By Geno McGahee
I went to see one of my favorite films of all time, DIE HARD, on the big screen today. 30 years ago, the action world was introduced to a new kind of hero. We had the devastating one man armies like Sly Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger that owned the genre and they were offered the role but turned it down. Without a huge action star, the production led to an unlikely choice, Moonlighting’s Bruce Willis, a comedic actor that had yet to prove any drawing power at the box office, but they saw something in him and they were right. This movie probably would not have been the hit it was had it starred Arnie or Sly…especially if it starred Sly.
John McClane (Willis) is a New York cop with a broken relationship with his wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), who is living in L.A., working at the Nakatomi Company and she moved up quickly. It’s Christmas time and John is coming to a Xmas party at the Nakatomi building, a towering skyscraper, with hopes to patch things up with his wife. He gets picked up, unexpectedly, by a limo driver, Argyle (De’Voreaux White). The two hit it off and Argyle agrees to wait in the parking garage for John. Should he make up with his wife and go home with her, Argyle will jet. If it doesn’t work, he’ll drive him to a hotel or something.
The holiday party is large and everyone is having a good time, including one dude that walks up to John and gives him a big smooch. Well, this is not surprising. On the airplane there, the flight attendant gave him that look that she wanted to fuck his brains out. McClane was a pussy magnet…not even dudes could resist. I was concerned that Mr. Takagi (James Shigeta) would jump his bones when they met, but he resisted the urge. Takagi is the big cheese at Nakatomi and is trying to make John feel at home. He takes him to Holly’s office and that’s where he meets the biggest douche bag of the movie, Ellis (Hart Bochner), who is snorting coke off of the desk. It’s the 1980s…coke was the thing and so was mullets. I’d rather deal with coke than a mullet any day of the week.
On top of being king douche, Ellis is also trying to steal Holly away from John. It’s not going well, but he’s rather forceful, telling Holly to show her husband the watch she got, implying that it’s a romantic gift. We find out how easily John kills dudes in this film. Ellis could have easily been the first. Yippee Ki-yay douche bag mother fucker.
Holly encourages her pregnant assistant to get drunk and then goes to hang out with her hubby. These were the good ole days when you could drink with your work friends and even drink on the job. So what if some people were ran over by heavy machinery operated by a guy half in the bag. It’s a small price to pay to have that freedom back. In the room, John starts a fight with Holly and you see why those two have so many issues. It looks like John will be returning to New York with blue balls at this point, but fate would intervene.
A group of terrorists, led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), enters the building and immediately kills the poor security guard. Is there ANY action film where the security guard is spared? At least they didn’t make him a fat dumbass like they do in most films, but Mr. Takagi would not hire shitheads. He probably paid his security team well and all the lit up buttons behind the desk looked pretty complex. A fucktard could not do that job.
As the group attacks, John runs upstairs into one of the unfinished floors. Hans walks around and looks for Takagi. Holly tries to hold him back, but he steps up and says “I am Takagi.” I wonder if Hans knew who he was from jump. I know this film took place before the internet came around, but he had to have gotten images of the guy before going there. Takagi could have easily given Ellis a boot in the ass, pushing him forward and say “that’s who you’re looking for!” Thankfully, he was a man with honor but Hans should have done his homework.
As John spies on the group, Takagi is given a chance to give them the code to get into the safe, but he is reluctant, insisting that the code would do them no good. Hans gives him to the count of three to give the code and Takagi says “I guess you’ll just have to kill me” and he gets his head blown off. Now here I noticed something I’ve never noticed before and I’ve seen DIE HARD six trillion times. After Takagi is killed, Karl (Alexander Godunov) hands Theo (Clarence Gilyard, JR) a hundred dollar bill, obviously betting on whether or not Hans would kill Takagi. It added some more personality to the group. Another thing I notice about Karl that I didn’t notice before was when he took the chainsaw to cut the phone lines as his brother, Tony (Andreas Wisniewski), struggled to connect the wires, he walked away with a big smile. He was fucking with his brother. Karl had more layers. He may have been fun to hang out with when he wasn’t killing people for money.
John pulls a fire alarm but it’s called off by terrorists before help could arrive, but it does give away his hiding spot and Tony is dispatched to find the guest that pulled the alarm. He gets up there and he fights with John, leading to the death of Tony and one of the funnier moments of the film. John loads Tony onto a computer chair and puts a Santa hat on him and writes “Now I have a machine gun. Ho-Ho-Ho.” When the elevator opens up, the group is shocked to see Tony, leading to another new thing I noticed. Right when Hans pushed Tony’s head to the side, he blinks. Dead Tony blinks, meaning one of two things. One, he was still alive and there was hope that they could still save him, or the actor just couldn’t keep his eyes open long enough to keep the dead act going. Either way, it’s interesting.
After John contacts the police with the radio he took off of Tony, they send Sgt. Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson), who you may also know as Carl Winslow from FAMILY MATTERS. He circles around and finally goes in to see the security guard. He walks around and leaves when nothing is apparently going on, which forces John to do something drastic. He drops a dead body of a terrorist that had his nuts shot up onto the police cruiser and then opens fire on the car as Powell desperately tries to escape, slamming it into reverse and driving off a ledge backwards. The cat’s out of the bag now. The Nakatomi building is under siege.
We now meet two new assholes. Reporter Richard Thornburg (William Atherton) is cutthroat and desperately looking to make a name for himself at any cost. He is on the scene and is very intrusive and a total prick. The other jerk off is Deputy Police Chief, Dwayne T. Robinson (Paul Gleason), known mostly for his role in THE BREAKFAST CLUB as the principal. He immediately insults Powell and takes over the operation, fucking things up to the point where McClane goes off on him, telling him he was “buttfucked on national TV.” Good stuff.
McClane systematically takes out the bad guys as Hans plans to open the safe and blow up the building with all of the hostages still inside. What a prick. Thanks to Thornburg, Hans discovers that Holly is the wife of John and that leads to a final showdown with Hans, his remaining goons, and McClane with Holly’s life hanging in the balance. It was great to see Hans and John face off again at the end with both Rickman and Willis giving incredible performances. Hans is definitely one of the best villains of all time. DIE HARD was running on all cylinders at all times.
Remarkably, John saves the day and earns a new friend in Powell. He and Holly realized that their differences were small, especially compared to dealing with a terrorist group that wants to shove an AR-15 up your ass. DIE HARD is a perfect film, possibly the best action film of all time, and led to many knockoffs and DIE HARD-inspired films. Even SKYSCRAPER, the Rock’s film, is a huge love letter to DIE HARD. It was an incredible film and there isn’t many action films that can come close to comparing to it.
DIE HARD has stood the test of time and it was great to see it big screen. I was 14 when it initially came out and I should have seen it then. Fucking cheap ass parents wouldn’t give me fucking six bucks to go see it. I had to wait for it to come to the video store and then I was battling some fat ass old guy that always waiting by the door every Tuesday morning, awaiting the latest releases. Anyway, I’m rambling. DIE HARD was so good and I wonder if they recut it for the 30th anniversary edition. Maybe the stuff I noticed is new from other cuts.
If you have not seen DIE HARD, see it. If you have seen it, I KNOW you love it like I do and if you don’t, what the fucking hell is wrong with you?
