl in a sequence that almost rivals the jet vs. semi fight from the previous film for ridiculousness. Still at this point the Die Hard franchise has wandered so far from it origins, and McClane become such a superman action hero caricature that things are finally wearing a little thin. Word is that Brue Willis would like to make one more Die Hard film and hopes that it will return in spirit closer to what the early films were an not what the latter films became, I hope he gets his wish, but truth be told no matter what they do with the Die Hard franchise next, I'll probably watch it, so long as Brue Willis is involved.
A Good Day to Die Hard: **1/2
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